Carol Hughes Dip Gestalt, BA, MPhil, MBACP(Accred)

• Counselling Programmes Coordinator
• Member of the Faculty Board
• Member of the Faculty Research Committee
• Member of the School Ethics Committee
• Partnership Team Leader
• Personal Tutor
• Master’s Dissertation Supervisor

Before entering the world of academia I worked for many years in in the field of social care, which included working with homeless people and rough sleepers, domestic violence, tenants’ groups, sheltered housing, within both statutory and voluntary service agencies.

This experience drew me into the field of Counselling and I have now been a practicing Counsellor for almost twenty years and in that time I have worked as a Counsellor in a number of settings, including NHS Primary Care, and a number of voluntary agencies. My background experience informs my teaching both on the undergraduate programmes that we offer and in the Master’s practice programme.

I am an accredited member of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy

I teach on both the Counselling undergraduate and postgraduate programmes within the School and my particular areas of interests are in ethics, research, politics, and issues of diversity and culture; drawing particularly on postmodern, critical, feminist and postcolonial theories.

I am interested in how these concepts influence Counselling theory and research practices. From a Counselling modality perspective I am interested in the continuing development of our understanding of emotions and the part they play in our construction as human entities.

In addition I have a growing interest in the discourses of the theories of anti-humanism, post-human and trans-human; which begs the question of Counselling’s changing relationship to the ideas of what makes us human.

My research interests are currently in Counselling and language provision, particularly looking at the minority Celtic languages in Britain.

My professional Counselling expertise lays in the area of Counselling trauma and Co-dependency.

The Counselling team have a strong track record in training external agencies and working with partnership organisations. Though our Community Counselling Centre we offer free Counselling to the local community and work in partnership with referring agencies.