Shona D J Hunter
University of Johannesburg, South Africa, VIAD, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Visiting Associate Professor
My work is interdisciplinary and my background is in critical policy studies. I have been writing, teaching and researching into the social, cultural and emotional politics of the state for nearly twenty years, holding academic posts at the Universities of Birmingham, Lancaster and most recently at Leeds along with visiting positions at the Universities of Sydney Australia, Mannheim Germany, Cape Town, Rhodes and currently in Johannesburg South Africa. My interests include all aspects of welfare politics and governance, state practices, identities and the broader material-cultural-affective politics through which the state is enacted nationally and globally.
My most recently published book project Power, Politics Emotions: Impossible Governance (Routledge, 2015) considers these issues within the context of urgent questions about the future role of the state in resolving intersecting social inequalities and injustices.
This interest in the state brings me to consider questions of whiteness and masculinity as they relate to national ideals and expressions of state power as it gets lived in the everyday through informal cultural practices as well as formal state bureaucratic practice.
In 2009 I established the ‘White Spaces’ research collaboration which brings together academics, activists and practitioners from 17 disciplines across 23 countries who have an interest in thinking critically about what it means to white in ethnic terms and how this relates to experiences of social and political vulnerability and marginality as well as to issues of institutional and bureaucratic power. Resources from earlier White Spaces work are archived at http://whitespaces.leeds.ac.uk/.
I am currently developing this White Spaces work as a broader public intellectual project along with a new book project under the working title ‘White States of Mind: fantasies of power and vulnerability' about the way white identities and subjectivities frame neoliberal bureaucratic formations.
If you would like further information on any of my past, current or future projects please do be in touch via email.
You can also check out my LinkedIn profile for other info and multimedia.
Address: Leeds, England, United Kingdom
My most recently published book project Power, Politics Emotions: Impossible Governance (Routledge, 2015) considers these issues within the context of urgent questions about the future role of the state in resolving intersecting social inequalities and injustices.
This interest in the state brings me to consider questions of whiteness and masculinity as they relate to national ideals and expressions of state power as it gets lived in the everyday through informal cultural practices as well as formal state bureaucratic practice.
In 2009 I established the ‘White Spaces’ research collaboration which brings together academics, activists and practitioners from 17 disciplines across 23 countries who have an interest in thinking critically about what it means to white in ethnic terms and how this relates to experiences of social and political vulnerability and marginality as well as to issues of institutional and bureaucratic power. Resources from earlier White Spaces work are archived at http://whitespaces.leeds.ac.uk/.
I am currently developing this White Spaces work as a broader public intellectual project along with a new book project under the working title ‘White States of Mind: fantasies of power and vulnerability' about the way white identities and subjectivities frame neoliberal bureaucratic formations.
If you would like further information on any of my past, current or future projects please do be in touch via email.
You can also check out my LinkedIn profile for other info and multimedia.
Address: Leeds, England, United Kingdom
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Journal Articles
Keywords
Decoloniality, coloniality, care, whiteness, race, institutionalisation, violence, relationality, relational choreography
– The paper draws out the key conceptual, methodological and substantive issues raised in the papers around the politics of equalities.
Design/methodology/approach
– Rather than reviewing and summarising each paper in turn this introductory article synthesises the key themes from papers to develop an overview of the key issues raised in the edited collection.
Findings
– The papers trouble traditional dichotomies in equalities studies, suggesting complex and fluid relationships between states, activists and professionals. They also identify some key elements of current equalities work such as equalities framing, diversity interpretation and the negotiation of ambiguity produced through the seesaw of hope/failure characterising this work.
Research limitations/implications
– The collection highlights the continuing dearth of work around certain equalities strands, in particular, around sexualities and generation. It also suggests avenues for further work developing postcolonial analysis of equalities work in organisations.
Originality/value
– The collection is unique in that it draws together current work crossing diverse national and sectoral contexts and from a range of equalities strands.
Books
Offering a provocative and innovative theorisation of governance as relational politics, the central argument of Power, Politics and the Emotions is that there are sets of affective dynamics which complicate the already materially and symbolically contested terrain of policy-making. This relational politics is Shona Hunter’s starting point for a more hopeful, but realistic understanding of the limits and possibilities enacted through contemporary governing processes. Through this idea Hunter prioritises the everyday lived enactments of policy as a means to understand the state as a more differentiated and changeable entity than is often allowed for in current critiques of neoliberalism. But Hunter reminds us that focusing on lived realities demands a melancholic confrontation with pain, and the risks of social and physical death and violence lived through the contemporary neoliberal state. This is a state characterised by the ascendency of neoliberal whiteness; a state where no one is innocent and we are all responsible for the multiple intersecting exclusionary practices creating its unequal social orderings. The only way to struggle through the central paradox of governance to produce something different is to accept this troubling interdependence between resistance and reproduction and between hope and loss.
Analysing the everyday processes of this relational politics through original empirical studies in health, social care and education the book develops an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical synthesis which engages with and extends work in political science, cultural theory, critical race and feminist analysis, critical psychoanalysis and post-material sociology.
How can we rethink ideas of policy failure to consider its paradoxes and contradictions as a starting point for more hopeful democratic encounters?
Offering a provocative and innovative theorisation of governance as relational politics, the central argument of Power, Politics and the Emotions is that there are sets of affective dynamics which complicate the already materially and symbolically contested terrain of policy-making. This relational politics is Shona Hunter’s starting point for a more hopeful, but realistic understanding of the limits and possibilities enacted through contemporary governing processes. Through this idea Hunter prioritises the everyday lived enactments of policy as a means to understand the state as a more differentiated and changeable entity than is often allowed for in current critiques of neoliberalism. But Hunter reminds us that focusing on lived realities demands a melancholic confrontation with pain, and the risks of social and physical death and violence lived through the contemporary neoliberal state. This is a state characterised by the ascendency of neoliberal whiteness; a state where no one is innocent and we are all responsible for the multiple intersecting exclusionary practices creating its unequal social orderings. The only way to struggle through the central paradox of governance to produce something different is to accept this troubling interdependence between resistance and reproduction and between hope and loss.
Analysing the everyday processes of this relational politics through original empirical studies in health, social care and education the book develops an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical synthesis which engages with and extends work in political science, cultural theory, critical race and feminist analysis, critical psychoanalysis and post-material sociology.
Edited Books
Situating the critical study of whiteness as a core intellectual pillar in a broadly-based project for racial and social justice, the volume understands whiteness as elaborated in global coloniality through epistemology, ideology and governmentality at the intersections with heteropatriarchy and capitalism. The diverse contributions present Black and other racially diverse scholarship as crucial to the field. The focus of inquiry is expanded beyond Northern Anglophone contexts to challenge centre/margin relations, examining whiteness in the Caribbean, South Africa and the African continent, Asia, the Middle East as well as in the USA, Scandinavia and parts of Europe. Providing a transdisciplinary approach and addressing debates about knowledges, black and white subjectivities and newly defensive forms of whiteness, as seen in the rise of the Radical Right, the handbook deepens our understanding of power, place and culture in coloniality.
This book will be an invaluable resource for researchers, advanced students and scholars in the fields of Education, History, Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Political Sciences, Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Feminist and Gender Studies, Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies, Security Studies, Migration Studies, Media Studies, Indigenous Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Diversity Studies, and African, Latin American, Asian, American, British and European Studies.
For reviews and contents see & pre order
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Critical-Studies-in-Whiteness/Hunter-Westhuizen/p/book/9780367403799
Book Chapters
Keywords
Decoloniality, coloniality, care, whiteness, race, institutionalisation, violence, relationality, relational choreography
– The paper draws out the key conceptual, methodological and substantive issues raised in the papers around the politics of equalities.
Design/methodology/approach
– Rather than reviewing and summarising each paper in turn this introductory article synthesises the key themes from papers to develop an overview of the key issues raised in the edited collection.
Findings
– The papers trouble traditional dichotomies in equalities studies, suggesting complex and fluid relationships between states, activists and professionals. They also identify some key elements of current equalities work such as equalities framing, diversity interpretation and the negotiation of ambiguity produced through the seesaw of hope/failure characterising this work.
Research limitations/implications
– The collection highlights the continuing dearth of work around certain equalities strands, in particular, around sexualities and generation. It also suggests avenues for further work developing postcolonial analysis of equalities work in organisations.
Originality/value
– The collection is unique in that it draws together current work crossing diverse national and sectoral contexts and from a range of equalities strands.
Offering a provocative and innovative theorisation of governance as relational politics, the central argument of Power, Politics and the Emotions is that there are sets of affective dynamics which complicate the already materially and symbolically contested terrain of policy-making. This relational politics is Shona Hunter’s starting point for a more hopeful, but realistic understanding of the limits and possibilities enacted through contemporary governing processes. Through this idea Hunter prioritises the everyday lived enactments of policy as a means to understand the state as a more differentiated and changeable entity than is often allowed for in current critiques of neoliberalism. But Hunter reminds us that focusing on lived realities demands a melancholic confrontation with pain, and the risks of social and physical death and violence lived through the contemporary neoliberal state. This is a state characterised by the ascendency of neoliberal whiteness; a state where no one is innocent and we are all responsible for the multiple intersecting exclusionary practices creating its unequal social orderings. The only way to struggle through the central paradox of governance to produce something different is to accept this troubling interdependence between resistance and reproduction and between hope and loss.
Analysing the everyday processes of this relational politics through original empirical studies in health, social care and education the book develops an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical synthesis which engages with and extends work in political science, cultural theory, critical race and feminist analysis, critical psychoanalysis and post-material sociology.
How can we rethink ideas of policy failure to consider its paradoxes and contradictions as a starting point for more hopeful democratic encounters?
Offering a provocative and innovative theorisation of governance as relational politics, the central argument of Power, Politics and the Emotions is that there are sets of affective dynamics which complicate the already materially and symbolically contested terrain of policy-making. This relational politics is Shona Hunter’s starting point for a more hopeful, but realistic understanding of the limits and possibilities enacted through contemporary governing processes. Through this idea Hunter prioritises the everyday lived enactments of policy as a means to understand the state as a more differentiated and changeable entity than is often allowed for in current critiques of neoliberalism. But Hunter reminds us that focusing on lived realities demands a melancholic confrontation with pain, and the risks of social and physical death and violence lived through the contemporary neoliberal state. This is a state characterised by the ascendency of neoliberal whiteness; a state where no one is innocent and we are all responsible for the multiple intersecting exclusionary practices creating its unequal social orderings. The only way to struggle through the central paradox of governance to produce something different is to accept this troubling interdependence between resistance and reproduction and between hope and loss.
Analysing the everyday processes of this relational politics through original empirical studies in health, social care and education the book develops an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical synthesis which engages with and extends work in political science, cultural theory, critical race and feminist analysis, critical psychoanalysis and post-material sociology.
Situating the critical study of whiteness as a core intellectual pillar in a broadly-based project for racial and social justice, the volume understands whiteness as elaborated in global coloniality through epistemology, ideology and governmentality at the intersections with heteropatriarchy and capitalism. The diverse contributions present Black and other racially diverse scholarship as crucial to the field. The focus of inquiry is expanded beyond Northern Anglophone contexts to challenge centre/margin relations, examining whiteness in the Caribbean, South Africa and the African continent, Asia, the Middle East as well as in the USA, Scandinavia and parts of Europe. Providing a transdisciplinary approach and addressing debates about knowledges, black and white subjectivities and newly defensive forms of whiteness, as seen in the rise of the Radical Right, the handbook deepens our understanding of power, place and culture in coloniality.
This book will be an invaluable resource for researchers, advanced students and scholars in the fields of Education, History, Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Political Sciences, Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Feminist and Gender Studies, Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies, Security Studies, Migration Studies, Media Studies, Indigenous Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Diversity Studies, and African, Latin American, Asian, American, British and European Studies.
For reviews and contents see & pre order
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Critical-Studies-in-Whiteness/Hunter-Westhuizen/p/book/9780367403799
Please contact me for further information.