Iain Edgar

Dr Iain Edgar, CQSW, BA (hons), MPhil, PhD

Dr Edgar is a social anthropologist based at Durham University. Before becoming an academic Iain qualified as a social worker with posts in Aberdeen and Newcastle. He has extensive experience of adult learning and groupwork, with a particular commitment to experiential and person-centred learning approaches. A skilled trainer, Iain has undertaken development work with a wide range of teams, from therapeutic communities to academics and practitioners in the social welfare field.

Iain has developed the practice of guided visualisation or imagework, originally developed in Jungian psychoanalysis and used in therapeutic settings for personal growth work, as an educational and research methodology.

Experiential methods such as imagework can be utilized in practice in such diverse fields as health and social care, social sciences, education, development and business and marketing. The imagework method is particularly effective in accessing participants’ implicit awareness of such areas as individual and collective vision development, personal and cultural identity formation and change; interpersonal dynamics; attitudes and ideologies, and organizational culture.

Iain also has a special interest in dreamwork. His work is of international standing: he has published extensively and delivered lectures and workshops across Europe and America.

Iain works collaboratively with Strategic Solutions Ltd on organisation development interventions drawing on his experience of dreamwork, imagework and guided visualisation.

Publications include:

Just Published – The Dream of Islam

‘Imagework and Health Research’ in New Qualitative Research Methodologies in Health and Social Care: Putting Ideas into Practice, F. Maggs-Rapport (ed.). Routledge (Taylor and Francis); Publication May 2004.

‘Imagework in Ethnographic Research’ in Working Images, S. Pink, L. Kurti & A. Afonso (eds.). Routledge (Taylor and Francis) publication date 2004.