Overview

Offering a provocative and innovative theorisation of governance as relational politics, the central argument of Power, Politics and the Emotions is that there are complex sets of emotional dynamics which complicate the already contested terrain of social policy-making. Equality and diversity are increasingly central components of governance in Western democracies. Arising from the particular social, cultural and political conditions of the late twentieth century, they constitute an important component of the new ethico-politics or life politics, another important element of which is the turn to the emotions. These developments make us think again about the changing processes of governance and shifting relations between institutions, governors and citizens. And Power, Politics and the Emotions uses controversy over diversity and equality policies as a lens through which to explore these broader developments. Contra rationalist accounts of governance, relational politics is the messy, incoherent, ambivalent and often contradictory processes of governance which structure and are structured through social and affective dynamics. Analysing the everyday processes of this relational politics through original empirical studies into equalities work and policy in health, social care, education and the voluntary and community sector, the book develops an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical synthesis which engages with and extends work in political science, cultural theory, critical psychoanalysis and social studies of science and technology/sociology of translation. It will be of interest to a wide range of higher level students and scholars in sociology, social and public policy, legal studies, politics, cultural studies, psychology and psychosocial studies, as well as professional policy-makers and practitioners in the field of equalities in general and in health, social care and education.

Full Product Details

9780415555104

Table of Contents

Reviews

This book will surely come to be recognised as a landmark on the long road towards putting a loving, suffering, struggling subject at the centre of social policy. Psychoanalysis meets Foucault in this hugely ambitious account of the state's melancholic entanglement with social difference. Fail again. Fail Better! - Paul Hoggett, Emeritus Professor of Social Policy, UWE, Bristol. Shona Hunter's book offers a welcome reframing of theories and practices of governing. Rather than repeating the failures of a focus on state and institutions as abstract entities, Hunter draws on feminist psychosocial perspectives to open up a focus on the relational politics of governing. Grounded in case studies of everyday practices and experiences, this book highlights the 'impossibility' of conventional governing and explores possibilities for renewal and reparation. - Janet Newman, Emeritus Professor, Open University. By foregrounding the 'feeling work' that characterises the daily practices of state agencies, their staff and their users, Hunter demonstrates with supreme skill and intellectual adroitness the power of feminist, psychosocial analysis to unlock and make meaningful the social, historical, cultural and psychic forces in and through which our subjectivities and collective belongings are made. - Gail Lewis, Reader in Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London.

Author Information

Shona Hunter is a Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy Governance at the University of Leeds, England and a Research Associate at the Research Centre into Visual Identities in Architecture and Design at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available