• • Home
  • About
  • Contact
• • Undergrad
  • Masters
  • PhD
• • Staff
  • Research & Publications
• • News & Events
  • Current Students

Dr Gail Lewis

Degree: BSc Social Anthropology, London School of Economics

Research Interests

My research is interdisciplinary in orientation and stands at the intersection of feminist, critical race, postcolonial and social policy scholarship. It draws upon the intellectual and methodological themes and approaches developed in these fields to consider the changing configurations and contingent relation among modalities of social difference and the relations of domination and subordination inscribed in such difference, with special emphasis on discourses and practices of citizenship, social welfare and organisational cultures.

This can be divided into three strands. One strand, seeks to challenge an idea, prevalent in social policy regimes and many academic disciplines including sociology and women's studies. This is that ethnic minorities, their assumed gendered practices (and attitudes to sexuality) are self-evident, pre-social groupings and cultural forms, whose inclusion in the national formation as full citizens will be enhanced and/or protected by a simple process of coming to know the specificities of their cultures and the needs that these cultures generate. I challenge this idea by using a blend of poststructuralist, feminist, critical race and postcolonial theory showing how social policy formations, institutional and professional practices are implicated in the processes by which specific ethnic groups are minoritised. I trace this as a social process of racialisation in which forms of colonial thought are simultaneously disavowed and deployed to produce a narrow conception of multiculturalism in which 'tolerance' establishes the limits of the social.

A second strand connected to, but discrete from the first, is a concern to analyse British and EU policy discourse for its 'worlding'. My concern is with the way that it 'peoples' its objects of concern and fields of operation, establishing a time/space configuration in which the ideological borders of (between) geographical regions are established upon a temporal spectrum ranging from 'traditional' to 'modern' along which differentiated populations are ideologically located. I explore the processes which enmesh such 'worlding' in constructions of the nation and national belonging in which minoritised figures, including but not limited to those of 'the immigrant woman' or 'the Muslim community', stand as the discursive boundary between the 'us' and 'them' of national belonging.

Hence, I attempt to locate contemporary British and European Union policy formations within an intellectual and analytic framework that foregrounds the continual process of nation formation, with its corollary of contestation over the terms of national belonging. In particular I have been concerned to explore how modes of colonial thought, with its constitution of radical difference grounded in racialised and gendered subjects and subjectivity, are entangled in contemporary policy formations in ways that, I argue, mark these formations as postcolonial.

The third strand of my research centres on the exploration of the ways in which processes of racialisation and gender formation shape or impact upon the dynamics of social interaction in everyday practice both inside and outside the welfare agency.

Here my concern is to explore the flows and shifts in the livedness of racialised and gendered subjectivity. This involves an interrogation of some of the ways in which the discourses of 'race', ethnicity and gender circulating in specific institutional arena configure the terrain of daily practice. I explore how the subject positions they offer are inhabited and how both the terms of daily practice and subjectivity are disturbed or contested by those subject to them. I argue that the terrain of daily life inside the welfare agency is made profoundly complex since it is the meeting point for multiple and competing conceptions of diversity. I foreground the disjunction between policy understandings of diversity (and its implications for professional practice) and those understandings of diversity that emerge from the experiences of differentially embodied professionals and clients who interact in the course of institutional life. I adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the investigation of these issues deploying psychoanalytic concepts and modes of analysis alongside those drawn from feminism and critical race theory to analyse professionals' narratives of everyday life in the multicultural agency. At times I also engage these issues through multiple registers, drawing on auto/biographical and fictional vignettes, alongside interview material or policy statements to stage an encounter with sociological or psychoanalytic theory.

I am currently working on a book called Technologies of Citizenship and Subjection: social policy and feminist postcolonial thought. It explores some of the relationships among social policies, practices of welfare organizations and post-imperial modes of governance in a context of cultural pluralism. It examines how the conjunction of these policies and practices are constitutive of racialised and gendered subjects and implicated in the processes that position these subjects in a hierarchical ordering of citizenship. Whilst the policy frameworks, welfare organizations and modes of governance focused upon are those of contemporary Britain and to a lesser extent the EU, the intellectual, pedagogical and political logic of the volume is grounded in the approaches and agenda of transnational feminism. The book will analyse the extent to which there is a postcolonial structure or inscription to the organization of citizenship in contemporary multicultural Britain and explores the implications this may have for strategies of governance in a context of a plurality of cultural forms.

Potential Doctoral Proposals

I would welcome the opportunity to supervise research students working in a number of areas related to my research interests, including but not limited to:

• Social policies, welfare practices and nation formation
• Migrations, diasporic identities and citizenship
• Practices of the everyday and multiculturalism
• Organisational culture, professional practices and forms of social difference

Publications

Books

'Race', Gender, Social Welfare: Encounters in a postcolonial society (2000) Cambridge, Polity Press.

Citizenship: personal lives and social policy (2004) ed. Bristol, The Policy Press in Association with the Open University

Rethinking European Welfare, (2001) edited (with J. Fink and J. Clarke), London.

Rethinking Social Policy , (2000) edited (with S. Gewirtz and J. Clarke), London, Sage.

Forming Nation, Framing Welfare , 1998 editor, London, Routledge

Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women (1988) (edited with S. Grewal, J. Kay, L. Landor and P. Parmar), London, Sheba Feminist Books.

Journal Articles

'Of Practices and Signs: Culture and Heteroglossia in the age of Blunkett', to be submitted to Cultural Studies , April 2005

'Welcome to the Margins: Diversity, Tolerance and Policies of Exclusion', accepted subject to revisions for Ethnic and Racial Studies , special issue, vol.28, no.3 spring 2005

'Cosmopolitan Phantasies and Multicultural Publics', (in press) Treca special issue, Borders, Boundaries, Borderlands, 2004.

'Imaginaries of Europe, Technologies of Gender, Economies of Power', submitted to European Journal of Women's Studies, Dec. 2004

'Racialising emotional labour and emotionalising racialised labour:anger, fear and shame in social welfare', (2001) in Journal of Social Work Practice , vol.15, no.2, pp.125-142 (with Y. Gunaratnam)

'Negotiated Belongings' an interview with Simon Hamilton-Clarke (1998) in 'Windrush Echoes', Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture , no.10, Autumn, pp.157-169.

'Situated Voices: Black Women's Experience and Social Work' (1996) in Feminist Review 53 , Summer, pp.24-56.

'Welfare Settlements and Racializing Practices', (1996) in 'The Public Good', Soundings: a Journal of Politics and Culture , pp.109-120.

'Audre Lorde: Vignettes and Mental Conversations' (1990) in Feminist Review 34 , pp.100-114,

'Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives' (1984) Feminist Review 17 , with V. Amos, A. Mama and P. Parmar (eds), (Edited 50% of text.)

Chapters in Books

'Racialising Culture is Ordinary', in Contemporary Culture and Everyday Life, (2004) E.B. Silva and T. Bennett, (eds), Durham: Sociology Press, pp.111-129

'Difference and Social Policy', in Developments in British Social Policy 2 , (2003) N. Ellison and C. Pierson (eds.), second edition Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.90-106

'Categories of Exclusion: "Race", Gender and the Micro-social in Social Services Departments' (2001) in The Changing Politics of Gender Equality in Britain, E. Breitenbach, A. Brown, F. Mackay, J. Webb, (eds.), Basingstoke, Palgrave, pp.143-163

'Transitions and Trajectories in European Welfare ' (2001), in Rethinking European Welfare, J. Fink, G. Lewis and J. Clarke (eds.), London: Sage in association with The Open University (with J. Fink and J. Clarke), pp.1-30

'Expanding the Social Policy Imaginary', in Rethinking Social Policy , (2000) G. Lewis, S. Gewirtz and J. Clarke (eds), London, Sage in association with The Open University, pp.1-21

'Discursive Histories, the Pursuit of Multiculturalism and Social Policy' (2000) in Rethinking Social Policy , ibid. pp.259-275

"Stuart Hall" and Social Policy' 'An Encounter of Strangers? (2000) in Without Guarantees , P. Gilroy, L. Grossberg, A. McRobbie (eds.), Verso Press, pp.193-202.

'The Body and Social Policy: Social Policy and the Body' (2000) in Organizing Bodies , L. Mackie et al. (eds.), Macmillan, with G. Hughes and E. Saraga (responsible for 80% of authorship), pp.10-31.

'Welfare and the Social Construction of "Race"' (1998) in Embodying the Social , E. Saraga (ed.), London, Routledge in association with The Open University, pp.91-138,

'Black Women's Employment and the British Economy' (1993) in Inside Babylon: The Caribbean Diaspora in Britain , W. James and C. Harris (eds.) London, Verso, pp.73-96.

'From Deepest Kilburn' (1985) in Truth, Dare, Promise: Girls Growing Up in the Fifties , L. Heron (ed.) London, Virago, pp.213-236.

Associated Keywords: Citizenship, Culture, Feminist and critical race theory, Gender constitution and performance, Nation, Organisations, Postcolonial, Professionals, Racialisation, Social policy, Welfare practices

View all research activities, ePrints, news and events associated with Gail Lewis.

«Back

Save this page: Del.icio.us Digg It Reddit Facebook Stumble It!