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 transitions; student employment; educational inequalities; gender, youth and working lives; and representations of class and gender in popular culture.

I have worked on a number of funded research projects in this area, 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). Most recently, I led a major ESRC funded project,’L-earning: rethinking young women's working lives’. This 3-year research study explored young women’s earliest experiences of work – including work while studying – and how these experiences may contribute to gendered inequalities in later life. You can read more about the study on our project website. The project findings are currently being translated into real-world impact including the Earning + Learning campaign – backed by the TUC, NUS and Young Women’s Trust, this national campaign seeks to raise awareness of students’ rights in the workplace and deliver real change for student workers nationally.

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.

Responsibilities

• Unit of Assessment Lead

Research interests

• youth transitions
• gender, youth and work
• student employment
• educational inequalities of class, gender and race
• the cultural politics of popular culture

Primary investigator (PI)

• L-earning: rethinking young women's working lives
• Side-Hustles: Young People and Employment- Adjacent Entrepreneurship

Co-investigator (Co-I)

• Living Gender In Diverse Times

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

• Luna Yihan Fu