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Rachel Cohen: Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship

Dr Rachel CohenDr Rachel Cohen, Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, has won an Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. Only 50 are awarded each year across all disciplines and all insitutions.

The Fellowships aim to provide career development opportunities for those with a proven record of research who do not hold, or have not held a full-time established academic post in a UK university or comparable institution in the UK.

The Trust will contribute 50% of each Fellow's total salary costs over a two-year period along with research expenses of up to up to £5000 per annum to enable the Fellow's research.

Rachel will be researching the consequences of increased non-standard work.

Her study will look at how workers’ employment situations shape their experiences of the labour process and work-life boundaries. The research focuses on two occupations: car-repair mechanics and accountants – male-dominated sectors to contrast with the hairstylists studied in Dr Cohen’s doctoral thesis. Each occupation includes workers in diverse employment situations: employees; self-employed small business owners; home-based or peripatetic workers. Concerns include the effects non-standard work has on workers’ autonomy; career development; temporality (including flexibility); networks; ability to access social support, manage risk and build professional security; work-life balance; and whether and how these effects are gendered.

Rachel received a BA in Politics and Modern History from the University of Manchester and her MA and PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her research interests are in work and the labour process, and particularly 'non-standard' work. Her PhD was titled Styling Labour: Work Relations and the Labour Process in Hairstyling. She is currently developing several publications from this research.

Rachel has taught a variety of topics: from social theory (contemporary and classical); to research methods (general and quantitative methods); to modules with a thematic orientation (work, labour, and social justice; political sociology; sociology of the family).