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Qualitative Research Approaches for Psychotherapy offers the reader a range of current qualitative research approaches congruent with the values and practices of psychotherapy itself: experience-based, reflective, contextualized, and critical.This volume contains 14 compelling, challenging new essays from authors in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, writing from a range of theoretical and cultural perspectives. The book covers both established and emerging approaches to qualitative research in this field, beginning with case study, ending with postqualitative, and with hermeneutic, reflexive, psychosocial, Talanoa, queer, feminist, critical race theory, heuristic, grounded theory, authoethnographic, poetic and collaborative writing approaches in between. These chapters introduce and explore the complexity of the specific research approach, its assumptions, challenges, ethics, and potentials, including examples from the authors'own research, therapeutic practice, and life. The book is not a ‘how to'guide to methods but, rather, a stimulus for psychotherapy researchers to think and feel their way differently into their research endeavours.This book will be an invaluable resource to postgraduate students, practitioners and established researchers in psychotherapy who are undertaking (or considering) qualitative research for their projects. It will also appeal to course tutors and trainers looking for a volume around which to structure a qualitative research methods course.

Artful Collaborative Inquiry comprises essays created collectively by a group of scholars and artists, the majority of whom have several decades of experience of working together. The book challenges commonly-held, individualistic beliefs about ownership, authorship and scholarly and artistic ethics and practices.The essays exemplify the entangled kinds of scholarly and artistic works that emerge in a post-human world, where humans, other species, environments, things and other matters, all matter and are of equal concern in the conduct of ethical artful scholarship. Situated at the (messy) crossroads where contemporary scholarship and artistic practice converge, the seamless mo(ve)ment and interplay between text and image make up the main body of the work in this book. The chapters combine the playful use and merging of time, space and place, researcher and researched, to give a unique exemplar of research and creativity in the rapidly emerging field of collaborative scholarship. It will be of particular interest to creative and qualitative scholars wishing to conduct more artful research, and artists engaging with scholarship.

Therapy, Stand-Up, and the Gesture of Writing is a sharp, lively exploration of the connections between therapy, stand-up comedy, and writing as a method of inquiry; and of how these connections can be theorized through the author's new concept: creative-relational inquiry. Engaging, often poignant, stories combine with rich scholarship to offer the reader provocative, original insights. Wyatt writes about his work as a therapist with his client, Karl, as they meet and talk together. He tells stories of his experiences attending comedy shows in Edinburgh and of his own occasional performances. He brings alive the everyday profound through vignettes and poems of work, travel, visiting his mother, mourning his late father, and more. The book's drive, however, is in bringing together therapy, stand-up, and writing as a method of inquiry to mobilise theory, drawing in particular from Deleuze and Guattari, the new materialisms, and affect theory. Through this diffractive work, the text formulates and develops creative-relational inquiry. With its combination of fluent story-telling and smart, theoretical propositions, Therapy, Stand-up, and the Gesture of Writing offers compelling possibilities both for qualitative scholars who have an interest in narrative, performative, and embodied scholarship, and those who desire to bring current, complex, theories to bear upon their research practices.

Collaborative Writing as Inquiry is a new and overdue contribution to the recently burgeoning literature on writing as a branch of qualitative inquiry. The book places a diversity of approaches to collaborative writing alongside each other, and explores these methods and the spaces between them as critical arts-based inquiry practices within the social sciences. It is not intended or written as any kind of a handbook, more of a scrapbook, containing summative and rich prologues to each section, and substantive chapters (some adapted from work previously published in international peer-reviewed journals), fragments and snippets of'writing in progress', as well as more extensive excursions into a range of approaches to writing collaboratively, including: collective biography; call and response (to people, to landscapes and to'what happens'in the writing spaces);'take three words'; poetic writing; and writing in scholarly communities and/or on retreat. This book illuminates, investigates and interrogates these emergent spaces, particularly as a critical gesture towards the individualised, market-driven agendas and neo-liberal practices of the contemporary academy.

This beautiful volume offers a range of research possibilities for practitioners. Bringing together the work of a community of scholars whose work blurs the edges between the arts and social sciences in the name of practice-based inquiry, Creative Practitioner Inquiry in the Helping Professions offers engaging and accessible exemplars alongside clear explanations of the theoretical understandings and backgrounds to the approaches offered. The book's contributors are teachers, doctors, social workers, counsellors, psychotherapists, health and community workers and organisational consultants; together they passionately engage in arts-based research as an effective and accessible instrument of inquiry, knowledge dissemination and social change.

Who are we with—and without—families? How do we relate as children to our parents, as parents to our children? How are parent-child relationships—and familial relationships in general—made and (not) maintained? Informed by narrative, performance studies, poststructuralism, critical theory, and queer theory, contributors to this collection use autoethnography—a method that uses the personal to examine the cultural—to interrogate these questions. The essays write about/around issues of interpersonal distance and closeness, gratitude and disdain, courage and fear, doubt and certainty, openness and secrecy, remembering and forgetting, accountability and forgiveness, life and death. Throughout, family relationships are framed as relationships that inspire and inform, bind and scar—relationships replete with presence and absence, love and loss. An essential text for anyone interested in autoethnography, personal narrative, identity, relationships, and family communication.

Five scholars met as writers at a workshop at the 2007 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry and made a commitment to write over the following year to, for and with each other. It became an experiment in the craft of autoethnography, exploring questions of intimacy and connection manifested through collaborative writing. Each year since then, the authors have returned to the Congress to read a small anthology of the year's writing—and to decide whether or not to continue. This book covers the first two years of that writing, offering stories of how writing touches, how it writes bodies into being and in between. It is an affecting, radical work, exploring love and intimacy as scholarly, messy, complex methodology—writing that often affirms and sometimes disturbs.

In this unique work, Ken Gale and Jonathan Wyatt bring together three areas of scholarship: collaborative writing as method of inquiry, the philosophical approaches of the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, and the performativity of both writing and the “self”. The book is a reflexive exploration into the theory and practice of collaborative writing, with their between-the-twos—sequences of exchanged writings using a variety of forms and genres—at the book's heart. Their collaboration offers an experimental, transgressive and nomadic inquiry into subjectivity. Based upon the authors'joint doctoral dissertation, the book draws for its theoretical base primarily from the work of Deleuze, from both his philosophical “figures” and the insights that he offers into his collaborations with others. It also tells a story, conveying a sense of a relationship developing over time.This book will interest both academics and postgraduate students in the field of qualitative inquiry, including those involved in narrative inquiry, cultural, communication and performance studies, and autoethnography.