Counselling Studies (PhD) PhD

The University of Edinburgh

This PhD programme is an advanced research degree enabling students to conduct in-depth independent research on a topic of their choice, thereby making a significant and original contribution to knowledge in the field of counselling and psychotherapy.

Counselling and psychotherapy specialise in qualitative, reflexive and critical approaches to research, and have particular expertise in practice-based research that draws directly on practitioners' own therapeutic work, on the client's experience of therapy, and in narrative, reflexive and auto-ethnographic methods.

We are especially keen to encourage research concerned with the interface between counselling, psychotherapy and social, cultural and political life.

Our research portfolio is highly interdisciplinary, integrating concepts, practices and scholarship from counselling and psychotherapy, psychology, sociology, philosophy, education, cultural studies, health and social care, and other social sciences.

Our interests include disability, gender, trauma, abuse, counselling children and young people, and sexualities.

Recent successful PhD topics have included:

• how children express emotions in aesthetic arts curricula in primary schools

• how suffering is transacted in therapeutic work with parents of children with disabilities; and

• how people with anorexia recover through psychotherapy

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Accredited by the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) for the purpose of exemption from some professional examinations through the Accredited degree accelerated route.

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Accredited by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) for the purpose of exemption from some professional examinations.

Accredited by the Institute of Chartered Accountants Scotland (ICAS) for the purpose of exemption from some professional examinations.