Professor Jonathan Wyatt

Professor Jonathan Wyatt

Sabbatical Fellow, April - June 2025 (previously 2019)

Home institution: University of Edinburgh                         ​

Project title: Writing, the Everyday, and Creative-Relational Inquiry

I have a contract with Routledge for a monograph, Writing, the Everyday, and Creative-Relational Inquiry, due with the publishers at the end of July,2025. This book is, in some senses, a follow-up to my previous book, Therapy, Stand-up and the Gesture of Writing: Towards Creative-Relational Inquiry, published in 2019. 

The premise of this new work, which will spin off chapter 5 of the 2019 book (The refrains of therapy and the everyday) is how the everyday is not (only) mundane but replete with possibility, not (only) a given but riven with contingencies, not (only) prosaic but imbued with the poetic.[1]  Or better: how the everyday is both mundane and open, given and contextual, prosaic and whimsical. Like Phillip Pullman’s Will Parry, you can slice through the everyday with a ‘subtle knife’ into other, parallel worlds: alongside a daily walking commute up an Edinburgh hill, one foot in front of another, heart rate rising, are stories of love and loss, masculinity and desire, illness and ageing, the body and what it can do (Spinoza, 2002), hope and despair, the planet and its future. The everyday, the ‘site’ of this text, will be the everyday of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘immanent materialism’, a “concurrent reciprocating reality and a potential maelstrom of non-human becomings” (Cole, 2013, 2); an everyday concerned with the flow, the “affective politics” (ibid.), the assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004) of the moment; the creative-relational event replete with potentialities.[2]

The book will tell these stories, together with, and through, theory, picking up on both Therapy, Stand-up, and the Gesture of Writing and others’ subsequent work (e.g. Gale, 2020; Harris, 2020; Holman Jones, 2020, Murray, 2020; etc.[3]) to push further at the concept of ‘creative-relational inquiry’, to see what more it can offer. The book inquires, through/with Deleuze and Guattari, affect theory and the new materialisms, into what more creative-relational inquiry might open, explores where else it might take me/us, looking for new concepts to emerge. The book tells stories of the everyday with and through theory; and it tells stories of theory with and through the everyday. Contrary to Elizabeth Grosz’s view that “theory is not necessary for the conducting of everyday life” (Konturri and Tiainen, 2007, 255), the book sees theory as not separate and abstract but lived, quotidian, embodied, necessary, urgent, creative. Further, the book tells stories of everyday theory (and theory every day) through writing. Writing-as-inquiry – as with Therapy, Stand-up, and the Gesture of Writing – is this book’s through-line, its lifeblood. The book thinks, feels, breathes, aches, with writing, with what writing holds and offers.