Creating Citizen-Consumers

My recent research has traced what happens at the interface between activist movements and changing governance regimes. Working the spaces of power: activism, neoliberalism and gendered labour (Bloomsbury, 2012) was based on a four-generation study which also formed the basis of journal outputs in Social Politics, Critical Policy Studies and Local Economy. The research continues, and has led to the creation of a Feminist Policy, Practice and Research Forum, convened jointly with Birkbeck Institute for Social Research. A related research focus is on the remaking of politics and culture following the banking crisis of 2008 and election of the UK Coalition government in 2010. This has generated publications on the financial crisis (Journal of Education Policy, 2010) on austerity politics (Critical Social Policy, 2012); on local government and neoliberalism (in Policy and Politics, 2011 and forthcoming in Urban Studies); and enactments of governing under austerity (Policy and Politics, 2013). My wider body of research engages with critical analyses of governance, policy and politics. This spans work on the managerial reforms of the 1990s (Clarke and Newman, 1997), analyses of the politics and policies of New Labour (Newman, 2001), and changing configurations of power associated with the 'modernisation' of European welfare states (Newman, 2005, Newman and Tonkens, 2011). My research interests include gender and the police, violence and integrity and ethics in the criminal justice system. I'm also interested in ethnographic research methods, danger, fear and situations where privileged access leads to dilemmas for researchers. In the past I have published articles on police informers and the way they are regulated and the effect of this upon rights and justice. More recently I've completed a book about research methods in criminology. My other recent research projects have included studying women bouncers and violence in the context of social control of the night time economy (ESRC Grant reference: RES-000-23-0384-A). This project was called Women on the Door: Female Bouncers in the New Night-time Economy carried out with Professor Dick Hobbs.