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As well as an intersectional approach, this book employs a critical approach. This may seem oxymoronic; after all, intersectionality is itself a critical approach. But what I intend by emphasizing this is the importance of keeping in play theoretical insights developed in and subsequent to earlier social policy critiques. Through this I define a critical approach as one that places struggles and contestations over social justice at the heart of its theories, analyses and practices of welfare provision and uses this position to question that which is taken for granted in the concepts, methods and discourses used in the field of study of social policy and welfare states (Lister 2010: 57–94). Contestation and contradiction were central to the early Marxist political economy of welfare analyses (Gough 1979; Ginsburg 1979), in which the welfare state was understood as the outcome of an uneasy truce between the interests of capitalism for a healthy, disciplined workforce and the interests and struggles of the working class for protection from poverty, unemployment and ill health. In this was its crucial contradiction: that capitalism couldn’t live with a welfare state but neither could it live without it (Offe 1984).

However, it was out of new social movement activism that these concepts were refined and broadened. Their contestations were often about welfare provision in terms both of its logics of redistribution – who got what from benefits and services – and of the interconnected issues of the recognition of people’s or groups’ moral worth – their dignity and personhood. Crucially, they were about democratic representation and participation in the formation and implementation of policy (Williams 1999; Beresford 2016). Second, they extended the notion of contradiction to people’s own experiences of the welfare state: while it provided individuals with the resources and services they needed, it did so in ways that reinforced some inequalities and hierarchies in which they already found themselves. This aspect was later refined in Foucauldian approaches to focus on the way welfare subjects are constituted through discourses and practices of social policies. Third, much of the activism highlighted a new form of struggle around the so-called social relations of welfare – that is, the relationship between providers and users of welfare provision. These developments gave rise to new self-help practices, but, more than this, they involved attempts to prefigure new social relations. Whether in women’s health centres, black people’s Saturday schools, co-operatives, forms of early independent living, support services for victims of rape and domestic violence, or the ACT UP support provided by lesbians and gay men for people with AIDS – these projects strove for a new kind of non-hierarchical, caring, respectful and empowering relationship between provider and user. The subsequent development of this aspect of critical thinking is pursued in chapter 5.

Political economy approaches which are relevant to social policy have themselves been refined over time. For example a ‘cultural political economy’ approach (Jessop 2013, 2015; Jensen and Tyler 2015) takes neoliberal austerity as a governmental project and looks at the changing realities and imaginaries of the ways the political and economic intersect in both capitalist social relations and capitalist accumulation processes. In other words, analysis of political economy is informed by an understanding of social and cultural relations. This is not just about social expenditure cuts but also about the means by which governments extend the very meaning of capital accumulation into the commodification and financialization of everyday life (Jessop 2015: 98). Similarly, John Clarke and Janet Newman’s (Clarke and Newman 2012, 2017; Clarke 2019a) understanding of austerity is informed by a ‘conjunctural’ approach developed from the analysis by Stuart Hall and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies of Margaret Thatcher’s ‘authoritarian populism’ in the 1980s (Hall et al. 1978). Importantly, too, Ian Gough develops a political economy of climate change and welfare which situates the environment centrally in the future of social policy (Gough 2017).

A critical approach questions the taken for granted in mainstream thinking – in this case, mainstream social policy. By ‘mainstream’ I refer to those bodies of work that establish theoretical or methodological ‘cores’ for the discipline and shape its subsequent research. Like disciplines, cores vary over time and place, but social policy literature reviews (e.g. Starke 2006), journal content analysis (e.g. Powell 2006) and disciplinary texts demonstrate the development of ‘cores’. While I use the heuristic device of distinguishing between ‘critical’ and ‘mainstream’ social policy, it will also be clear that the boundaries between the two have shifted over time and have been quite porous. In some countries, social policy exists not as a discipline but as a subsection of sociology, political science, political economy or economics which studies state and non-state welfare policies. Historically, at least in the UK, social policy has been associated with its social reforming origins and the development of European modernity. This means that, as the first section of the chapter showed, the hierarchies, exclusions and otherness associated with European modernity underpin the discipline’s theoretical development, even though, by its very subject matter, issues of equality and social justice run through its veins. Here, the crucial and central question becomes what and who is included in the ‘social’ of social policy and social justice, and this is one of the questions that the book explores.

There are also important aspects of critical thinking which are not just about ‘unmasking’ power, domination and unquestioned constructions in disciplines. They go beyond this and look to resistance against domination as a way of understanding how things may be transformed. This is similar to the concept of praxis described in the previous section. This is sometimes referred to as ‘criticality’ (Roseneil 2011). In this way, there are two sides to critical theory: that which, forensically and remorselessly, unpicks power and injustice, past and present; and that which creatively looks to the future. In other words, criticality seeks to transcend that which is sometimes called the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Sedgwick 2003). These two elements have been described as ‘negative’ and ‘affirmative’ critique (Rebughini 2017). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) similarly distinguishes between ‘paranoid reading’, which remains within the confines of criticism and critique, and ‘reparative reading’, where the future can be imagined as different from the present. This book adopts the ‘reparative’ approach that seeks to understand the contradictions, ambiguities and instabilities in global capitalism, neoliberalism and neoliberal welfare states, as well as in everyday discourse about welfare and in political mobilizations. Political mobilization for social justice does not necessarily promote or represent social justice for all. At the same time, as Leonard Cohen sang, ‘There’s a crack in everything. That’s where the light gets in.’

There are some clear similarities between these ideas and those of intersectionality. More than that, each improves the other. The one can help deal with the problems and pitfalls of the other. What intersectionality offers social policy is a more rigorous framing of how the social relations of power and inequality are experienced and operate within and across social groups; it permits a more open-ended view of populations and social policy fields and analyses the contingent ways in which their borders and boundaries are socially, economically, politically, culturally and administratively constructed. It also provides a coherence between its analysis and methods to thinking through the possibilities for coalitional forms of solidarity and political change. This enhances a critical perspective which in its turn secures the analysis in an understanding of the political economy of welfare, but in a way that can simultaneously address the intersections across its cultural, social, moral and organizational dimensions and their contestations, ambiguities and contradictions.

With these considerations in mind, I use intersectionality in this book to look at a number of key contemporary analytical and empirical developments in social policy. In doing so, I focus on those multi-scalar dynamics not usually associated with intersectionality’s subject matter – understanding austerity through intersecting global crises of finance, care, racialized borders and climate change. This is pursued at national scale through the intersecting, changing and contested domains of family, nation, work, and nature in the social relations of welfare governance. In other words, this approach analyses the intersecting social relations and social forces within and across different scales, from the intersubjective to the transnational. It focuses on the ways in which different social, cultural, economic and political forces, conflicts and crises come together and unsettle that which is taken as given. I also extend intersectionality’s methodological power to focus on the intersections of ethics of care, environment and decoloniality and the possibilities for alternative welfare futures which incorporate intersectional social justice. This does not rely only on intersectionality, or only on the theories mostly closely associated with it, but seeks to align and synthesize other perspectives and concepts in social policy analysis which share and enhance some of its key concepts and concerns. Those writing on intersectionality have stressed the ‘provisional’ nature of its theorizing (Carastathis 2016: chap. 3). It is not the last word on multiple processes of subordination but looks to both political and intellectual possibilities for change. In this way I draw on work which also carries the characteristics I have described above, which can be found, for example, in some political economy perspectives, critical geography, conjunctural analysis, critical race theory, theories of postcoloniality and decoloniality, critical disability and queer theories, eco-social policy analysis and psychosocial analysis. These, and others, inform my synthesis, while at its core is an insistence on applying to social policy analysis a critical and relational understanding of contingency, contestation, connectedness, contradiction, and a firm resistance to overdeterminism, essentialism and reductionism.