About
Dr Polly Withers is a feminist theorist of the cultural politics of neoliberal globalisation. She is currently leading the Leverhulme Early Career Project Neoliberal Visions? Gendering Consumer Culture and Its Resistances in the Levant.
This work uses gender and sexuality as logics to analyse interconnections rather than oppositions between neoliberalism and nationalism; a synergy she uses consumer media to explore. Using Palestine as a case study and Jordan as a comparison, the project is especially focused on developing a theory of neoliberal affect to consider how neoliberal state-building unravels through gendered/sexed representations of ‘the good life’ in consumer adverts under settler-colonisation, uneven globalisation, and political statelessness. The work therefore uses media to bridge gaps between cultural theory and political economy. She is currently working on a book project based on this research.
Prior to this, Polly’s award-winning ESRC-funded postdoctoral (LSE, 2018-2019) and doctoral (University of Exeter, 2017) research focused on the cultural politics of gender and sexuality in Palestinian popular music, from which she has published extensively.
Polly also has extensive and award-winning teaching experience. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and - alongside other roles - was an LSE Fellow in Media and Communications, as well as the Associate Programme Director of the Global Media and Communications MSc (with USC), at the Department of Media and Communications at LSE (2019-2021). In addition, Polly led the project 'Neoliberal Visions: Exploring Gendered Adverts and Identities in the Palestinian West Bank', funded by the LSE Middle East Centre’s Academic Collaboration with Arab Universities Programme, and in collaboration with Birzeit University in Palestine (2019-2021).