Women’s Space and Community Action in the Neoliberal City
This paper will explore the affective entanglements of state violence, vulnerability, and community resistance in inner-city Britain through the lens of several grassroots women’s projects. By tracing the rise and role of these projects from the end of the 1970s, it will examine how marginalised communities operated and organised in response to an ascendant politics of state retrenchment and the growing responsibilization of care. It will also provide insight into the way deteriorating socio-economic conditions and punitive welfare reforms impinged on the minds and bodies of racialised women in urban space; while circumscriptions of state support and protection have long been constituted along internal borders of race, gender, and class, this paper is concerned with the emotional fallout of hardships particular to or experienced disproportionately by black, Asian, and other minoritised women under neoliberalism. One such hardship was the economic attack on women’s community projects and spaces, which often grew out of precarious and emotionally charged urban ecologies, and that became vital sources of emotional stability, support, and succour in turn.
All welcome- this session is free to attend, but booking in advance is required.
This page was last updated on 14 March 2025
