The Art of The Interpersonal: Mutual Enablement of Growth

Interpersonal skills and experiences matter to all aspects of life. The Interpersonal has emerged as a unifying theme in my research and training practices, which consider how we are (and could be) relating to the world around us. 

It is well known that the quality, and qualities, of our relationships are intrinsic to human development. As a corollary, all interpersonal processes can be viewed as developmental opportunities: each participant is changed through encounter with others.  

Using different starting points and parameters, I explore qualitative aspects of interpersonal  experience, and how mutually negotiated encounters or events may co-influence and change the world in which they occur.  I am concerned with making unconscious aspects of these processes available for thought and reflection.  

Landing that which seems abstract or distant back into sense-based understanding, we may form a more intuitive and embodied understanding of how learning, growth and healing is (or isn't) taking place through our active and responsive processes. This allows us to make relational sense of our experiences, and our sense-making itself, even as our positioning evolves and changes in light of our rapidly developing social and cultural contexts.

I engage across disciplinary boundaries with artists, social and cultural theorists, psychologists, educators, psychoanalysts and counselling and psychotherapy practitioners from different traditions and modalities, to investigate areas that feel urgent, exciting, troubling or pressing, through shared relational practices, with multiple perspectives, moving between arts and sciences, theory and practice.  

I use concepts and practices that are:

• creative
• relational
• embodied 
• movement oriented
• psychoanalytic 
• developmental
• affective
• psychosocial 
• posthuman
• feminist
• de-colonial

Attending to the fundamental qualities of relational communication, through time and across sensory modalities, creates conditions for new insight, increased awareness and more reflexive, ethical engagement with  relational dynamics in which we have influence.

Work is experimental, evolves as it goes, and supports development of clarity of intention and manoeuvrability within the interpersonal sphere, without a need for specific outcomes, answers or solutions. This process allows an embodied experience of the philosophical and scientific positions that underpin a relationally-oriented lens.

I owe gratitude for inspiration and support to the work of:

Jane Speedy, Sue Porter and what is now the Collaborative Artful Narrative Inquiry Network (CANI-net), for introducing me to collaborative narrative inquiry practices and allowing me space to develop my ways of working with others.

Jonathan Wyatt and colleagues who developed the Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry at the University of Edinburgh, which brings into focus the creative nature of being in relation.

Erin Manning and Brian Massumi's work, including the SenseLab and now the 3e (3 ecologies) project which inspire me from afar to develop opportunities for social engagement.

Peter Fonagy and the collaborations between UCL's Psychoanalysis Unit and The Anna Freud Centre, bringing developmental psychology and psychoanalytic theory into relation, a foundational experience that has informed everything in my life since.

The Association for Psychosocial Studies, so many of whose members inspire and support my ongoing journey of inquiry.

Garland, M. C., Brown, L., Dunlop, M., Laidler, C., Liebmann, M., Puntil, D., Sakelliaradis, A., & Speedy, J. (2024). Using Fragments to Uncover Connections Through Call and Response, Resonance, and Dissonance. International Review of Qualitative Research, 0(0). 

Mendus, A., Kirkpatrick, D., Laidler, C., Speedy, J., Dunlop, M., Gallant, M., Sakellariadis, A., Wyatt, J., & Wyatt, T. (2022). Remembering Sue: Last Writes. Qualitative Inquiry, 28(8-9), 917-930.

Collaborating author in D. Kirkpatrick, S. Porter, J. Speedy & J. Wyatt (ed.s) (2021). Artful Collaborative Inquiry: Making and Writing Creative, Collaborative Research. London: Routledge.

Dunlop, M. with Del Negro, G. de Munck, K., Gale, K., Mackay, S., Price, M., Sakellariadis, A., Soler, G, Speedy, J. & van Hove, G. (2020) ‘Something Happened in the Room: Conceptualising intersubjectivation’. International Review of Qualitative Research. Special Issue: Activism and/in the Academy.

Dunlop, M (2019). ‘Like the Moon Rising: Standing in the Brexit Dawn’. International Review of Qualitative Inquiry. Special Issue: Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of the Global Right: Qualitative Researchers Respond. Spring 2019, Vol. 12 issue 1, pages 17-26.