Julie MacLeavy

• PhD (Wales)
• Professor (Full) at University of Bristol

The Routledge Handbook of Neoliberalism seeks to offer a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon of neoliberalism by examining the range of ways that it has been theorized, promoted, critiqued, and put into practice in a variety of geographical locations and institutional frameworks. Neoliberalism is easily one of the most powerful discourses to e...

This article reviews geographical research on labour market changes that pose a challenge to ‘work’ as a compelling category of analysis. Drawing inspiration from feminist scholarship that has sought to develop a frame for thinking about the concept of work so that other activities outside employment are recognised, it considers what everyday pract...

Covid‐19 has created a challenge and opportunity to change collective economic and care systems. While the care deficit that confronts the UK pre‐dates the pandemic, contemporary events have made it clear that care is a foundational element of a safe, functioning society. Building on research that shows new technologies are being used to augment th...

This article is designed to stimulate debate over the possibilities for thinking feminist futures. It argues for moving away from a linear understanding of feminism which assumes that past feminism produces present and future feminism as a response to its previous waves. Instead, we argue for embracing the multiplicity and simultaneity of contempor...

The Handbook for the Future of Work offers a comprehensive and critical analysis of a series of key debates concerning the changing nature of work and employment. The temporal focus is primarily on the last twenty years, and arguments about technology, automation and capitalist transformation, as the economic landscape shifts and new work practices...

This concluding chapter further dismantles the notion of a technologically determined future of work, championing instead a more nuanced understanding that recognises the significant influence of social, economic and geopolitical factors. In particular, it discusses the emergence of a 'new' or 'second' cold war or 'world civil war' as potentially (...

The Handbook for the Future of Work offers a timely and critical analysis of the transformative forces shaping work and employment in the twenty-first century. Focusing on the past two decades, the handbook explores how technological advancements, automation and a shifting capitalist landscape have fundamentally reshaped work practices and labour r...

This chapter explores the ongoing transformation of class within the rapidly changing world of work. While the prevailing discourse suggests a future dominated by precarious work, the chapter argues for a more nuanced perspective. It acknowledges the anxieties associated with precarious work arrangements but suggests these anxieties are not entirel...

The COVID-19 pandemic altered work patterns in almost all industrialised nations, with a marked increase in remote work. This shift from office-based to home-based work carries far-reaching consequences for workers, communities, regions and nation-states. By decoupling place of residence from place of work, remote work-fuelled migration has the pot...

This paper reflects on the enduring significance of austerity and its multifaceted influence on society. It emphasises the stark contrast between the promise of future prosperity, used to justify spending cuts and tax increases in the aftermath of the 2008 crash and recession, and the long‐lasting ramifications of these measures in terms of increas...

This paper employs a longitudinal lens to examine the temporal dimensions of urban neighbourhood regeneration. Specifically, it focuses on four neighbourhoods in Bristol, UK, which were subject to the flagship New Deal for Communities programme from 2000 to 2010. By combining past research into the (then) emerging impact of the NDC with data from m...

The concept of urban living is evolving, and there is a growing interest in creating smaller, more connected, and hyperlocal neighbourhoods, where everything people need is within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. This paper challenges the concept of the ‘15-minute city’ as a panacea for urban ills, by exploring the history of utopian urban planning a...

Reflecting on Ihnji Jon's contention that urban conflicts emerge from the ‘different conceptualisations of temporality’ that groups of residents hold, this paper considers how urban practitioners might productively engage with time as a situated experience. Specifically, it considers the methodological techniques, forms of collaboration and modes o...

In the UK the socio-economic impacts of the COVID-19 mitigations over the course of the pandemic (March 2020 to the time of writing in January 2022) have been experienced unevenly and with differential intensities at both the regional and local scales. Using individual-level geocoded data (from the Understanding Society: UK Household Longitudinal S...

Scholars of resistance have long identified and differentiated the distinctive features, contours, and boundaries of resistance in social life. However, some have characterised the resulting plurality of conceptual frameworks in resistance studies as ‘somewhat chaotic’ (Baaz et al. 2016: 137). In this Intervention, we play within the chaos at the c...

This article revisits Andrew Gamble's book, Britain in Decline, and also revisits the geographies of state crisis. Drawing on the substantial archives of state theory, the article explores how Brexit emerged as a moment of crisis following the relative decline of the economy and the reshaping of the welfare state. Discussions of Brexit and the unev...

This paper adds to an increasing body of social science literature, which engages with the research practice of "co-production." It aims to make a distinctive contribution by suggesting that what is produced under this process should be given greater attention. Previous literature has focused on the "co" (cooperative) element: debating whether and...

Neoliberalism is easily one of the most powerful concepts to emerge within geography over the past two decades. But whilst the number of scholars writing about neoliberalism has grown exponentially, there remains significant debate on what “neoliberalism” actually is, whether it exists at all, and its utility as a means of theorizing what appears t...

Journal publication in geography changed significantly in the late 20th century as its dominance by learned societies was captured by (large, multi-national) commercial organisations making large profits from freely-donated authors’ intellectual property. Further changes are now proposed, involving journals being freely accessible, sustained not by...

This commentary responds to Henry Wai-chung Yeung’s call to develop clearer causal explanations in geography through mechanism-based thinking. His suggested use of a critical realist framework to ground geographical research on economies is, on one level, appealing and may help to counteract taken-for-granted assumptions about socio-spatial conditi...

Social class has featured in geographical writings since the early 1970s. Since this time there have been significant changes in the class landscape, arguably the most important being the perceived disappearance of the "working class" in advanced industrialized nations. Deindustrialization and several decades of substantial social mobility have see...

The past 18 months have delivered a series of “surprising” electoral outcomes. In the USA, the election of Donald Trump confounded expectations. In the UK, the leave result from the EU referendum and the subsequent snap General Election which saw the Conservative Party lose their majority have been heralded as knife‐edge moments and a new period in...

There is a growing narrative that the outcome of the UK referendum on European Union membership was the product of disenfranchisement and disillusionment wrought by the uneven consequences of economic restructuring in different UK regions, cities and communities. Those most likely to vote ‘leave’ were concentrated among those ‘left behind’ by globa...

This paper uses a feminist state-theoretical approach to explore the development of Brexit and argues that the UK’s EU referendum and its aftermath reflect a gendered politics embedded within the ongoing neoliberal restructuring of the state. Directing attention to the struggle to protect women’s interests, maintain equality strategies, and more ge...

This paper calls for deepening understandings of inequality and the reproduction of inequality across the income distribution. In particular, it brings intergenerational transmissions and place effects, their interaction and progression over time into greater focus. The objective is to understand the implications of increasing inequality for those...

Against a backdrop of persistent gender inequalities around childcare, recent research suggests that some men – and especially fathers – are engaging to a greater extent in the everyday tasks of social reproduction. However, our understanding of the multiple factors, motivations and institutions that facilitate and constrain this nuanced ‘regenderi...

In response to four commentaries on our paper ‘Regendering care in the aftermath of recession?’, we extend our discussion of the ongoing knowledge gap that prevails around shifting patterns of male work/care. Recognizing the spatial limits of extant theories of male primary caregiving, we discuss first the need to attend to the variegated landscape...

This collection of contributions uses the 21nd anniversary of the publication of Allan Cochrane’s Whatever Happened to Local Government? (1993) to reflect on the state of contemporary English local government, and in the process assess the book’s intellectual legacy.

In this short commentary, I respond to Weller and O'Neill's (2014) presentation of neoliberalism as a 'summary word that elides a complex reality and dissuades close political engagement'. Whilst I agree that we need to avoid the easy rhetoric of universality in our research enquiries, our attempts to recognize, explain and theorize paradigmatic ch...

This paper focuses on the implementation of workfare in the US, with the aim of understanding the passive response of the unions and other progressive groups to the restructuring and retrenchment of the American welfare system. In particular, it considers the disparate efforts to organise welfare recipients and low-wage workers around the restructu...

The special issue is based on the contributions to an ESRC Seminar Series called Feminism and Futurity held at the University of Bristol during 2010 and 2011. This series, organized by four feminist geographers, drew together feminist academics from a diverse range of disciplines to foster debate and dialogue around the present status and future po...

In 1994, Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell published ‘Jungle law breaks out: neoliberalism and global‐local disorder’. In this paper, Peck and Tickell proposed that the dramatic acceleration of place‐based competition was the result of political‐economic disorder at the global scale and that neoliberalism was critical to the understanding of this shift i...

This paper considers the UK coalition government's austerity drive, which attempts to garner public support for the reduction or withdrawal of welfare entitlements through appeals to frugality, self-sufficiency and fiscal prudence. In particular, the paper considers the recasting of the former Labour government's work incentives and welfare disince...

Welfare-to-work lies at the heart of the British government's employment strategy. Its key initiative - a series of ‘New Deals’ for the unemployed - is a supply-side active labour market policy that has been combined with important changes to the tax and benefit system to try and engage the unemployed in employment. In this, the need to give suppor...

This item is Closed Access until 29 October 2012. It is the pre-peer reviewed version of an article which has been published in final form at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00792.x Accepted for publication

This paper evaluates the impact of recent shifts in the geopolitical outlook of the United States—specifically the ‘Global War on Terror’ and its domestic ramifications—on the prior project of reconfiguring the US state to an after-Fordist ‘workfare’ paradigm. In particular, the paper attempts to situate recent developments in the reconfiguration o...

In recent decades, welfare reform in the USA has increasingly been based on a political imperative to reduce the number of people on welfare. This has in large part taken place through the establishment of a “workfare” state, in which the receipt of state benefits requires a paid labor input. Designed to reduce expenditure on civil social services,...

Urban regeneration is increasingly framed around notions of community empowerment. Policy programmes seek to make communities visible and then strengthen and support them through the establishment of a leadership role in urban regeneration practices. At first glance, this appears to be a positive development. Yet commentators note how community par...

Analysis of ‘neoliberalism’ in recent geographical work has usefully drawn attention to the manner in which certain political-economic ideas resonate with a diverse range of state projects, policy objects and socio-political imaginaries. Positioning neoliberalism as a multifaceted political phenomenon, scholars have explored its local manifestation...

The concept of ‘community cohesion’ has played a defining role in the institution of a new policy agenda for regenerating urban areas in many liberal welfare states. Its particular interpretation supports the installation of urban programmes that are based not on the improvement of the built environment, but rather investment in the social and cult...

This article deconstructs New Labour's emerging workfarist regime to reveal the complex and contradictory gender relations embodied in and through its work-welfare policy. Starting from the decline of manufacturing employment within the UK, it traces the deregulation of the labour market and the range of structural and social changes initiated by t...

This paper explores New Labour’s emerging political economy using Jessop’s six dimensions of the state as a heuristic device. In pointing towards the contextualised and institutionalised nature of sociopolitical action, the six dimensions of the state model is posited as a means of unravelling the constitution and ordering of the state within conte...

Since the election to power of New Labour in 1997, the concept of social exclusion has played a defining role in framing welfare policy. The rapid absorption of its terminology in government discourse has signalled a shift away from existing notions of inequality and disadvantage to a broader understanding of material poverty, which also includes (...