Narration Equality: enactments of remembering and forgetting in the simplification of equality apparatus

'Narration Equality: enactments of remembering and forgetting in the simplification of equality apparatus' will be presented by James Beresford.

Abstract: This presentation will look at how narratives around policy pasts and futures are contested and enacted within the context of Equality and Human Rights legislation. Examining  the project of ‘simplification’ instigated by New Labour through the 2006 and 2010 Equality Act’s and the merging of the existing equality commissions at the time, it will be argued that memory is constitutive of policy. Drawing upon narrative interviewing with policy practitioners, and Carolyn Pedwell’s idea of relational webs, it will be shown how memories (as enactments) and alignments to particular collective memories work to shape the political and conceptual horizons through which different projects come to be located as viable. This idea of viability is linked to the way authority is imbued into them as a result of alignment with particular (individual and collective) bodies.

All welcome! There is no need to book.

Location Details

Room 12.21 and 12.25
Social Sciences Building 
University of Leeds
Leeds
LS2 9JT

View campus map