Dr Martin Purcell

Martin has over thirty years' experience as a Community Education practitioner, having worked in various community development and youth work roles throughout the UK (including ten years in Wales, four in Scotland and over twenty in England).  Throughout his professional career, Martin has been employed mainly in the voluntary and statutory sectors, working with community groups to design and deliver community-based services, for which he secured several million pounds in funding from public and charitable sources.  Martin's practice has been underpinned by a commitment to social justice and to facilitating transformation in the lives of marginalised and excluded groups through informal educative processes.

Over the past fifteen years, Martin’s career has been in transition from being purely practice-based to academia.  Martin worked as a contract researcher for the prestigious Leeds-based Policy Research Institute for several years, conducting work on community initiatives for central government departments and agencies, local authorities, national voluntary organisations and local charities.  These included evaluations of the New Deal for Communities, the Youth Contract and the Children’s Fund; contributions to national and local policy on public participation and multi-disciplinary working; and research into the children’s workforce, including the role of Directors of Children’s Services and Children’s Trusts.

Martin has become involved increasingly in a voluntary capacity in various roles for community organisations and charities.  Currently a Trustee for two charities concerned with ensuring quality youth work provision, Martin was until recently a Trustee for a mental health charity providing services for young people in his home county of West Yorkshire.  Since his return to Dundee – where he was engaged in community regeneration and anti-poverty work for four years in the mid-1990s – Martin has continued to develop links with local community organisations, where he continues to work in voluntary roles.

Martin has taught for the past ten years on professionally qualifying community education and other programmes, including Youth & Community Work, Regeneration and Urban Design courses at four English Universities: Leeds Beckett, Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan and Huddersfield.   Throughout his time teaching on these programmes, Martin has developed considerable expertise in both his subject area and pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning, all of which inform his teaching practice at the University of Dundee.