Clare Woodford

Clare Woodford lectures and researches in the humanities. Her research interests include theories of gender, ideology and pedagogy, Marxism and post-Marxism, queer theory, psychoanalysis, democratic struggle, activism and the arts, and performance studies. She has written widely on these themes.

Clare’s research is primarily motivated by concerned about the relationship between inequality and violence and unrest and how this plays out in advanced capitalist democracy. In a more general sense she is fascinated by concepts of social order and disorder; finitude and the edges of being and knowledge; the inter-play of faith, reason, belief and action; performance and politics and the varied ways in which social animals communicate with one another and both make themselves (or fail to make themselves) understood and how we seek (or fail to seek) to understand others.

This has led her to engage with a diverse range of thinkers and schools of thought from Rawls’ political liberalism, to Foucault, Rancière, Cavell and neo-Gramscian pedagogical theory.

Currently, her interests are manifest in two projects:

Violence, property and the democratic subject –the inter-relationship of democracy, violence and property, all interlaced with the ‘becoming’ of the democratic subject.
Democracy, emancipation, equality: rethinking the emancipatory project to free it from the redemptive framework.

Clare’s recent publications include work on democratic responses to the BNP, the ethics of Foucault and Cavell, foreignness and democracy and the radical democracy of Jacques Rancière. Her book, Disorienting Democracy has just been published with Routledge.