Researching the Unconscious

Joins us for this fascinating course on Researching the Unconscious: The Essex Summer School in Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Research Methods

This summer school is available to research students and brings together experienced psychosocial researchers, who will teach you how they use psychosocial and psychoanalytic ideas and methodologies to conduct their research. Based on examples from their own research practice, you will learn how psychosocial approaches and psychoanalysis can help you construct your object of research, conduct your fieldwork, and interpret your findings.

In the inaugural lecture of the summer school, Prof Lisa Baraitser will discuss collaboration as a psychosocial method. She will address questions of research methods from the perspective of collaboration and the impossibility of working alone. Offering a psychosocial perspective on interdisciplinarity, she will show how we are dependent on others for making new knowledge, a process that is not necessarily harmonious, and can be full of archaic terrors that are played out and reworked as the research unfolds.

The four sessions of the course will be dedicated to interview methods, discourse analysis, psychosocial ethnography, and ethnographic reflexivity. Prof Sasha Roseneil’s session will be dedicated to the biographical-narrative interpretive method (BNIM) as psychosocial research method. Prof Jason Glynos will discuss discourse and fantasy, showing how the concept of fantasy can be ‘operationalised’ for purposes of critical empirical research. Dr Raluca Soreanu’s will discuss psychosocial ethnography, showing how to approach difficult research sites and how to ‘listen’ to psychosocial scenes. Dr Ruth Sheldon’s session will be dedicated to ethnography and its forms of reflexivity.