Prof Wendy Larner

BSocSci(Waik), MA(Cant), PhD(Carl)

Professor of Human Geography and Sociology

Contact

Office: G2.15N
Tel: +44 (0)117 928 8306
Fax: +44 (0)117 9287878
Email: w.larner@bristol.ac.uk

Research interests

Wendy Larner is Professor of Human Geography and Sociology, and Research Director for the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law. Her research programme is situated in the interdisciplinary fields of globalisation, governance and gender, and links insights from critical social theory with a strong commitment to empirical research. Her aim is to challenge conventional understandings of globalisation as an inevitable ‘new reality’ by showing that it is a contested and contradictory process in the making. Relatedly, she has a long standing research interest in theorising neo-liberalism and ‘post-welfarist’ governance.

Her intellectual platform builds on a series of empirical projects which encompass economic and social policy, industry studies, and community based research, and which have received funding from the NZ Foundation for Research Science, and Technology, RSNZ Marsden Fund, NZ TEC Innovation Fund, Canadian Faculty Awards, Canadian Programme for International Research Linkages, Economic and Social Research Council and the British Academy. Current projects include research on the relationships between neoliberalism and activism, and a forthcoming book on the New Zealand fashion industry. She is also Editor of Antipode: A journal of radical geography, and Associate Editor of Social Politics: International Studies in Gender State and Society, and serves on editorial advisory boards of Progress in Human Geography, Geopolitics and Studies in Political Economy.

Professor Larner has received a number of national and international awards for her research including both British and Canadian Commonwealth Scholarships, a Fulbright New Zealand Senior Fellowship, and a Queen Mary Distinguished Visiting Fellowship. She has also been an invited visiting professor at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, University of Kentucky and the University of Frankfurt. In 2009 she was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Selected publications

Molloy, M & Larner, W. 'Who Needs Cultural Intermediaries Indeed? Gendered networks in the designer fashion Industry', Journal of Cultural Economy, 3 (3), (pp. 361-377), 2010.

Larner, W. 'Economic Geographies as Situated Knowledges', in J Pollard, C McEwan and A Hughes (Eds.), Postcolonial Economies: Rethinking material lives, (pp. 81-106), Zed Press, 2011. ISBN: 9781848134041

Larner, W. 'Neoliberalism, Mike Moore and the WTO', by Larner, W. Environment and Planning A, 41 (7), (pp. 1576-1593), 2009. ISSN: 0308-518X 10.1068/A41142