Dr Kim Allen

Profile

I am a feminist interdisciplinary scholar whose work sits at the intersections of youth, culture, gender and work. Central to my scholarship and praxis is a commitment to taking seriously social groups and cultural sites which are deemed marginal, trivial or lacking value – namely youth, women, the working-class, and popular culture. Re-situating these instead as valuable sites for critical sociological inquiry, my work interrogates how both lived experiences and representational configurations of youth, class and gender register broader socio-economic change, political crises and inequality

I have published widely on issues including: youth and graduate transitions and ‘employability’; educational inequalities; gender, youth and working lives; and representations of class and gender in popular culture.  My co-authored book - Celebrity, Aspiration and Contemporary Youth: Education and Inequality in an Era of Austerity – was published by Bloomsbury Press in 2018.  

I have worked on a range of research projects, including: ‘Celebrity Culture and Young People’s Classed and Gendered Aspirations’ (ESRC);  Young women’s transitions in austerity (British Academy); and ‘Living Gender in Diverse Times’(ESRC).  

I am currently Principal Investigator on a major ESRC funded project,’L-earning: rethinking young women's working lives’.  This 3-year research study explores young women’s earliest experiences of work – including work while studying – and how these experiences may contribute to gendered inequalities in later life. The study is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its ‘Transforming Working Lives’ initiative – a broader scheme of research projects investigating changes in working lives and power in the workplace. You can read more about the study on our project website.

I am also Partner Investigator on the Australian Research Council grant ‘Side-Hustles: Young People and Employment-Adjacent Entrepreneurship’.

I sit on the editorial board of journals including: British Journal of Sociology of Education; Journal of Youth Studies; and the European Journal of Cultural Studies.

Research interests

• youth transitions 
• ‘employability’ and youth/ graduate labour markets
• educational inequalities of class, gender and ‘race’
• gender and work
• class, gender and celebrity culture
• the cultural politics of popular culture

Professional memberships

• HEA (Fellow)
• BSA

Student education

I teach on several modules across the school at undergraduate and postgraduate levels including:
•    Reality TV: Truth or Fiction (SLSP5371M) 
•    Gender and Society (SLSP2050) 
•    States of Emergency (FOSS3001/ FOSS2001)
•    Qualitative Research Methods (SLSP5520M)
•    Theorising Gender (SLSP5321M)
•    Debates in Childhood and Youth (SLSP2150)
•    Understanding and Researching Society (SLSP1170)
•    Approaches and Methods for Media and Culture (SLSP5366M)
•    Researching Inequality in the Media (SLSP5361M)
 

Research groups and institutes

• Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies

Current postgraduate researchers

• Georgina Trace
• Luna Yihan Fu