Current Research Interests

COUNSELLING AND PSYCHOTHERAPY AS SOCIO-SPATIAL PRACTICES

Counselling and psychotherapy services have become widely available and widely used in many contexts, prompting numerous questions about their "place(s)" in modern societies. My research explores these questions theoretically and substantively, contributing to a series of debates within and beyond human geography about subjectivities and spatialities. This research is grounded in close collaboration with service providers, training providers and professional bodies for counselling and psychotherapy. Through these collaborations my work offers new resources for practitioners and policy-makers, in the form of analyses of service provision, and discussions grounded in my capacity to move between "insider" (practitioner) and "outsider" (social science) perspectives. Funded projects include a study of ethnic minority access to counselling (Joseph Rowntree Foundation), and a study of voluntary sector counselling services in Scotland (Economic and Social Research Council) (see Counselling and Society Research Project). Projects on the histories of psychotherapy in Scotland, and psychotherapeutic identities are in the planning stages. A text entitled Counselling and Society is in preparation for Palgrave.

EMOTIONAL GEOGRAPHIES

Questions of emotion have become important topics in a number of social science disciplines. Linking insights from counselling studies, psychoanalytic theory and feminist social research, I am elaborating an approach to qualitative research that focuses on emotional dimensions of fieldwork. This approach is informed by a commitment to validate the full range of emotions researchers ordinarily experience in the practice of research, as well as to support researchers working on sensitive topics and/or with vulnerable. Several current or recent doctoral students engage with issues of emotional life through projects about agoraphobia, hospice care, emotional well-being and meanings of home. My interest in emotional life is also being taken forward collaboratively through a co-edited book entitled Emotional Geographies and a special issue of Gender, Place and Culture.

FROM GENDERED IDENTITIES TO THE MAKING AND REMAKING OF SELVES

My current research interests have their origins in a series of contributions to feminist debates about issues of gender difference and identity. This strand of my research draws on feminist, post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theorising, and has gradually shifted from questions about gender, to explore processes through which selves are made and remade in urban societies. Several current or recent doctoral students engage with related questions in relation to a range of issues, including cultural understandings of death and dying, perceptions of landscape, the remaking of identities after violent conflict, and the subjectivities produced through educational practices. Recently emerging from this work is a co-authored book Subjectivities, Knowledges and Feminist Geographies published by Rowman and Littlefield.

GENDER, CLASS AND URBAN SOCIAL CHANGE

My theoretical interest in issues of gender, difference and identity have developed in parallel with substantive research on the relationship between contemporary forms of urban social change and changes in the position of women in society. Recent projects include research on gentrification, and on the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in a buoyant housing market.