This seminar will consider notions of gendered identity governing conceptualisations of 'active' citizenship and political organisation. For example, it will ask how new forms of governance are enacted by discourses that endorse policy and political practice through shifting notions of individual and collective social identities.
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Janet Newman (Social Policy, Open University)
This paper explores the difficult and antagonistic, but also productive, alignments between activism, informal labour and governmental projects seeking to enrol resources beyond the state. Its particular focus is on 'community' as an ambiguous locus of activism and site of gendered labour. The paper draws on a wider project on the 'spaces of power' generated by women in their working lives. Their accounts showed how collective and cooperative projects in 'liminal spaces' of community action generated commitments, resources and skills that were drawn on in governmental projects of inclusion, participation and empowerment. Such projects prefigured significant policy shifts that reconfigured of sectoral and organisational boundaries and transformed public and professional labour. But rather than operating with binary distinctions between women's activism and governmental power I focus on the 'border work' through which spaces of power are generated and worked. I trace how participants viewed themselves as simultaneously 'inside' and 'outside', and explore the kinds of connective labour, the work of 'translation'; such positions require. The paper ends by speculating on the understandings this might open up for analyses of current political projects, notably Cameron's 'Big Society' (assuming this still has currency by the time of the seminar!).
Patricia Noxolo (Geography, Sheffield University)
After the terrorist attacks in London on July 7th 2005, in which so-called 'home-grown' bombers killed 52 Londoners, UK public debates struggled to make sense of the discursive relationships between security and community. This paper will draw on an in-depth analysis of a range of newspaper articles published in the days immediately following the revelation of the identity of the 'fourth bomber' Jermaine Lindsay and of his wife, Samantha Lewthwaite. It explores the particular constructions of community and security in this context, and argues that they reveal a complexity that takes us well beyond ossifying notions of 'radicalisation' within closed and separate communities.
Lynn Staeheli (Geography, Durham University)
Abstract to follow
Jane Foot (Policy Practitioner)
Title and abstract to follow
