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Phil Mizen joined the Department in 2001, from the School of Health and Social Studies, University of Warwick, where he worked since 1993.
He co-teaches a third year course on youth as a social problem, a second year module on Visual Sociology and he contributes to a first year foundation social policy course, Social Welfare in Britain. He also teaches a MA module on restructuring the welfare state and has supervised six research students through to the successful completion of their doctorates (topics include youth justice, student fees, child labour in India and Africa, and council tax debt.
His own research interests are the sociology of youth and child labour. He approaches the former from the slightly unorthodox direction of looking at how state forms create 'youth' through youth policy. A major element of Phil's work in this area has been an interest in how young people have been forced to bear a disproportionate burden of the costs of state restructring as the Keynesian welfare state was repudiated through the rise of monetarism and, more recently, 'new Labour's' Third Way. These themes are elaborated in Phil's books Young People, Training and the State (Mansell, 1995) and The Changing State of Youth (Palgrave 2005). Phil has also explored a number of related themes in a series of journal articles and book chapters.
Phil's interest in child labour has been pursued through an ESRC research project funded as part of their 'Children 5-16 Initiative'. The project involved a qualitative programme of research exploring the working lives of children in England and Wales, just before the turn of the 21st Century. As well as being published in books and journals, this project provided the basis for an edited collection of papers examining children's work in modern capitalist countries, Hidden Hands (P. Mizen et al (eds.) FalmerRoutledge, 2001). More recently, Phil has been working with Dr Yaw Ofosu-Kusi, Lecturer in Social Studies, University of Education, Winneba, Ghana, to research the working lives of street children in Accra.
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