Claire Blencowe
Dr Claire Blencowe
Associate Professor of Sociology
Email: C.Blencowe@warwick.ac.uk
Room: E0.16 Social Sciences
BlueSky: @claireblencowe.bsky.social
Biography: I am Associate Professor of Sociology and co-chair of the Just Eco-Geo-Political Futures research cluster at Warwick. For many years I also served as the co-director of the Social Theory Centre. I’m currently on research leave from teaching, but last year delivered the second-year core Modern Social Theory, and the third year UG/PG option Religion and the Planetary Crises.
Areas of Expertise: Cultural structures and histories of racial capitalism; Feminist/queer, decolonial, biopolitical, (new)materialist & cultural theory; Participatory action research; Extractive industries and religion.
Research Statement: I am an interdisciplinary scholar theorising and researching the cultural structures of racial capitalism and planetary crises. I critically investigate the ways that intersecting power relations are produced through systems of culture, knowledge, belief and ‘aesthetic regimes’. I also pursue creative and hopeful work to disrupt power relations and pursue justice through participatory action research and decolonial pedagogy.
My new book Spirits of Extraction: Christianity, Settler Colonialism and the Geology of Race explores the role of an evangelical Christian movement in supporting the establishment of the global mining industry, and settler-colonial rule, in the context of the 18th-19th century British Empire. The book moves through three historical sites and affective scenes: the foundations of the evangelical movement in work with the 'savage' miners, prisoners and industrial poor of 18th century Bristol; the transnational Cornish mining diaspora and the contribution of their religion to the inscription of cultural structures of global racial capitalism; and 19th century Anishinaabewaki/Upper Canada(Ontario) where evangelical Christianity contributed to and connected cultural genocide, religious biopolitics, and the sacralisation of mining as the basis of settler-state claims to sovereignty. Whilst the subject matter is historical, the book is motivated by all too enduring questions about the relationship between the power of the extractive industries, religious racism, and settler-colonial genocide.
I will continue to research religious biopolitics on the extractive frontiers with a fellowship at the Kate Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) at Heidelberg University from October 2025. I will be exploring how the dynamics of biopolitical racism, extractive industries, and religion operate in 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.
My most recent participatory action research project was a collaboration with Redes de Mare (a fantastic local NGO working in a favela complex in Rio de Janeiro), the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State and Cardiff University. The project investigated the impact of armed violence - especially police violence - on women in the Mare communities and the practices through which women come together to survive and resist that violence. Challenging structures of bio/necro-political racism and the ways favela women's bodies are denigrated in public discourse is central to this. We produced a public report which we launched in the Mare in 2023 and lead to a public hearing of the State Legislature's Commission for the Rights of Women. Academic outputs are on the way.
My previous work includes scholarship on Michel Foucault and the theory of biopolitics, including critiques of the investment of 20th century feminism in biopolitical racism, critical analysis of the relationship between settler-colonial and neoliberal state sovereignty and the abuse of children, and more hopeful work on the capacity of decolonial pedagogy and participatory research to challenge racism, inequality and authoritarian power. Details of my publications can be found here.
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 commons (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 Mentees (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