Title: Restating the problem of power: politics, policies and populations

John Clarke is a Professor of Social Policy at the Open University in the UK, where he has been engaged in teaching and research for over twenty five years. After a first degree in Management Studies, he was rescued by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, where he was a postgraduate for five years. During that time he was part of the writing groups that produced Resistance Through Rituals and Policing the Crisis.

More recently his work has addressed how cultural studies might illuminate and transform the study of welfare, states and forms of citizenship – and vice versa. Recent publications include Changing Welfare, Changing States (Sage, 2004) and Creating Citizen-Consumers: changing publics and changing public services (with J. Newman, N. Smith, E. Vidler and L. Westmarland, Sage, 2007). He is currently part of an international collaboration exploring how citizenships are constructed and contested in the encounters between juridical and everyday representations and practices.