22 April 2016: ‘What has stand-up ever done for qualitative inquiry’ research seminar

You are welcome to attend the following research seminar:

What has stand-up ever done for qualitative inquiry?

led by Jonathan Wyatt (University of Edinburgh)

and presented as part of the Plymouth Institute of Education Research Seminar Series

on 22 April 2016 at 2 pm in Rolle 206, Plymouth University

Abstract:

I am working on a book, provisionally titled Charmed circles: therapy, stand-up, and the gesture of writing, in which I look to Deleuze and Guattari, new materialist and affect theories, and the comic work of Stewart Lee and others, to explore the connections between stand-up comedy and therapy. In the process I find myself also lured into how stand-up speaks to the processes and practices of qualitative inquiry, and writing-as-inquiry in particular. For example, as I write this abstract in early January 2016 (on a bleak, rainy Saturday in Edinburgh), the notions of surprise, subversion, juxtaposition, incongruity, circularity, atmosphere and boldness all seem to come into play when I consider how stand-up might speak to what we do as researchers.

In this seminar, I shall develop these ideas further in pursuit of how stand-up might act as a ‘provocation’ (after Erin Manning) for conceptualising and undertaking qualitative inquiry differently.

About Jonathan Wyatt:

Jonathan Wyatt is senior lecturer and director of Counselling, Psychotherapy and Applied Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. He is the winner, with Beatrice Allegranti of the 2015 Norman K. Denzin Qualitative Research Award for their paper “Witnessing Loss: A Feminist Materialist Account”, published in Qualitative Inquiry. His recent work includes special issues on collaborative writing, co-edited with Ken Gale, for the journals International Review of Qualitative Research and Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies; and a book, On (writing) families: Autoethnographies of presence and absence, love and loss, co-edited with Tony Adams and published by Sense.