People: Core Team
Core Team: Director, Co-Directors and Associates
Director
Hannah Morgan
Hannah Morgan is Senior Lecturer in Disability Studies in the Department of Sociology and Director of CeDR. She is the organiser of the biennial Lancaster Disability Studies Conferences. Hannah is an Executive Editor and Book Reviews Editor of the international journal Disability & Society. Her research interests focus on disabled people’s experiences of welfare, health and social care, disabled people’s self-organisation and the role of professionals in the lives of disabled people. She tweets as @HannahnagroM.
Co-Directors
Chris Grover
Chris Grover is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy in the Department of Sociology.
Chris Hatton
Professor Chris Hatton has been an academic at Lancaster University since 2000, and for over 25 years has worked to document, understand, and evaluate attempts to tackle the inequalities experienced by people with learning/intellectual disabilities and their families. He is currently Co-Director of the Public Health England Learning Disabilities Observatory. He writes a blog mainly on these issues at http://chrishatton.blogspot.co.uk/ and a more occasional blog in support of the #JusticeforLB campaign at http://dataforlb.blogspot.co.uk/.
Email chris.hatton@lancaster.ac.uk Twitter @chrishattoncedr
Founding Director
Carol Thomas
Carol Thomas is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, based in the Faculty of Health and Medicine. She is best known for her publications in Disability Studies, including her books : Female Forms: Experiencing and Understanding Disability (Buckingham: Open University Press 1997), and Sociologies of Disability and Illness. Contested Ideas in Disability Studies and Medical Sociology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007). She has also researched and published widely on patients’ and carers’ experiences is living and dying with cancer, and has developed an interest in illness narratives. Publications on narrative analysis have followed, most notably: Negotiating the contested terrain of narrative meth0ods in illness contexts. Sociology of Health and Illness 32 (4): 647-660, 2010). Carol is a founding member of the Centre for Disability Research (CeDR) at Lancaster University and was its first Director (2008-16).
Associates
Susie Baines
Susie Baines is a Research Associate in the Division of Health Research within the Faculty of Health and Medicine. Having worked in the field of learning disabilities since 2002, Susie began her career looking at the religious needs of adults with learning disabilities, and the experiences of Christian parents who had parented their child with learning disabilities to adulthood.
Susie is currently a member of the Learning Disabilities Health Observatory www.ihal.org.uk which was established in 2010 to provide better, easier to understand, information on the health and wellbeing of people with learning disabilities. Projects have included: Reasonable Adjustments, Acute Liaison Nurses, Joint Strategic Needs Assessments, Autism Self-Assessment Framework, Learning disabilities Self-Assessment Framework, and what CQC inspection reports of acute hospitals say about people with learning disabilities.
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fhm/dhr/people/susannah-baines
Susie Balderston
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/about-us/people/susie-balderston
Sue Cranmer
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/educational-research/about-us/people/sue-cranmer
Rebecca Fish
Rebecca Fish is a Lecturer working in the Sociology Department. Rebecca has worked with people with learning disabilities for 19 years and has led projects that include both service users and staff as participants. The majority of her research looks at experiences of living and working in inpatient units, exploring staff and service-user accounts of the institutional response to ‘challenging behaviour’. A notable area of her research has been experiences of self-harm, both from staff and service-user perspectives. In 2000 she won an NHS R&D bid for 45k to extend this research, and support service-users to record and publish their experiences. The research filled a gap in knowledge in this area and features extensively in the NICE systematic review of evidence in their guidance for the longer-term management of self-harm. Rebecca’s PhD research used ethnography to explore how the intersection of gender and disability influences women’s experiences of living on locked wards and made recommendations for changes to policy and practice. Her current project explores the provision of accessible health information in Primary Care. Overall, her research has informed policy, procedure and training with the aim of improving the experiences of people with learning disabilities
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/about-us/people/rebecca-fish
Elaine James
Elaine James is an Honorary Research Research Fellow in the Division of Health Research and a commissioner of adult social care in a local authority.
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fhm/dhr/people/elaine-james
Brigit McWade
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/about-us/people/brigid-morris-colton
Lisa Morriss
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/about-us/people/lisa-morriss
Janet Robinson
Janet Robinson is a Research Fellow in the Division of Health Research. She has been involved in research in the field of intellectual disabilities since competing her PhD in 1992. Her interests centre around the health of people with intellectual disabilities. She is currently employed by Improving Health and Lives (www.ihal.org.uk), the Public Health England sponsored Learning Disabilities Public Health Observatory. This is a collaboration between Public Health England, Lancaster University and the National Development Team for Inclusion.
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fhm/about-us/people/janet-robertson
Imogen Tyler
Imogen Tyler is Professor in the Department of Sociology. She researches social inequalities, power, injustice and resistance. Her work is concerned with how inequalities are measured and classified, the ways in which inequalities are reproduced & resisted and the kinds of subjectivities and identities which are constituted through unequal social relations. In terms of disability studies, Imogen is particularly interested in the history of disability, in disability welfare and in changing classifications of disability. The recognition of disability as ‘a problem’ of government emerged in tandem with the rise of industrial capitalism and the emergence of the welfare state. Contemporary understandings of disability where forged in social and political conflicts around the distributive criteria of welfare (Stone, 1986), and rights based claims for equality. Today, disabled people and their families in Britain are currently living through the most severe cuts to state funded services of any group at any time in the history of the welfare state. Imogen is interested in examining how this transformation in disability welfare signals a deeper shift in the cultural political economy of disability. For example, while the state is contracting disability as an administrative category, to reduce the ‘fiscal burden’ of disabled people, austerity is growing disabled populations. Inequalities, as social scientists have evidenced, harm people and make them sick. Imogen is interested in the features of the current ‘disability epidemic’: escalating levels of mental and physical ill-health; the rising mortality rate of disabled and elderly people; the depletion of peoples capacity for unpaid care in the face of welfare conditionally; the erosion of legal redress; and fraying accountability structures.
Imogen has a particular interest in the political struggles of learning disabled people and their families for adequate medical and social care and resources, and she has written on the #justiceforlb movement ‘Connor Sparrowhawk: the erosion of accountability and the administrative grotesque‘ (2016).Imogen has previously been funded by the EU (framework 7), the ESRC and the Leverhulme Trust, and in 2015 was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize . Books include Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain (2013), Immigrant Protest (2014), and Stigma Nation (in progress).
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/about-us/people/imogen-tyler
Sara Wasson
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/english-and-creative-writing/about-us/people/sara-wasson