Eleanor Jupp is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of Kent. She has also held teaching and research positions at the Open University, University of Reading and Oxford Brookes University. She holds at PhD in Human Geography from the Open University, and her teaching and research interests combine social policy and urban social geography, with particular interests in community, neighbourhoods and families. Before undertaking her PhD, Dr Jupp worked in policy and practice in the voluntary sector, and as a UK government policy advisor on issues of neighbourhood regeneration and social exclusion, and she continues to collaborate with the voluntary sector and community groups on research.
Dr Jupp’s research concerns shifting relations between social policy frameworks and citizens, with a focus on two areas: modes of collective action and citizenship within disadvantaged urban communities, including activism, community action and experiments in collective provisioning and sharing; and how families, children and young people interact with welfare systems, with a focus on early childhood. She has overarching interests in gender and feminist theory, and how matters of care, emotions, space and embodiment can be considered in relation to the welfare state. Research projects have focused on the geographies of Sure Start Children’s Centres (2010-12); localism and urban policy (2011-13); ‘home’ and the welfare state (2013-15, ESRC funded seminar series, PI), and austerity, children’s services and voluntary action in Medway and Oxfordshire (2015-2017).
These themes have been explored in two recent books: Emotional States: sites and spaces of affective governance (Routledge, 2017, eds Jupp, Pykett, Smith) and The New Politics of Home: housing, gender and care in times of crisis (Policy Press, 2019, Jupp, Bowlby, Franklin and Hall). She has edited special journal issues of Children’s Geographies (2013) and Critical Social Policy (2017). Her monograph on Care, Crisis and the Politics of Everyday Life (forthcoming, Bristol University Press, 2021) will draw together research on austerity, everyday lives and community action from the past ten years.
