British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship award for WBS faculty member

Dr Deborah Dean, Associate Professor of Industrial Relations at Warwick Business School, has been awarded a Mid-Career Fellowship by the British Academy, the UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

The Mid-Career Fellowships were introduced this year by the British Academy to support outstanding individual researchers on the completion of a major piece of research, and to enable public understanding and engagement with humanities and social science. Only 46 Fellowships were awarded out of a total 470 applications.

The Fellowship will fund Deborah to undertake her research project, titled Performing Ourselves: Actors, Social Stratification and Work. Her research interests include industrial relations in the entertainment industry and equality issues in employment, and she will be drawing on her UK, US and European research on actors' working realities to understand advantage and disadvantage in wider society. At the end of the 12-month project she plans to have a book written on her research, which will be published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Deborah explains, "Professional actors or performers act as society's proxies. In other words, they are paid to represent us to ourselves, and we are simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar with them as workers. Despite all performers doing the same sort of work using the same set of skills, they are allocated work in highly segmented labour markets based on society's attribution of meaning and value to age, gender, race/ethnicity, disability and sexuality. My research to date across very different national socio-political-legal contexts reveals strikingly similar outcomes, and societal conceptions as both persistent and changing. The British Academy Fellowship Award will enable me to further explore actors' working realities to understand regulation of work, and advantage and disadvantage in wider society. This enables new theoretical insight into why particular meanings and values are attributed to these workers."

Professor Mark Taylor, Dean of WBS, comments, "I congratulate Deborah on winning this prestigious British Academy Fellowship. It is rare to see research on creative artists in relation to their industrial and social contexts. At WBS we look at things differently, and Deborah's research will bring greater understanding of the creative industry, and thereby benefit to society, from international to local levels."

Further information
The British Academy, established by Royal Charter in 1902, champions and supports the humanities and social sciences. It aims to inspire, recognise and support excellence and high achievement across the UK and internationally. For more information, please visit www.britac.ac.uk.