Mark Burton

Mark Burton has lived and worked in Manchester since the late 1970s. He worked for over thirty years in public services in the roles of psychologist, developer of services and senior manager, mostly with a focus on adults who are intellectually disabled. Outside work he was active in Cuba Solidarity and a variety of ecological and international causes. In all these he emphasised the linkage of practice with the social conditions within which people live, using a variety of frameworks from the critical social sciences to inform this. He also maintained a scholarly output and facilitated practice-based and inclusive research. Since retirement he describes himself as a scholar-activist, working on a variety of environmental, economic and political issues. Specific projects include Steady State Manchester http://steadystatemanchester.net and the English language Liberation Psychology Network http://libpsy.org. Through the latter and his written work he has promoted liberation psychology and related fields of praxis to audiences that do not read Spanish and Portuguese. He is Visiting Professor at Manchester Metropolitan University and collaborated with colleagues from there on the text “Critical Community Psychology” (Wiley, 2011).