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--Djjr (talk) 18:17, 28 October 2011 (UTC) Anything? Suggest a look at Sociological Abstracts under electronic resources at Mills library. For example, there's this piece: "An Interview with Paul Willis: Commodification, Resistance and Reproduction," by Sassatelli, Roberta; Santoro, Marco in the European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 265-289, May 2009

Paul Willis

Paul Willis is a leading British cultural theorist, and well known as a major contemporary figure in sociology and cultural studies. Paul Willis' Work is widely read in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and education, his work emphasizing consumer culture, socialization, music,and popular culture.

"Outline"

-Basic background -Famous Works -Critics of Willis' works

Basic Background

Paul Willis’s work has focused on mainly, but not exclusively, on the ethnographic study of lived cultural forms in a wide variety of contexts. From highly structured to weakly structured ones, Willis examines how practices of `informal cultural production` help to produce and construct cultural worlds `from below`.

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Trained in literary criticism at Cambridge, Paul Willis received his PhD in 1972 from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University where he remained as Senior Research Fellow until 1981. During the 1980`s Willis served as youth policy adviser to Wolverhampton Borough Council in the English Midlands. There he produced The Youth Review (published by the Council and Ashgate) which formed the basis for youth policy in that city and for the formation of the democratically elected Youth Council, both still functioning. During the 1990`s he served first as Head of the Division of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies and then as a member of the Professoriate at the University of Wolverhampton. In 2000 Willis co-founded the Sage Journal, Ethnography. In 2003 Willis was hired as a Head Professor of social and cultural ethnography at Keele University. Most recently, Paul Willis is a Professor at Princeton University, as well as editor and founder of the international journal Ethnography, based at Princeton. He has published widely on work, culture, education, and method. Among his many works are “Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs” and “The Ethnographic Imagination”. At Princeton he teaches seminars for juniors and seniors in research methods, the sociology of work, as well as the required course for concentrators, “Claims and Evidence in Sociology.”

Famous Works

Paul Willis is best known for his rich ethnographic studies of working-class youth culture. She also suggests that Willis' recommendations are somewhat anachronistic, and also too class orientated. While class should be a central analysis of unemployment, its important to stress that gender and race are also central issues when discussing this topic.