Supporting academics, students, and universities navigate uncertainty, develop meaningful careers, and realise their potential in higher education through coaching, mentoring, and consultancy grounded in extensive experience as a researcher, educator, and academic leader. Whether you are seeking career progression, research development, dissertation supervision, or support coping with institutional change, I offer practical, reflective, and confidential support tailored to helping you to realise your goals.
Creative Futures in Higher Education
I am an experienced sociologist, social psychologist, critical theorist, and educationalist with a specific interest in the ways in which individuals and societies imagine and envisage the future in the face of increasing uncertainty and instability. Informed by my long-standing research specialism in psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, existentialism, and phenomenology, and a history of leadership in the university sector, my work is focused upon understanding the creation of worlds, values, and motivations with a view to imagining alternative futures.
Although my research initially focused on the study of utopias and dystopias in social history, in more recent work I began to study the ways in which the future is imagined and realised in the university. By applying my work on psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, existentialism, and phenomenology to this problem I founded my coaching and mentoring practice, which is primarily focused on supporting people to realise their potential in the contemporary university.
Living in a world shaped by complexity and crisis, where it is difficult to make sense and create meaning, one of the key challenges of contemporary life is establishing and maintaining a sense of purpose, direction, and future orientation. In this respect, my practice is informed by an interpretive creative problem solving approach focused on supporting individuals at all career stages to develop their capacity to find meaning, plan their futures, and realise specific objectives.
Given this background in understanding the individual in social context, I am particularly interested in working with people seeking to make sense of and develop their capacity within higher educational institutions. Although I specialise in supporting those working in the university sector, my interest in social psychology and organisational logics means that I am also well placed to support those working in other large institutions.
Navigating the University
Although the university remains a space of growth, development, and realising potential, it is also a place of increasing complexity, dizzying technological change, financial challenge, and normative crisis that can be extremely difficult to navigate. This is the case for managers, academics, and students who have their own unique and sometimes conflicting challenges within an environment that feels more and more demanding and strained. Based on my extensive experience as a university educator, researcher, and leader, I work with clients navigating this complex and challenging environment supporting them to find meaning, achieve their objectives, and realise their potential.