Clare Woodford

Clare Woodford is Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy in the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE)  School of Humanities, University of Brighton; director of the CAPPE Critical Theory research group strand; degree leader for BA (Hons) Philosophy, Politics and Ethics; and co-editor of Rowman and Littlefield’s Polemics series. She is the author of articles and chapters on democratic disorientation and ambivalence, the work of Rancière, Butler, Cavell, Honig, Rawls, Laclau and Foucault with respect to performance, extremism, transnational populism, democratic activism and the ethics of friendship. Her first book Disorienting democracy: politics of emancipation (London; Routledge) juxtaposed Rancière’s thought with that of Butler, Cavell, Menke and Derrida to draw out the practical implications of his writing for emancipatory politics. She is currently working on a second book on love and desire in democratic theories of the subject. Clare works at the interstices of political philosophy, poststructuralism and democratic theory. Questioning the division between theory and practice, passivity and action, she rethinks ethics, education, literature and aesthetics for a powerful conceptualization of democracy as ongoing egalitarian emancipatory struggle.

Clare’s research is primarily motivated by concern 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.

Clare is available to supervise PhDs in any of the above areas. Please email enquiries to c.woodford@brighton.ac.uk.

Current PhD funding opportunities:

http://www.southcoastdtp.ac.uk/apply/