Alys Young

Overview

I am Professor of Social Work Education and Research  within the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work.

I am also the director of SORD - the S ocial R eseach with D eaf P eople programme

I am a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) http://blogs.mhs.manchester.ac.uk/news-hub/2015/10/30/social-sciences-academics-work-recognised-by-academy-of-social-sciences/

I also currently hold the role of Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Centre for Deaf Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

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Biography

Following her BA Hons. in English Literature from King’s College, Cambridge (1986), Alys worked as a residential social work assistant. She qualified as a social worker in 1989 with a MSc in Applied Social Studies and a CQSW from Oxford University. She went on to work for Cambridgeshire Social Services as a community mental health social worker, ASW, generic social worker and specialist social worker with Deaf people. She gained her PhD in 1995 from the Centre for Deaf Studies, University of Bristol, on the impact on hearing familes of sign bilingual approaches to early intervention, carrying out her fieldwork in both BSL (British Sign Langauge) and English.

Author of over 100 academic publications, her main research interests are: (i) early intervention with deaf children and their families; (ii) improvements in the provision and effectiveness of health and social care services for deaf chidlren and adults across the life span; (iii)  social science research methodologies in the context of signed languages and d/Deaf people.

She currently leads the Social Reserach with Deaf People group (SORD) which comprises a multidisciplinary, bilingual group of Deaf and hearing researchers working on a range of applied social research projects connected with family, service and community contexts which involve Deaf people. wwww.manchester.ac.uk/sord

Formerly international visiting scholar at the National Technical Insititute for Deaf People, RIT, USA and visiting professor University of British Columbia, Canada, she is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Centre for Deaf Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

Alys is a Senior Fellow of the NIHR School for Social Care Research. In 2015 was conferred FAcSS (Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences) for her contributions to social work and social research with Deaf people(s) http://blogs.mhs.manchester.ac.uk/news-hub/2015/10/30/social-sciences-academics-work-recognised-by-academy-of-social-sciences/

In 2016 she won the Times Higher Education Award for Outstanding Research Supervisor of the Year http://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/alys-wins-the-inaugural-times-higher-education-award-for-outstanding-research-student-supervision/