Richard Freeman is Professor of Social Science and Public Policy at the University of Edinburgh. He teaches knowledge and practice on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in policy and politics, as well as theory and method in the Graduate School of Social and Political Science. He is a former Fulbright Scholar and Jean Monnet Fellow, and has held visiting positions at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, Bremen, the Institut d’Études Politiques (‘Sciences Po’), Paris, the Institut für höhere Studien, Vienna, and Yale University, New Haven.
His research is concerned with knowing and doing in politics, that is with what policy makers, practitioners and others know and do when they go to work. It draws on public policy as well as social theory, the sociology of knowledge and science and technology studies in exploring public action. His most recent books are, with Steve Sturdy, Knowledge in Policy: embodied, inscribed, enacted (Policy Press 2014), with Jan-Peter Voß, Knowing Governance: the epistemic construction of political order (Palgrave Macmillan 2015) and, with Fiona McHardy and Danny Murphy, Working for Equality: policies, politics, people (Argyll Publishing/CCWB 2017). He is a former co-editor of Critical Policy Studies and Palgrave Studies in Science, Knowledge and Policy.
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Writing Politics
We need to talk about writing. Doing politics differently must mean writing politics differently, and 'writing politics' is a collective exploration of how that might work... Most of us work in policy, politics, sociology, law or IR, and we’re committed to teaching as...
Doing Politics
is now free to access at doingpolitics.space. I want to write about politics as something people do, to describe a politics grounded in human action and interaction – in the gathering and meeting, talking and writing of embodied and situated human beings…
Seeing Politics
takes up the idea that one of the principal characteristics of action is its visibility, and uses photographs to explore aspects of 'doing politics'. It was given online as a keynote presentation to the Critical and Interpretive Public Administration (CIPA) network...
The role of the councillor and the work of meeting
This paper picks up a theme from the recent literature on the councillor, that of time spent in meeting, and suggests that if we are to understand the role of the councillor we must understand the work the meeting does. The discussion is based in a series of...
What do policy makers really do?
The question is important because making policy engages a great number of people one way or another, and what they do they might do well or badly. Our standard answers are rather hazy, not least because policy making entails such great numbers of people doing a great...
Meeting, talk and text: policy and politics in practice
Our prevailing accounts of the policy process are challenged by studies of practice as well as by practitioners themselves. This paper sets out an alternative, grounded in politics and sociology and informed by recent work in related disciplines. Drawing on the...