Jonathan Wyatt

Professor of Qualitative Inquiry and co-director of the Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry

Biography

Background

Jonathan trained as a counsellor, part-time, at the Isis Centre in Oxford and Oxford Brookes University, completing his MSc in 2001. For ten years, until July 2011, he worked one day a week in the NHS as a counsellor in primary care and, until moving to Edinburgh in September 2013, ran a small private counselling and supervision practice. He originally worked as an English teacher, then subsequently in youth and community work, before moving into staff development and training (most recently as Head of Professional Development at the University of Oxford).

He completed his doctorate at Bristol in narrative and life story research in 2008. Jonathan is an accredited member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, and a member of the International Association of Qualitative Inquiry and the Collaborative and Narrative Inquiry Network (CANI-NET).

Qualifications

EdD, MSc, MEd, PGCE, BA (Hons)

Responsibilities & affiliations

Accredited Member, British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy

 

Postgraduate teaching

Between Counselling and Research (1)

Autoethnographic Research Methods in the Social Sciences

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

No

Areas of interest for supervision

When open to new PhD projects, Jonathan is interested in proposals that involve one or more of the following: 

Writing as inquiry; collaborative writing as inquiry; autoethnography ('assemblage/ethnography'); Deleuze and Guattari; post-structural, post-humanist, new materialist, and 'post-qualitative' inquiries; the experience of loss; the therapeutic encounter

Current PhD students supervised

Yingjie Ouyang, DPsychotherapy, title to be confirmed

Michelle Bradley, DPsychotherapy, title to be confirmed

Hassan Bishil, PhD, A Father's Experience with a Son's Journey with Schizophrenia

Hayley Woodside, DPsychotherapy, When a mother becomes a person: The before, the after, and everything in between

Saumya Prakash, DPsychotherapy, The Experience of Female Therapists with a diagnosis of Alopecia Areata

Cassie Li, DPsychotherapy, Relations: Becoming with

Augustus Reed, PhD, Letters & Reasonings: A Blac-Male-Ethnography (BME) & Blac-oetic Narrative resisting the pervasive colonial violence

Kelly Stewart, PhD, Exploring the intergenerational trauma of suicide running in families

Alex Romanitan, PhD, Man-to-man: How do I tell you you’re beautiful? Using performative writing to come to terms with intimacy between men

Marie Meechan, PhD,  Troubling Unexplained Infertility: A Critical Autoethnography of Loss and Hope

Karen Kaufman, PhD, Writing loss: Conjuring curses, words, silences

Benedicate Sanio Ala-Oborie, DPsychotherapy, Possessed: Merman or mental health illness? An autoethnographical account of my encounter with mental health challenge in a family imbued with traditional and religious beliefs

Sydney Millman, PhD, Growing from grief: An emerging underground exploration of psilocybin mushrooms, motherhood, and psychedelic feminism

Mai Tran, PhD, On homing: Exploring belonging between cultures through film and writing (with Edinburgh College of Art) https://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/profile/tuyet-mai-tran

Mia Livingston, PhD, title to be confirmed but "if there's a long word for wearing my research like a giant sock followed by turning myself inside out, that's what I'm doing"

Camilla Akoo, DPsychotherapy, Holding Space on Shifting Ground: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis into Counsellors’ Journey Through the Psychedelic Renaissance

Caren Christie, PhD, title to be confirmed

Andrew Noland, DPsychotherapy, title to be confirmed 

Kelly-Rose McNeil, DPsychotherapy, title to be confirmed

Barbara Erber, PhD, Embodied Presence and Feeling Safe in Authentic Movement and Everyday Life

Martyna Napierska, PhD, title to be confirmed

Alice Yendle-Parson, PhD, title to be confirmed

 

 

 

Past PhD students supervised

Andrew Seed, PhD, Decentring the self: a journey or the 'I' becoming universal 

Panu Sahassanon, DPsychotherapy, Pursuit of virginity in Thai gay culture: the exploration through autoethnographic letter-writing

Katherine Porter, PhD, 'I don't know', a subtle thread: the role of differing intersubjective forms of relatedness in the learner teacher relationships of children looked after by those other than …

Jay Myles, PhD, Soul-searching: Autoethnographic exploration of transformational change in and through therapyAndrew Seed, PhD, Decentring the self: A journey or wanderings into the beyond

Anna Planedin, DPsychotherapy, Encountering shame and sex: storied assemblages

Tim Vermeulen, DPsychotherapy, Melancholy and the loss of self: A nomadic inquiry 

Melissa Dunlop, PhD, Auto/fictioning (the) contemporary (in) human relations and psychotherapeutic purposes 

John Malherbe, DPsychotherapy, Troubling the golden thread: A postqualitative inquiry into the tacit dimension 

Audrey McFarlane, DPsychotherapy, A posthuman therapeutic encounter: Reconceptualising a counselling session as entangled performative encounter 

Andrew Gillott, PhD, Where are all the bodies buried? Towards a creative-relational inquiry

Elif Zapsu, PhD, Lover: exploring Sufi concepts of love and death in psychotherapy

Sui-Ping Chan, DPsychotherapy, An exploration of the trajectory of being a breast cancer patient through collaborative writing in imaginal dialogue

Gabriel Soler Santibañéz, PhD, Towards a holding-machine: A transitional inquiry into transitional phenomena (

Susan Mackay, PhD, Troubling pleasures: A creative-relational inquiry 

Jan Bradford, PhD, Family secrets: Keeping the home fires burning 

Christina Sachpasidi, PhD, Exploring how psychotherapist in the free-of-charge services of Athens understand and respond to political dimensions of their work 

Nicky Haire, PhD, Humour in music therapy 

Sue Chapman, PhD, Changing the discourse: Self-cultivation for a sustainable teaching profession

Elise DeFusco, DPsychotherapy, Experiencing Azeroth: A narrative inquiry into the playing the massive-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), World of Warcraft 

J. Karen Serra U., PhD, Making sense of ourselves: Reconceptualising reflexivity and experience 

Jason Holmes, DPsychotherapy, What is the experience of being inside, outside and in-between gay worlds?         

Pat Bond, PhD, Wound meets wound in the counselling room

Edgar Rodríguez, PhD, Understanding gay men’s identities

Natasha Thomas, DPsychotherapy, Between dissociation and oneness: Shifts in consciousness in the therapeutic encounter,

Carrie Applegath, DPsychotherapy, Remembering, reclaiming, re-remembering: An autoethnographic exploration of professional abuse

Krista Ann Hilton, PhD, Georgia State University, A nodal ethnography of a (be)coming tattooed body (Member, Advisory Committee)

Zoi Simopoulou, PhD, Reveries of the existential: a psychoanalytic observation of pre-school children’s existential encounters at their nursery

Hsin-Shao Chang, DPsychotherapy,“If We Hug? A Counsellor’s Exploration into Her Perceptions of Hugging a Client”

Research summary

Jonathan’s research examines the entanglement of self and other within and beyond the therapeutic encounter; and it troubles what we mean by ‘self’ and ‘other’. He undertakes this research through autoethnography (or, better, 'assemblage/ethnography'), collaborative writing as inquiry, creative-relational inquiry and, currently, 'everyday inquiry'. His work connects the dots between collaborative inquiry in the context of research and collaborative inquiry in the context of therapy, searching for – and doubting – the transformative resources in each.

He grapples with the ethics of what is his to tell: how to write stories of the therapist – and the son, husband, father, brother, friend – ‘becoming’ in and with relationships and spaces. He’s working at an approach to theorizing experiential accounts without depersonalizing them.

His research examines the links between research and therapeutic practice, provides exemplars to write with and against, and makes explicit some methodological possibilities and limitations.

Current research interests

Jonathan is a co-director of the Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry. His book, 'Therapy, Stand-up, and the Gesture of Writing: Towards Creative-Relational Inquiry', was published in 2019 by Routledge and won the 2020 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry book award. He has been working slowly on a new book for Routledge, provisionally titled 'Writing the Everyday', due to be published in 2026. Jonathan is involved in a number of research collaborations: with Fiona Murray (Edinburgh) in an edited book on creative-relational inquiry; with Ken Gale (Plymouth), Fiona Murray, Karen Kaufman (Edinburgh), and Giulia Carozzi (Edinburgh) on a special journal issue on collaborative writing; and with Keith Tudor (Auckland University of Technology) on a second edited book project, 'Qualitative Research Approaches for Psychotherapy: Reflexivity, Methodology, Criticality 2', to be published by Routledge in 2026.

Conference details

International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry

European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry

International Conference of Autoethnography

Invited speaker

Keynote speaker at 2021 Irish Narrative Inquiry Conference

Keynote speaker at 2020 European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry

Keynote speaker at 2018 National Annual Conference of India Association of Clinical Psychologists

Keynote speaker at 2017 UK Council for Psychotherapy annual research conference

Keynote speaker at 2017 British Conference of Autoethnography

Organiser

The Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry hosted the European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in February, 2019: https://kuleuvencongres.be/ecqi2019 

Participant

Multiple

Papers delivered

Multiple - see Researcher Explorer page for selection. https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/persons/jonathan-wyatt/

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