About
Dr Polly Withers is a feminist theorist whose research examines the cultural politics of neoliberal globalisation. She currently leads the Leverhulme Early Career Project, "Neoliberal Visions? Gendering Consumer Culture and its Resistances in the Levant”, at the LSE Middle East Centre.
Her work explores how gender and sexuality operate as organising logics that connect, rather than oppose, neoliberalism and nationalism. Focusing on consumer media, she examines how these dynamics unfold in contexts shaped by settler-colonialism, uneven globalisation, and political statelessness. Using Palestine as a primary case study, with Jordan as a comparative context, the project develops a theory of “neoliberal national affect” to analyse how neoliberal state-building is mediated through gendered and sexualised representations of “the good life” in commercial advertising. In so doing, her research bridges cultural theory and political economy. Polly is currently developing a book project based on this research.
Previously, Polly’s award-winning ESRC-funded postdoctoral research (LSE, 2018-2019), and doctoral research (University of Exeter, 2017) examined the cultural politics of gender and sexuality in Palestinian popular music, an area in which she has published extensively.
Polly also has extensive award-winning teaching experience. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and has held several academic teaching and leadership roles, including LSE Fellow in Media and Communications, and Associate Programme Director of the Global Media and Communications MSc (with USC), in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE (2019–2021).
In addition, she led the project Neoliberal Visions: Exploring Gendered Adverts and Identities in the Palestinian West Bank, funded through the LSE Middle East Centre’s Academic Collaboration with Arab Universities Programme and conducted in collaboration with Birzeit University (2019–2021).