Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Dr Darren Nixon
Senior Lecturer
Dr Darren Nixon is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and has been writing about the changing nature of work for over three decades. Exploring working class men's experiences in education and work and changing masculinities are key areas of interest.
Darren's broad area of interest is the Sociology of Work and he is a co-author of a key textbook in this field (Grint & Nixon, 2015). His work is well-known in the literature on working-class masculinity and he has researched and published work on working-class men's orientation to manual labour (Nixon, 2006) and the impact of de-industrialisation and the rise of the service economy on working-class men and masculinities (Nixon, 2009, 2018). More recently his work has explored young working-class adults' education and labour market transitions (Brozsely & Nixon, 2021).
A further area of interest is critical pedagogy and gamification. Dr Nixon has worked on several funded projects with colleague Dr Natalia Gerodetti and sociology students at Leeds Beckett to co-produce meaningful learning resources that are embedded on the sociology degree at Leeds Beckett University. He has presented the games at an array of global conferences and taught using the games at universities in Switzerland and Valencia. He has co-authored several papers and chapters on that work and the methodologies developed and utilised within in it (Gerodetti & Nixon, 2104, 2016, 2019a,2019b).
Current Teaching
Darren teaches modules including:
- Global Capitalism
- Exploring Social research
- Contemporary Social Futures
- Men & Masculinities
- The Sociology of Work
- Research Ethics
Research Interests
Darren is currently working on an Erasmus+ funded multi-country project creating a game for youth workers that embeds a variety of non-formal learning techniques in the game mechanics. This is part of a broad suite of projects working with small global youth organisations and youth workers on developing, training, and disseminating non-formal youth work techniques and methodologies and consolidating them in gamified learning resources.
Ask Me About
- Social class
- Working-class
- Employment
- Caribbean
- Ethics
- Games
- Government policies
- Masculinity
- Sociology
- Teaching
- Welfare
Selected Outputs
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Nixon D (2009) 'I Can't Put a Smiley Face On': Working-Class Masculinity, Emotional Labour and Service Work in the 'New Economy'. GENDER WORK AND ORGANIZATION, 16 (3), pp. 300-322.
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Nixon D (2009) Re-thinking the Future of Work: Directions and Visions - By Colin C. Williams. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH, 33 (3), pp. 881-883.
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Grint K; Nixon D (2015) The Sociology of Work. Polity Press.
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Nixon D (2011) Work Identity and Economic Change. Ashgate Publishing.
Other people in this area
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![Natalia Gerodetti]()
Dr Natalia Gerodetti
Senior Lecturer / School Of Humanities And Social Sciences
