Power, Politics and the Emotions

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.

• Part One: Governance from a Feminist Psychosocial Perspective; Chapter One: Governing Subjects, Repression and Equality; Chapter Two: Ordering Differentialtion: Reconfiguring Governance as Relational Politics; Part Two: The Relational Politics of Governance; Chapter Three: Governing Subjectivities: The Politics of Ontological Detatchment and Relational Connection; Chapter Four: The Circulation and Distribution of Bad Feeling; Chapter Five: Resisting the Happy Governmentalities of Diversity; Chapter Six: Sustaining Collective Challenges to Policy Monoliths; Chapter Seven: Equalities Policy as Relational Hinterland; Conclusion: Mobilising Hopeful Fictions Through Differentiated Uncertainties

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.