Writing & Research
 

Alongside my clinical practice, I have an ongoing interest in the relationship between our inner psychological worlds and the social, cultural and material environments in which we live.

My academic journey has increasingly led me towards questions that sit at the boundaries of psychotherapy, psychosocial studies, creativity and more-than-human thinking.

I am particularly interested in what becomes visible when we look beyond the individual as the sole location of psychological experience.

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Beyond the Individual

 

Psychotherapy has given us extraordinarily rich ways of understanding relationships between people.

My research interests extend that curiosity a little further.

What happens when we also pay attention to our relationships with objects, places, animals, landscapes and the wider living world?

How might experiences of safety, belonging, identity, displacement and memory be connected not only to people, but to the environments through which our lives have unfolded?

And what might different cultural and philosophical traditions teach us about the consequences of understanding human beings as separate from, rather than embedded within, the worlds they inhabit?

These are questions I continue to explore rather than questions for which I claim to have answers.

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From Objects to the More Than Human

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My MA in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London allowed me to explore the relationship between psychological experience and the material world.

My research and creative practice have considered how objects can become entangled with memory, identity and social experience, including my work exploring internalised racism through The Pink Stink.

I have subsequently become increasingly interested in more-than-human perspectives and what they might contribute to our understanding of trauma, homelessness, belonging and psychological life.

Rather than viewing the individual as separate from their surroundings, this work invites a wider question:

What changes when we understand a human life as something that has always existed in relationship with a world?

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Rethinking Therapeutic Space

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An emerging focus of my work is the idea of therapeutic space itself.

We often imagine therapy as something that takes place between two people in a particular kind of room. I am interested in widening that frame and asking what else might constitute a therapeutic space.

Can therapeutic spaces be found in landscapes, communities, creative practices, relationships with objects or encounters with the natural world? What happens when safety and belonging are created beyond conventional clinical environments?

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My longer term ambition is to explore these questions internationally and across different cultural contexts, learning from different understandings of place, relationship, community and the more-than-human world.

I am particularly interested in approaching this work with cultural humility. Different communities hold their own knowledge about land, belonging, wellbeing and relationship. Such knowledge cannot simply be separated from the people, histories and places from which it emerges.

The intention is not to search the world for a universal model of therapy, but to become curious about the different spaces, relationships and conditions through which people experience restoration, connection and belonging.

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Developing Research

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I am currently developing these interests through further writing, research and international enquiry, with a longer term ambition to contribute to doctoral research.

The questions are continuing to evolve.

At their centre is a curiosity that has followed me through my work as an artist, psychotherapist and psychosocial researcher:

What might we understand differently about ourselves if we stopped imagining that the human story belonged only to humans?

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Writing, Teaching and Conversation

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Alongside my research interests, I have written for Contact Magazine, taught psychotherapy students and contributed as a guest lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London and the Sherwood Psychotherapy Training Institute.

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I am interested in opportunities for writing, teaching, research collaboration, conference contributions and conversations that bring together psychotherapy, psychosocial thinking, creativity, identity, therapeutic space and more-than-human perspectives.

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My research continues to develop, and this page will grow alongside it.