Working the Spaces of Neoliberalism: Activism, Professionalisation and Incorporation - Paperback

by Nina Laurie (Editor), Liz Bondi (Editor)

This collection offers a new way of looking at neoliberalisation and new understandings of contemporary processes of professionalisation.

• This collection offers a new way of looking at neoliberalisation.
  
• Presents new understandings of contemporary processes of professionalisation.
  
• Draws on new, original research.
  
• Features studies from the Global North and the Global South.

Back Jacket

Drawing on global research, this book argues that processes of professionalization form an integral part of the production of neoliberal spaces, with profound implications for political activism. It brings together original research from diverse contexts, including studies conducted in the Global South and the Global North, in order to enable key features of neoliberalisation to be understood more fully.

The book brings into focus tensions and connections between activism and processes of professionalisation in relation to neoliberalism. It illuminates links between the context of neoliberal restructuring and the ways in which professionalisation involves processes of representation, negotiation and embodiment as activism feeds into "scaled up" policy-making. In doing so, it elaborates how the spaces of neoliberalism are "worked" in two related senses: namely how neoliberalisation incorporates, co-opts, constrains and depletes activism; and how professional subjects inhabit and sometimes subvert the opportunities neoliberalisation opens up.

Author Biography

Nina Laurie is Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at the University of Newcastle, UK. She works collaboratively with colleagues at CESU, San Simón University, Bolivia. Together with Robert Andolina and Sarah Radcliffe she is author of Multi-ethnic Transnationalism: Indigenous Development in the Andes (forthcoming). She is also co-author of Geographies of 'New' Femininities? (1999).

Liz Bondi is Professor of Social Geography at the University of Edinburgh. She is founding editor of the journal Gender, Place and Culture, the co-author of Subjectivities, Knowledges and Feminist Geographies (2002) and co-editor of Emotional Geographies (2005).