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Paul Willis is a leading British cultural theorist.

He was born in Wolverhampton and received his education at the University of Cambridge and at the University of Birmingham. He worked at Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and subsequently at the University of Wolverhampton. He was a Professor of Social/Cultural Ethnography at Keele University. In Fall 2010, he left Keele University and is now a professor at Princeton University.

He gave a paper at the 9th Symposium of the National Deviancy Conference in January 1972 entitled 'A Motor-Bike Subculture'.

In 'Learning to Labour', Willis conducted an in-depth ethnography of a set of working class 'lads' in a town in the West Midlands referred to as 'Hammertown'. He conducted a series of interviews and observations within a school, with the aim of discovering why 'working class kids get working class jobs'. He concluded his research stating that the lads had an 'anti-authority' subculture that transmitted to the workplace.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Paul Willis", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0