Conference Speakers

Mark Baldwin is a senior lecturer in social work at Bath University. His research interests include looking at the development of integrated health and social care services  and Community Care policy implementation (particularly the part played by front line implementers and the construction of care management through different forms of knowledge.) Mark is a member of the national steering committee of the Social Work Action Network.

Sarah Banks is a Professor in the School of Applied Social Sciences, University of Durham. She has a background in community development and worked in the voluntary sector and local authority social services before joining Durham University. Her degrees are in philosophy, social history and social work. Her research interests include professional ethics, community development and work with young people.

Peter Beresford is Professor in Social Work at Brunel University. He is the Director of the Centre for Citizen Participation, Chair of Shaping our Lives, Visiting Fellow at the School for Social Work and Psycho-social studies at the University of East Anglia, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is also a Trustee of the Social Care Institute for Excellence. He is co-author of “Making User Involvement Work.”

Iain Ferguson is a senior lecturer in social work at the University of Stirling and a founder member of the Social Work Action Network. He has recently published Reclaiming Social Work (Sage) and (with Rona Woodward) Radical Social Work in Practice (Policy Press)

Chris Jones is Emeritus Professor of Social Work at Liverpool University. He has written widely on social work education, poverty and inequality and state supervision, surveillance and control of marginalised communities. His book State Social Work and the Working Class (Macmillan, 19??) was originally published in the series ‘Critical texts in Social Work and the Welfare State’ which developed a number of ‘radical social work’ themes in the 1980s. He is currently completing a book (with Michael Lavalette) on the experiences of young people on the Palestinian West Bank.

Mary Langan teaches social policy and criminology at the Open University. In the 1970s she was an inner city social worker and an active participant in the radical social work movement. She has written extensively on social work and social policy in a wide range of books and articles. She edited the Routledge Social Policy series ‘The State of Welfare’. As the parent of a boy with autism and severe learning disability, she has campaigned and written about the rights of people with disabilities and their families.

Michael Lavalette is Associate Professor of Social Work at Liverpool Hope University and a founding member of the Social Work Action Network. He has written on a range of issues within social work, social policy and sociology. With Iain Ferguson he has recently published ‘Social Work After Baby P’ and is currently completing a book (with Chris Jones) on the experiences of Palestinian young people on the West Bank.

Laura Penketh is a senior lecturer in social work at Liverpool Hope University. She has written on issues of ‘race’ and anti-racism in social policy and social work as well as on issues of ‘women, gender and social work’. She is currently researching alongside women in impoverished communities in both Liverpool and Chennai (India).

Jeremy Weinstein was a member of the Case Con Collective, worked as a social worker in Lambeth and Wandsworth before going to London South Bank University as a senior lecturer on the post graduate social work programme. He remains a Visiting Fellow at LSBU and now works as a counsellor/psychotherapist running a low cost counselling project and in private practice. Jeremy has researched/written on social work as trade unionists, aspects of group work and more recently on the topic of loss and bereavement.   His text, ‘Working with Loss, Death and Bereavement, a Guide for Social Workers’ was published by Sage in 2008

Charlotte Williams is Professor of Social Justice and Head of the School of Public Policy and Professional Practice at Keele University.  She is Visiting Professor at Liverpool Hope University. She has been a social work educator for over twenty years initially at the University of Wales, Bangor. She has written and researched extensively on equalities issues and her publications include ‘A Tolerant Nation? Exploring Ethnic Diversity in Wales’, Cardiff: University of Wales Press and ‘Social Policy for Social Welfare Practice in a Devolved Wales’ Venture Press. In 2007 she was awarded an OBE for services to ethnic minorities and equal opportunities in Wales.  

Professor Walter Lorenz (Bolzano, Italy) has made a major contribution to social work study and practice through his work in a number of European countries, including Germany, Switzerland, UK, Ireland, and Italy. Walter is Professor at the Free University in Bolzano, Italy, where he is responsible for the Faculty of Social Work. He received his Social Work education at the London School of Economics and worked several years in London's East End (where he was involved with theearly radical social work movement in Britain), before he moved to Cork, in 1978. More recently he has led several European research and cooperation projects and his main focus is the development of European and intercultural dimensions in social work.