John Clarke’s research while affiliated with The Open University and other places

In a collaborative project, we argued that citizenship was always both ‘unfinished’ (imparfaite) and ‘under construction’ (en travaux). This contribution examines some of the ways in which citizenship continues to be unfinished and is in the process of being reconstructed. It highlights three particular tendencies that have dominated the processes – and the politics – of citizenship’s reconstruction: a deepening nationalisation of citizenship; an ensuing intensification of practices of ‘bordering’, even as borders become more mobile; and the subcontracting of the management of citizenship to agents and agencies ‘beyond’ the state.

The UK government has consistently claimed to be ‘following the science’ in its approach to the pandemic but this claim conceals complex and shifting entanglements of politics and science. The instability of the relationship between politics and science became increasingly visible around the unequal vulnerability of racialized minorities to infection and death from Covid-19. How and when Black and other minoritized deaths matter has become the focus of UK governmental efforts to delay and deflect, in what has been claimed to be the ‘best country in the world to be a black person’. Rather than the rule of Science, what the pandemic reveals are the conjunctural contested articulations of science(s) and politics.

Sanford F. Schram and Marianna Pavlovskaya (eds) (2017), Rethinking Neoliberalism: Resisting the Disciplinary Regime, London: Routledge, £33.99, pp. 296, pbk. - JOHN CLARKE

Rachel Humphris (2019), Home-Land: Romanian Roma, Domestic Spaces and the State, Bristol: Bristol University Press, £80.00, pp. 256, hbk. - JOHN CLARKE

This paper focuses on the moment of Brexit and its political aftermath in order to challenge dominant academic and popular conceptions of the political subject as singular and coherent. Instead, we suggest that there is an urgent political and analytical need for a view of the subject as multiple, contradictory, and dialogic. As interdisciplinary scholars working on the borders of policy studies and cultural studies, we think this is a critical site for transdisciplinary conversations about such conceptions of the subject. In the political field, such subjects are selectively and unevenly addressed and mobilized by political projects—such as Vote Leave—that invite them to recognize themselves as part of an imagined collective identity. In the twin disturbances of the European Union referendum and the 2017 general election, we suggest that it is possible to see that other voicings, other identifications, and other projects remain possible. Specific political mobilizations are neither singular nor stable.

Carol Bacchi and Susan Goodwin (2016) Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, £49.99, pp. 149, hbk. - Volume 48 Issue 1 - JOHN CLARKE

In this article, we explore the implications of contemporary populist challenges to established forms of expertise in the UK, USA and elsewhere. Drawing on a Foucauldian conception of knowledge and power as always articulated, we argue for a conjunctural approach to understanding the ways in which formations of expertise become stabilized and de-stabilized, vulnerable to challenge and contestation. We trace the role of economic expertise in defining the limits of political and policy “realism” before and after the crash of 2007–8. We then consider the rise of nationalist-populist political mobilizations which challenged existing “expertise” in the name of popular wisdom. In the context of de-stabilized forms of expertise, we ask about emergent attempts at reconfiguring knowledge, power and politics in different ways.

As neoliberalism has been assembled and reassembled in its many forms, citizenship has remained a constant object of its attention as a focal point through which economic, social and political relations can be reimagined and re-configured. We trace diverse attempts by neoliberal political projects to reassemble citizenship in the Global North and in the UK in particular. Drawing on a study of voluntary advice work in the UK (Citizens Advice), we explore how citizenship is being reassembled in the context of a citizen-to-citizen network of advice-giving. How are conceptions of citizenship negotiated in the face of the disassembling of citizenship in politics and policy? The study points to a complex field of negotiation, raising issues of theory and practice in everyday sites and relationships.

In June 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, creating massive political turmoil and controversy. Our aim in this paper is to contribute to a discussion about how to analyze such critical moments in policy and politics. Rather than searching for one ‘real’ cause (whether the micro-politics of the Conservative Party or popular disaffection from neo-liberalism), we offer a form of conjunctural analysis that highlights issues of multiplicity and heterogeneity. We sketch this approach and then explore two puzzles that have particular pertinence for Critical Policy Studies. One is the puzzle of populism: how new imaginings and representations of the ‘British people’ were constructed. The second is the puzzle of expertise; how antipathy to ‘expert’ knowledge was shaped to challenge British and European ‘elites’. Conjunctural analysis, we argue, offers a vital means of engaging with such puzzles, and of grasping the heterogeneous and contradictory forces, tendencies, and pressures that enabled Brexit.