2021 | book, home, research
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…
2019 | home, journal paper, research
This paper picks up a theme from the recent literature on the councillor, that of time spent in meeting, and suggests that if we are to understand the role of the councillor we must understand the work the meeting does. The discussion is based in a series of...
2019 | engagement, home, research
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...
2019 | home, journal paper, research
Our prevailing accounts of the policy process are challenged by studies of practice as well as by practitioners themselves. This paper sets out an alternative, grounded in politics and sociology and informed by recent work in related disciplines. Drawing on the...
2018 | home, research, teaching
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...
2018 | chapter in book, home, research
Policy makers and commentators refer readily to ‘the European project’, as though Europe itself were a project. But what would it mean to take this term seriously, to develop the account of European governance it seems to suggest? This chapter begins on the ground, in the everyday understanding of the project as an organizational form…
2017 | home, journal paper, Leigh D : Freeman R, teaching
The ‘practice turn’ and its associated ontology, epistemology and methodology are now well established in political research. In this article, we identify and explore a corollary pedagogy. After outlining the principal components of practice theory, we compare case-...
2017 | book, engagement, Freeman R : McHardy F : Murphy D (eds), home
Equality is a hugely important topic for most Scots and many of us want to see a more equal society. But what kind of equality do we want, and how, in practice, might we achieve it? This book brings together a group of experienced practitioners from across the country...
2017 | home, journal paper, research
served as postscript to Vicky Singleton, Claire Waterton and Natalie Gill’s new Sociological Review Monograph on Care and Policy Practices…
2017 | chapter in book, Freeman R : Sturdy S, home, research
Comparison is crucial to the way that policy organizations know the world, and nowhere more so than in the work of international organizations, which inevitably find themselves comparing policies and practices in different national settings. But how should we...
2017 | engagement, home, research report, Simpkin M : Freeman R
This paper reports a project undertaken by the Academy of Government, in collaboration with Oxfam Scotland, on the work of commissions. Its purpose was to inform a report by Oxfam Scotland responding to the Scottish Government’s announcement, in the Fairer Scotland...
