Reader Emeritus in the Department of Sociology

 

Email: C.Wolkowitz@warwick.ac.uk

Tel: 44(0)2476 523159

Room: D0.12

Profile

Carol Wolkowitz is Reader Emeritus in the Department of Sociology. Her research has involved a number of different areas of gender, employment and body studies. In 2006 she published Bodies at Work (Sage), which spearheaded research on the relation between embodiment and the labour process, including chapters on industrial and service sector employment, sex work, workplace health and safety and ‘body work’. Her concept of ‘body work’, first mooted in an article in Work, Employment and Society (WES) in 2002, was further developed, with others, in two edited volumes presenting empirical research on ‘body work’. Bodies at Work also included an analysis of the gendered meanings signalled by photographs of bodies at work, an interest continued in a special section of Sociological Research Online (2012) on Visualising Landscapes of Work and Labour, edited with Phil Mizen. It includes her article on the body work economy of South Florida, based on still photographs by herself and others.

Since retiring in 2017, Carol has conducted research with Nickie Charles on therapy dog visits to a university campus, conceptualising their interactions with students as a form of work. (Work, Employment and Society, 2023; Gender, Work and Organization, 2019). Her article with Francesca Vianello (University of Padua) analyses general practitioners’ perceptions of the health and safety risks faced by live-in care workers in the Veneto, Italy Health, Risk and Society, 2022.

Carol was the first director of the Warwick University network on Connecting Research on Employment and Work (CREW). She was a member of the Editorial Board of Work, Employment and Society (2014-2021) and also served long stints on the editorial boards of Gender, Work and Organisation and Int. Journal of Work, Emotion and Organization.

Publications

Bodies at Work was followed by two edited collections of articles on body work. Body Work in Health and Social Care (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), co-edited with Julia Twigg, Rachel Lara Cohen and Sarah Nettleton. Body/Sex/Work: Intimate, Embodied and Sexualized Labour (Palgrave 2013), co-edited with Rachel Cohen, Kate Hardy and Teela Sanders, shows that focusing on body work and sex work can contribute to the revival of labour process analysis, highlighting its relevance to understanding the organization of service sector work, including care work, salon work and sex work.

Carol is also co-author of two books on homeworking and home-located work, Homeworking Women: Gender, Class and Racism at Work, with Annie Phizacklea (1995) and Homeworking: Myths and Realities, with Sheila Allen (1987). Her other publications include the Glossary of Feminist Theory (2000, 1997), with Terry Lovell and Sonya Andermahr, and several articles exploring the use of personal narratives to understand women's roles in the American communities established by the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. Carol also contributed an autobiographical account to a review of changes in the sociology of work as a field of study, published in Sociology in 2009. She has a long-standing interest in gender in Indian history and politics, stemming from her doctoral research (Sussex University) on women politicians' careers in South India. She was also a co-editor of Of Marriage and the Market: Women's Subordination in International Perspective (1981 and 1985).

Former Teaching

Besides supervising over 25 PhD theses on a wide range of topics, Carol taught a postgraduate module on Sex, Gender and Power at Work and the visual methods component of the MA Qualitative Methods module. At undergraduate level she convened Sexualities in Society and Visual Sociology.

Research Groups

Carol remains an active member of the University’s Centre for the Study of Women and Gender (CSWG) and the Connecting Research on Work and Employment (CREW) network.