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Department of Sociology

Claire Blencowe

Dr Claire Blencowe

Associate Professor of Sociology

Email: C.Blencowe@warwick.ac.uk 

Room: E0.16 Social Sciences

Telephone: +44(0)24 761 51706

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Biography: Claire Blencowe is Associate Professor of Sociology. She joined Warwick in 2011 after spending a year lecturing social theory at Newcastle University, and completing her studies at the University of Bristol where her PhD on Foucault, race and biopolitical modernity was supervised by Thomas Osborne. She grew up in Cornwall on the edge of the Atlantic, which increasingly seeps its way into her research. Previous leadership roles at Warwick include co-directing the Social Theory Centre, leading the Justice, Authority and Geopolitics research theme, serving as Postgradaute Taught Programmes Director and hosting numerous symposiums and PhD summer schools. In the current year she is co-leading the Just Eco-Geo-Political Futures research cluster and is not teaching. She has two young children and lives in Bristol.

Research Statement: My work is driven by curiosity about the ways that power relations are embedded and transformed through practices of knowledge, systems of thought and structures of experience or ‘aesthetic regimes’. This underlies my creative and hopeful work towards developing participatory action research and collaborative theory as forms of disruptive and egalitarian democratic practice. It also underlies my critical explorations of political discourse, science, and religious thought, as sites through which the intersecting power structures of racism, coloniality, class-oppression and heteropatriarchy are reproduced. My current work in both respects centres on the relationship between religion and colonialism.

On the one hand, I explore the ways that coloniality and destructive civilisational discourses are produced in social theory, and political movements, through a kind of secularist policing of ‘proper’ knowledge. I have argued for the celebration of practices that validate and engage with the often embodied and spiritual knowledges of marginalised peoples that disrupt hierachies of 'proper' knowledge, disenchant secularism, and challenge racism. I have written about this in relation to ecological attunement, decolonial social theory, and problematics of hopeLink opens in a new window in the 21st century. These concerns inform my participatory action research with Redes de Mare, UFRJ & Cardiff University on embodied practices, knowledge and community amongst women who survive state-racism and its cascading violences in a favela complex in Rio de Janeiro.

On the other hand, I am exploring the role of past and present religious practice as a site through which colonial, imperialist, and extractivist economies are created and lived. My current book project – Spirits of Extraction: Chrisitanity, Settler Colonialism & the Geology of Race (in press with MUP) – explores the history of 18th and 19th century Evangelical Revival Movements and their complex relationship to the power and political economy of the British Empire. I explore how Methodist theology and affective investments contributed to carving out civilisational or 'cultural' racism, its role in establishing British control of mines around the world as well as settler colonial sovereignty. Biopolitical racism enabled Methodist missionaries to racialize miners and peoples displaced by mining in ways that supported the expansion of the extractive industries, whilst the resonance between extractivism and evangelical theology helped both to flourish. This also generated a kind of quasi-deification of the extractive industries. Arguably, religious biopolitics is an emanation of the lived-apocalypse on the extractive frontiers. This builds on my previously published work on biopolitical structures of experience, biopolitical authorityLink opens in a new window, and on migrant child detention as ‘family debilitationLink opens in a new window’. But the questions have pushed me beyond the constraints of biopolitical theory to engage more deeply with the complex intersections of religion, coloniality and the earth itself, moving towards planetary materialism and geopolitics. 

I will continue this trajectory of research on religious biopolitics on the extractive frontiers in 2025, with a fellowship at The Kate Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) at Heidelberg University. During the fellowship I will be exploring how the dynamics of biopolitical racism, extractive industries, and religion operate in the present, analysing two discursive sites. First, the lobbying of Evangelical Christian libertarian think tanks that support the fossil fuel industries whilst also promoting violent suppression of environmentalist campaigners. Second, the discourses of Neo-Pentecostal Churches in Brazil in relation to opening indigenous and Quilombo territories to (further) mineral extraction. Evangelical Christians and other religious voices are present on both sides of these struggles. Thus, I not only ask how biopolitical religion enables world-destruction, but also what religious and spiritual movements emerge at the extractive frontiers that enable people to survival, resist, and escape lived-apocalypse.

Areas of Expertise: Social and Cultural Theory (feminist/queer/decolonial biopolitical theory; geopower; new materialism); Genealogies of Race and Racism; Creative and Participatory Methodologies; Religion and Extractivism.

PhD Project Supervision (past & present):

  • Camila Stipo - Activist gestationalities. A diffractive reexamination of women human rights activists in 1980s
    through kin-making practices of contemporary women water advocates in Chile (BECAS Chile Scholarship funded - Women & Gender Studies)
  • Joss Allen - Tending to the seed common (Leverhulme Trust -TRANSFORM Doctoral Scholarship - Global Sustainable Development))
  • Yamin Chowdhary 'Imaginations of Sexual Citizenship: The Narratives of Homonationalism in India' (ESRC funded - Women & Gender Studies)
  • Sebastian Leyton Blanco ‘Race, decoloniality and the will for alterity: A critical-ethical approach to
    racial (de-)subjection and subjectivation in the modern state' (AHRC funded, Midlands 4 Cities, co-supervision with Philosophy Department)
  • Lizzy Le Quesne 'A Dance of Becoming: Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT), embodied emancipation and a dance practice of somatic autobiography'. (AHRC funded, Midlands 4 Cities, co-supervision with Ruth Gibson & Sarah Whatmore, Coventry University)
  • Dr. Paola Patino-Rabines (2022) 'Deviant Politics in Contemporary Peru: Aesthetic Transgressions and the Political Dispute over Diversitiy's Terms of Recognition'. (Warwick Chancellor's Fellowship, Women & Gender Studies)
  • Dr. Seb Rumsby (2020) 'Social Factors Affecting Economic Development in Vietnam's Highlands' (ESRC funded)
  • Dr. Kathryn Medien (2018) 'Intimate Occupations: Sexualised Biopolitics in Colonised Palestine' (ESRC funded, Women and Gender Studies)
  • Dr. Wonseok Kim (2018) A Critical Investigation into the Discourse of Educational Neutrality in South Korea (1987-2017)'
  • Dr. Leonardo Vasconcelos de Castro Moreira (2018) ‘The Universal Church of Kingdom of God in Madrid: A church without borders'
  • Dr. Morteza Hashemi Madani (2015) 'Social Theory and the Secular Fundamentalisms'
  • Dr. Sam Burgum (2014) 'Occupy London: Post-Politics versus Politics Proper in an Era of Consensus' (ESRC funded)

Post-doctoral Supervision (past & present):

  • Dr. Gala Rexer 'Entangled Reproduction: Life in the Wastelands of Racial Capitalism' - Leverhume Early Career Fellowship, 2024-2027
  • Dr. Joe Davidson 'Climate Catastrophe, Apocalyptic Futures, and Black Social Thought' – Leverhume Early Career Fellowship, 2022-2025.
  • Dr. Stephen Seely 'Participatory Differences: South Africa and the Politics of Sexual Democracy,' Reading four cases of sexuality politics in South Africa through the framework of 'southern epistemologies. Marie Curie- University of Warwick Horizon 2020 COFUND, 2017-2019