Zoe Rubenstein

I am an ESRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Brighton's Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender. For my PhD I explored the landscape of support in the UK for people perceived to be at risk of causing sexual harm. This fellowship will see me move away from this policy domain to look instead at policy relating to LGBT+ inclusion.

Particularly while I explore this change in topic area during the fellowship, my research interests remain broad, and I am intrigued by questions of how critical epistemologies translate across disciplines. At the same time, I am situated in policy studies and have a particular interest in the following:
- Critical policy analyses of traditional, hierarchical policymaking domains (e.g. Westminster civil service)
- Deliberative Policy Analysis (particularly that forwarded by Wagenaar and colleagues in recent issues of the journal Critical Policy Studies)
- Approaches to policy analysis using Bourdieu's field theory
- Explorations of how social issues (in particular relating to LGBT+ inclusion) are filtered through to policy
- Epistemological studies of policy as it exists beyond written documents