The core course team, currently led by Dr Julie Cherryman and Mark Haydon-Laurelut, will provide tutorial and project supervision in addition to being unit coordinators for several of the course units. All  team members bring with them extensive experience of working in services for people with intellectual disabilities, as well as academic teaching and research expertise. Several other members of academic staff in the Department of Psychology also contribute to the course with units relevant to their subject expertise.

This core course team comprises:

Mark Haydon-Laurelut

As well as being a lecturer on this course, Mark is also a practising Systemic Psychotherapist in NHS Adult Learning Disability services. He is unit coordinator for Intellectual Disability and Supporting Families and Participatory and Enabling Practices. Recent publications have been on the discursive construction of 'challenging behaviours' and the exploration of systemic therapy as an anti-disablement practice.

Dr Karl Nunkoosing

Karl currently positions himself as a critical disability studies teacher and researcher. He has been engaged in the lives of people who experience learning difficulties since his youth. He teaches about the socialconstruction of intellectual disabilities. The research questions that grab his attention tend to favour qualitative methodologies and critical discourse analysis in particular, but not exclusively so. Current obsessions include the attributes of workers who enable people who experience learning difficulties to experience good lives; contemporary social constructions of 'challenging behaviour', 'duty of care', research interviews, and fathers and fatherhood.

Dr Treena Jingree

Treena is a social psychologist and senior lecturer. She is very much looking forward to being unit coordinator from 2012 of Empowerment and the Social Construction of Learning Disabilities. Her research interests focus on unequal power relations and how identities (e.g. support staff /carer/parent identity and learning disabled identities) are constructed in talk.