Senior Lecturer & Director of Counselling and Psychotherapy
Doorway 6, Medical Quad, Teviot Place
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, the Narrative Inquiry Centre at Bristol and the Centre for Arts Therapies Research, Roehampton.
Yes
Jonathan is interested in PhD 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
Pat Bond, PhD, Wound meets wound in the counselling room
Edgar Rodriguez, PhD, Understanding gay men’s identities
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
Karen Serra, PhD, Performing meaning
Melissa Dunlop, PhD, The relationship between contemporary psychotherapy and fiction: An exploration
Katherine Porter, PhD, The learner-teacher relationships of looked-after children considered using the concepts and processes described in the writings of Wilfred Bion
Jay Myles, PhD, Soul-searching: Autoethnographic exploration of transformational change in and through therapy
Gabriel Soler, PhD, to be confirmed
Susan Mackay, PhD, to be confirmed
Krista Ann Hilton, PhD, Georgia State University, A nodal ethnography of a (be)coming tattooed body, December 2016 (Member, Advisory Committee)
Zoi Simopoulou, PhD, Reveries of the existential: a psychoanalytic observation of pre-school children’s existential encounters at their nursery, November 2016
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 and, latterly, through bringing these together with dance/movement, performance and film. 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 counsellor – 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.
