Citizenship: Personal lives and social policy

by Gail Lewis (Editor)

Personal Lives and Social Policy adds a new dimension to the citizenship literature by using citizenship as a lens through which to explore the relation between personal lives and social policy. This book focuses on the following domains to consider some of the dimensions of the lived practices and experiences of  the 'high moment' of working-class citizenship that was embodied in the post-war welfare state; the conflicts and anxieties experienced by children and parents in the transition to secondary school and the struggle of refugees and asylum seekers to gain right of residence in the UK and the possibility of building a new life. The authors draw upon a range of theoretical perspectives, including feminist, psychoanalytic and Marxist, to explore what citizenship can tell us about the ways in which personal lives not only are shaped by social policy, but can become the site from which some of the exclusions embedded in social policy and welfare practice are contested.

176 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2004

About the author

Gail Lewis is a British writer, psychotherapist, researcher, and activist. She is visiting senior fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics, and Reader Emerita of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, London. She trained as a psychodynamic psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic.
Lewis's work is rooted in black feminist and anti-racist struggle, and a socialist, anti-imperialist politics. She was a co-founder of the Organisation for Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), and she was a member of the Brixton Black Women's Group. She was a founding collective editorial member of the Feminist Review. Lewis was interviewed for the oral history project "Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation", archived at the British Library, a project that interviewed "feminists who were at the forefront of the Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s and 80s".