Dr Stuart Cameron

Stuart's PhD thesis, 'Earning, Learning and Income: A Historical Analysis of Barriers to Accessing the Educational Ladder', assesses competing claims about the educational utility of ‘labour’. It shows, with regards to both child employment and the employment of undergraduate students, that the recent fashionable emphasis placed upon the ‘beneficial’ aspects of ‘work experience’ alongside learning is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, it shows that this is a recurring, if unproven, theme throughout the history of debates about education reform and child/student employment. As with child employment, the evidence points to a far more nuanced picture regarding the impact of employment on the studies and learning experiences of undergraduate students, and this non-problematic conception of undergraduate employment is challenged in the thesis.