Fellow 2025-2026 Claire Blencowe
Claire Blencowe is Professor of Sociology and co-chair of the Just Eco-Geo-Political Futures Research Cluster at the University of Warwick, where she has worked since 2011. Previous roles include Director of the Social Theory Centre at Warwick and teaching fellowships at Newcastle and Bristol Universities.
Her new book, Spirits of Extraction: Christianity, Settler Colonialism and the Geology of Race (Manchester UP, 2025), is a theoretical exploration of the historical intersections of the mining industry, Methodist evangelical Christianity, civilizational education, and the modern metaphysics of race. It contributes to theories of race and racism by insisting on the enduring role of religious biopolitics and Christianising education, whilst also expanding on the role of mining in the creation of modern racism and settler-colonial sovereignty.
She is also working on the politics of race, affect, aesthetics, and resistance in the present, writing up a participatory action research project in the Mare favela complex in Rio de Janeiro, which explores women’s creative collaborative responses to the ubiquitous violence and disruption caused by policing in their communities, in collaboration with Redes de Mare NGO, Cardiff University, and Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Previous projects include a series of collaborations on the development of authority studies and participatory methodologies for challenging and transforming power/knowledge—including the edited collections Problems of Hope (2017, ARN Press); Problems of Participation: On the Struggle for Common Life (2013, ARN Press); and Authority, Experience and the Life of Power (Routledge, 2015)—and a series of articles on biopolitical citizenship, as well as her previous sole-authored book exploring Michel Foucault’s theories of biopolitics and their implications for critical understanding of modern structures of experience and politics, Biopolitical Experience: Foucault, Power & Positive Critique (Palgrave, 2012).