About

Dr Linden West is Professor Emeritus of Canterbury Christ Church University, and a celebrated researcher and writer. He is a distinguished scholar in the broad field of adult and transformative education as well as learner motivation and professional learning. He is also a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, drawing on (but not exclusively so) object relations/relational psychoanalytic perspectives. He brings insights from clinical work and training into understanding learning, popular education and what we might call transformative and transcendental experience. He is an historian of popular and workers’ education while his main contemporary interest has lain in the application of auto/biographical and narrative enquiry, and interdisciplinary psychosocial and spiritual perspectives, to diverse educational, social, cultural, political, psychological and religious phenomena. Most recently he worked among Jewish Israeli and Palestinian educators, exploring how narrative methods can provide a basis for meaningful dialogue across the profoundest of differences. He has been writing too on class and adult as well as higher education, drawing on the complex stories people tell – most recently working class women at university and their encounters with otherness and in their own complex self and identity work. He has undertaken oral history work among Kent Miners and their communities, leading to a major 2024 exhibition called Radical dissent? Workers education and the Kent Coalfield. He has sought to develop forms of writing doing most justice to the complexity and intimacy of experience, alongside encounters with what can be repressive social and cultural forms. He asks, ‘what enables people to keep on keeping on?’, including the role and nature of love and the idea of the gift in adult learning. He draws on feminist writers like Hélène Cixous, and myth and literature, to chronicle and interpret the nuance of experience, including of the ineffable. Linden has drawn on the work of Latin American radical educator Paulo Freire and liberation theology to illuminate processes of ‘annunciation’ – the bringing forth of new life and hope – in the most difficult and perplexing experience, including in the Jewish Israeli/Palestinian conflict.