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How can we rethink ideas of policy failure to consider its paradoxes and contradictions as a starting point for more hopeful democratic encounters? Offering a provocative and innovative theorisation of governance as relational politics, the central argument of Power, Politics and the Emotions is that there are sets of affective dynamics which complicate the already materially and symbolically contested terrain of policy-making. This relational politics is Shona Hunter s starting point for a more hopeful, but realistic understanding of the limits and possibilities enacted through contemporary governing processes. Through this idea Hunter prioritises the everyday lived enactments of policy as a means to understand the state as a more differentiated and changeable entity than is often allowed for in current critiques of neoliberalism. But Hunter reminds us that focusing on lived realities demands a melancholic confrontation with pain, and the risks of social and physical death and violence lived through the contemporary neoliberal state. This is a state characterised by the ascendency of neoliberal whiteness; a state where no one is innocent and we are all responsible for the multiple intersecting exclusionary practices creating its unequal social orderings. The only way to struggle through the central paradox of governance to produce something different is to accept this troubling interdependence between resistance and reproduction and between hope and loss. Analysing the everyday processes of this relational politics through original empirical studies in health, social care and education the book develops an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical synthesis which engages with and extends work in political science, cultural theory, critical race and feminist analysis, critical psychoanalysis and post-material sociology.", Offering a provocative and innovative theorisation of governance as relational politics, the central argument of Power, Politics and the Emotionsis that there are complex sets of emotional dynamics which complicate the already contested terrain of social policy-making. Equality and diversity are increasingly central components of governance in Western democracies. Arising from the particular social, cultural and political conditions of the late twentieth century, they constitute an important component of the new ethico-politics or life politics, another important element of which is the turn to the emotions. These developments make us think again about the changing processes of governance and shifting relations between institutions, governors and citizens. And Power, Politics and the Emotionsuses controversy over diversity and equality policies as a lens through which to explore these broader developments. Contra rationalist accounts of governance, relational politics is the messy, incoherent, ambivalent and often contradictory processes of governance which structure and are structured through social and affective dynamics. Analysing the everyday processes of this relational politics through original empirical studies into equalities work and policy in health, social care, education and the voluntary and community sector, the book develops an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical synthesis which engages with and extends work in political science, cultural theory, critical psychoanalysis and social studies of science and technology/sociology of translation. It will be of interest to a wide range of higher level students and scholars in sociology, social and public policy, legal studies, politics, cultural studies, psychology and psychosocial studies, as well as professional policy-makers and practitioners in the field of equalities in general and in health, social care and education.

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