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Critical Social Policy
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Living documents: A feminist psychosocial approach to the relational politics of policy documentation

Shona Hunter

University of Leeds, s.d.j.hunter{at}leeds.ac.uk

This paper challenges dominant analyses of policy documents and documentation practices as coercive welfare technologies. Instead it develops an interdisciplinary feminist psychosocial analysis which posits policy documents as material semiotic actors in the process of governance, produced through and productive of the social relations of public service provision. It uses an empirical case study from the author's experience in equalities policy making in education to develop an understanding of the multiple social relations constituted through document production. It applies the concepts of boundary object and transitional phenomena to understand the ways in which policy documents enable collective resistance to dominant constructions of otherness and alterity in equalities work and policy. The paper also considers how this sort of analysis highlights `uncomfortable truths' around the position of critical social researchers in document production for policy purposes.

Key Words: audit cultures • otherness • postcolonial • resistance • transitional objects • writing

Critical Social Policy, Vol. 28, No. 4, 506-528 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0261018308095300
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