Emily Kenway

is exploring the ways in which homeless people negotiate work opportunities which may be exploitative.  She is author of The Truth About Modern Slavery (Pluto, 2021) and Who Cares: the hidden crisis of caregiving and how we solve it (2023).

Hessa Al Khalifa

is Director of Strategy Management and Institutional Excellence in the Ministry of Housing, Bahrain, and is writing about the origins of New Town planning there.

Writing Politics

We need to talk about writing. Doing politics differently must mean writing politics differently, and ‘writing politics’ is a collective exploration of how that might work… Most of us work in policy, politics, sociology, law or IR, and we’re...

Doing Politics

is now free to access at doingpolitics.space. I want to write about politics as something people do, to describe a politics grounded in human action and interaction – in the gathering and meeting, talking and writing of embodied and situated human beings…

Seeing Politics

takes up the idea that one of the principal characteristics of action is its visibility, and uses photographs to explore aspects of ‘doing politics’.  It was given online as a keynote presentation to the Critical and Interpretive Public Administration...

Mirja Sjöblom

is a Senior Economist with the World Bank’s Global Practice on Health, Nutrition and Population and worked on the governance of primary health care markets in Sweden.

Øyunn Høydal

visited the SKAPE centre in 2017, while completing her PhD on evaluation research.  She now has a postdoctoral position at Oslo Metropolitan University.

What do policy makers really do?

The question is important because making policy engages a great number of people one way or another, and what they do they might do well or badly.  Our standard answers are rather hazy, not least because policy making entails such great numbers of people doing a great...

Doing Politics: research, teaching and practice

For a meeting of the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, 19 November 2018… The aim of this presentation is simply to set out a framework for studying ‘doing politics’, and to discuss ways of using it in teaching as well as...

Gastprofessur in Vienna

 Visiting Professor in the Department of Politics, University of Vienna, 2018-2019, teaching courses in Making Policy, Doing Comparison and Doing Politics and Making Policy at Bachelor’s and Master’s levels respectively… BAK 13: Making policy,...

Good Vibrations

Nice citations, at least, if not ex-citations.  Like lots of us, I guess, most of what I’ve written appears again (if it appears at all) as a name and number, person and date inserted in someone else’s argument, to be read as simple ciphers for the complex...

So what are you working on right now?

I have this disparate set of things I’m calling ‘doing politics’.  I’ve become fascinated by what politics and policy making look like in practice, on the ground, as a set of human actions and interactions.  What do we actually do in order to...

Local politics in Scotland: the work of the councillor

Three reports for APSE (Association for Public Service Excellence), part of continuing work with Professor Steve Griggs at De Montfort University, Leicester, explore the work entailed in local politics, focusing on the role of the councillor: Anderson, D, Barnett, N,...