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My career has involved work with adults with learning difficulties and in the disabled people’s movement in community education, Disability Arts development, management, and training roles. My undergraduate responsibilities involve teaching sociology, philosophy and social policy to BA Guidance and Counselling/Integrated Health and Social Care students, and overseeing the delivery of Disability Studies modules taught by one of Northumbria University’s teaching partners in Singapore. At postgraduate level I supervise MSc social work dissertations, contribute to the MSc in Autism, and I am presently principal supervisor of one PhD student. In 2017 I was a co-investigator and co-author of The National Lottery-funded research report ‘Improving Understanding of Service User Involvement and Identity’ (Shaping Our Lives, 2017), and I am currently on the editorial team producing The Routledge Handbook of Service User Involvement in Human Services Education and Research, to be published in 2020. I am a board member of Disability Arts Online and Chair of Shaping Our Lives’ research committee. Outside work, I have been identified as the Whitley Bay Stuckist by Charles Thompson, the founder of the Stuckist art movement, and have exhibited paintings at Whitley Bay Film Festival and at The Exchange, North Shields. I am the singer in a band that performs raucous covers of obscure 1970s pop hits. 2019 will see the publication by The Iron Press of an epic poem I have written with an old school friend, begun in 1979 as a distraction technique during maths lessons. I am a disabled person.