Elissa Foster
Biographic Data
| ID | 208033 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elissa Foster |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elissa |
| FAMILY NAME | Foster |
| SIGNATURE | FOSTER E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Birmingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2737-9930 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 106 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Autoethnographies of Precarity: Risky Business, Uncertain Futures, and … the Work Continues
This article serves as the introduction to the special issue “Risky Business, Uncertain Futures, and ... the Work Continues.” The special issue emerged from the preconference of the Autoethnography Special Interest Group of the International Association of Qualitative Inquiry meeting in 2025. The article presents autoethnography as inherently risky and as a methodology that can sustain us through uncertain times and events that call us to reflect…
Introduction to Presence Tense: Moving Collectively Into a New History
This introductory essay introduces the themes of the gathering at the 20th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry that gave rise to this special issue, and frames the ten contributed articles with four intersecting themes related to autoethnographic inquiry: autoethnography as making space , embodied futurity , intergenerational responsibility, and resistance
“Inter and Enter: An Invitation to Collaboration Thru Autoethnography”
This performative and collaborative autoethnography plays with the homophonic or maybe homiletics of “inter” and “enter” as the invitational aspect of collaborative autoethnography. The contribution of diverse collaborators from differing racial, ethnic, geo-spatial locations, and generational standpoints speak to/between experiences with the dialogic aspects of autoethnography; the speaking of self with and for others that is always a part of au…
There Was an Old Woman Who . . . Lost Patience With the Academy and Performed Her Frustration at a Public Meeting
Taking as its starting point the nursery rhyme about the old woman who swallowed a fly, this autoethnographic performance text presents a fable of an old woman who first becomes invisible and then realizes that she can reclaim her power, but only once she rids herself of all the “rubbish” she has consumed. The text adopts the traditional format of a play script and references core themes of critical performance studies—gender, power, the body, pr…
Other People’s Children: Conscience, Complicity, and Collective Engagement
Integrating personal stories of maternal connection and separation with a detailed analysis of the 2018 crisis of migrant family separation in the United States, this autoethnographic essay examines the continuum between parental responsibility and collective engagement for the greater good. A comparison is made between the current crisis of family separation and the case of the Stolen Generations of Indigenous children in Australia, particularly…
Ecofeminism revisited: Critical Insights on Contemporary Environmental Governance
Echoing other articles in this special issue, this article re-evaluates a collection of feminist works that fell out of fashion as a consequence of academic feminism embracing poststructuralist and postmodernist trends. In line with fellow contributors, the article critically reflects upon the unsympathetic reading of feminisms considered to be essentialising and universalistic, in order to re-evaluate, in my case, ecofeminism. As an introduction…
Self-Efficacy in Researching and Obtaining Medical Cannabis by Patients With Chronic Conditions
Background. Due to the increasing availability of medical-grade cannabis for treatment of chronic conditions, we examined how prospective users navigate the process of researching, procuring, and using cannabis. Given the barriers prospective users experience, self-efficacy may be a factor for those who incorporate cannabis into treatment. Aims. The purpose of this study was to identify behaviors associated with self-efficacy in the context of re…
Impact of a health marketing campaign on sugars intake by children aged 5–11 years and parental views on reducing children’s consumption
A health marketing campaign had a positive impact in reducing sugars intake but reductions in sugars were not sustained. Parents want to reduce their child's sugars intake but societal barriers and confusion over which sources of sugars to avoid hamper efforts to change
Perceived Efficacy of Medical Cannabis in the Treatment of Co-Occurring Health-Related Quality of Life Symptoms
For persons living with chronic conditions, health-related quality of life (HRQoL) symptoms, such as pain, anxiety, depression, and insomnia, often interact and mutually reinforce one another. There is evidence that medical cannabis (MC) may be efficacious in ameliorating such symptoms and improving HRQoL. As many of these HRQoL symptoms may mutually reinforce one another, we conducted an exploratory study to investigate how MC users perceive the…
Getting back in the DeLorean: Modernization vs. anti-modernization in contemporary British politics
This article highlights a growing clash between mainstream modernizing and populist anti-modernizing forces in the UK. Whilst scholarship on UK party politics has, for the past three decades, focussed on processes of party modernization, little attention has been paid to the countervailing processes of resistance towards modernization. This contrasts with comparative studies, which show that throughout much of Europe modernization processes have …
Academic Labor in the Age of Anxiety: Autoethnography Matters
In this autoethnographic essay, I reflect on three spheres of academic work-program administration, teaching, and scholarship-and find evidence of the effects of neoliberalism in each sphere of practice. Specifically, I articulate the prevailing emotional experience of my academic work as anxiety, which is a consequence of internalizing the construction of students-as-consumers and responding uncritically to the demands of academic organizations …
Narrative and the Subjunctive Imaginary: An Expatriate Autoethnographer Reaches for Home
This article is a narrative response to an invitation from the editor of this special issue to meditate on the theme of “home.” The central narrative is a retelling of a retelling—the author's brother recounting how he met “the man who saved his life” 20 years earlier and learned from him details of the story that were missing. For the author, the experience of listening to the story prompts an exploration of theories about the relationship betwe…
Implementing the Employability Agenda: A Critical Review of Curriculum Developments in Political Science and International Relations in English Universities
This article draws on research commissioned by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and conducted during 2013. It interrogates the ways in which the employability agenda has been fed through to the level of individual politics departments. The project was particularly concerned with establishing whether, and how, colleagues in politics and international relations (IR) had taken ownership of student employability at the level of the curriculum. In t…
Physicians’ Stories: Autoethnography, Presence, and Rhizomatic Inquiry
This article reflects on a project in which the author guided several physicians as they wrote their first autoethnographic research articles, which were then presented at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in 2011. Revisiting three of the physicians’ stories, the article articulates the significance of having physicians—scientists by training—engage autoethnography as an emotional, literary, poetic, and embodied practice. The auth…
What Kind of ‘Big Government’ is the Big Society? A Reply to Bulley and Sokhi-Bulley
Research Highlights and Abstract This article Contributes to the debates applying Foucauldian theory to contemporary British Politics and invigorates the debate through a discussion with Bulley and Sokhi Bulley Develops understandings of contemporary British Politics under the Coalition government, particularly in light of the ‘Big Society’ project. Compares, through a Foucauldian framework, the differences and similarities between the New Labour…
Gendering Global Conflict: Towards a Feminist Theory of War
Within the growing discipline of feminist security studies and given the increased attention awarded to mainstream security studies, in what is a geo-politically unstable period for many areas of t
International sustainable development policy: (Re)producing Sexual Norms Through Eco-Discipline
This article contends that the global thrust towards population management, legitimised by the concept of sustainable development, works to construct identities along the lines of gender and sexuality. This article focuses on the operation of what Foucault termed, biopower, as operational through and (re)productive of the United Nation's (UN) population/sustainable development discourses. I argue that the said disciplinary narratives and apparatu…
The Personal is Not Political: At Least in the UK's Top Politics and IR Departments
Through mapping the provision of teaching gender and sexuality studies on politics/political science and international relations (IR) programmes, this article asserts that the top-ranked politics and IR departments in the UK offer very little provision of such teaching. We argue that this lack of gender and, more so, sexuality teaching is highly problematic for the discipline. Moreover, we suggest that the lack of such provision is not reflective…
Sustainable Development: Problematising Normative Constructions of Gender within Global Environmental Governmentality
Systems of governance are legitimised as an almost indispensable response to global co-ordination over matters of environmental degradation. Considering sustainable development as the key label for ‘common-sense’ political approaches to environmental degradation and a key informant for international environmental policy-making activity, this article seeks to problematise such a widespread discourse as (re)productive of (hetero)sexist power relati…
Theorising Cameronism
This article represents an early and, largely speculative, attempt to make sense of Cameronism as a distinctive political project. Herein, we present three separate, but potentially overlapping, narratives that could be employed to locate the significance of Cameronism within broader trends in British and global party politics. In this respect, we view Cameronism as: a continuation of Thatcherism; a development in the unfolding of forms of neo-li…
Reflecting on What? Addressing Sexuality in Social Work
This article is written by five women from different settings in social work and academia, who are all qualified social workers. Their personal experiences and sexual identities are also different, but they hold a coherent commitment to improving social work practice by addressing sexuality issues in their work. The article considers a number of areas of relevance and interest to social work practitioners, managers and researchers, all focusing o…
Sustainable Development Policy in Britain: Shaping Conduct Through Global Governmentality
Dialogue About Dialogue ‐ Investigating Intersubjectivity in Interview Research
This essay represents a dialogue between the two co‐authors about the role of intersubjectivity in their respective fields of research‐intergroup dialogue and communication at the end of life. Using dialogue and intersubjectivity as both the topic and the method of their inquiry, the authors work together to articulate the nature of intersubjective moments in interview research, the relationship between dialogue and intersubjectivity, the conditi…
Desiring Dialectical Discourse: A Feminist Ponders the Transition to Motherhood
Contemporary discourse about career motherhood reifies a public/private dichotomy that ignores the evolving obligations and desires in women's lives. Problems arise when complex private stories of pregnancy meet the inflexibility of public discourse and its concomitant social practices. A relational perspective reframes “public/private” from static binary to dynamic dialectic. Mirroring the proposed public and private dialectic, this essay integr…
Storm Tracking: Scenes of Marital Disintegration
The purpose of the research was to explore the kinds of conflict cycles couples may engage in even as they struggle to overcome their problems. This script was developed from research notes, contemporaneously recorded during the weeks leading to the author's separation from her husband, using autoethnographic processes of systematic introspection.1 The play script form was adopted to reflect the coconstructed, embodied, and embedded nature of rel…
Theorising Cameronism
This article represents an early and, largely speculative, attempt to make sense of Cameronism as a distinctive political project. Herein, we present three separate, but potentially overlapping, narratives that could be employed to locate the significance of Cameronism within broader trends in British and global party politics. In this respect, we view Cameronism as: a continuation of Thatcherism; a development in the unfolding of forms of neo-li…
The Personal is Not Political: At Least in the UK's Top Politics and IR Departments
Through mapping the provision of teaching gender and sexuality studies on politics/political science and international relations (IR) programmes, this article asserts that the top-ranked politics and IR departments in the UK offer very little provision of such teaching. We argue that this lack of gender and, more so, sexuality teaching is highly problematic for the discipline. Moreover, we suggest that the lack of such provision is not reflective…
Ecofeminism revisited: Critical Insights on Contemporary Environmental Governance
Echoing other articles in this special issue, this article re-evaluates a collection of feminist works that fell out of fashion as a consequence of academic feminism embracing poststructuralist and postmodernist trends. In line with fellow contributors, the article critically reflects upon the unsympathetic reading of feminisms considered to be essentialising and universalistic, in order to re-evaluate, in my case, ecofeminism. As an introduction…
Academic Labor in the Age of Anxiety: Autoethnography Matters
In this autoethnographic essay, I reflect on three spheres of academic work-program administration, teaching, and scholarship-and find evidence of the effects of neoliberalism in each sphere of practice. Specifically, I articulate the prevailing emotional experience of my academic work as anxiety, which is a consequence of internalizing the construction of students-as-consumers and responding uncritically to the demands of academic organizations …
Desiring Dialectical Discourse: A Feminist Ponders the Transition to Motherhood
Contemporary discourse about career motherhood reifies a public/private dichotomy that ignores the evolving obligations and desires in women's lives. Problems arise when complex private stories of pregnancy meet the inflexibility of public discourse and its concomitant social practices. A relational perspective reframes “public/private” from static binary to dynamic dialectic. Mirroring the proposed public and private dialectic, this essay integr…
Gendering Global Conflict: Towards a Feminist Theory of War
Within the growing discipline of feminist security studies and given the increased attention awarded to mainstream security studies, in what is a geo-politically unstable period for many areas of t
Storm Tracking: Scenes of Marital Disintegration
The purpose of the research was to explore the kinds of conflict cycles couples may engage in even as they struggle to overcome their problems. This script was developed from research notes, contemporaneously recorded during the weeks leading to the author's separation from her husband, using autoethnographic processes of systematic introspection.1 The play script form was adopted to reflect the coconstructed, embodied, and embedded nature of rel…
International sustainable development policy: (Re)producing Sexual Norms Through Eco-Discipline
This article contends that the global thrust towards population management, legitimised by the concept of sustainable development, works to construct identities along the lines of gender and sexuality. This article focuses on the operation of what Foucault termed, biopower, as operational through and (re)productive of the United Nation's (UN) population/sustainable development discourses. I argue that the said disciplinary narratives and apparatu…
Sustainable Development: Problematising Normative Constructions of Gender within Global Environmental Governmentality
Systems of governance are legitimised as an almost indispensable response to global co-ordination over matters of environmental degradation. Considering sustainable development as the key label for ‘common-sense’ political approaches to environmental degradation and a key informant for international environmental policy-making activity, this article seeks to problematise such a widespread discourse as (re)productive of (hetero)sexist power relati…
What Kind of ‘Big Government’ is the Big Society? A Reply to Bulley and Sokhi-Bulley
Research Highlights and Abstract This article Contributes to the debates applying Foucauldian theory to contemporary British Politics and invigorates the debate through a discussion with Bulley and Sokhi Bulley Develops understandings of contemporary British Politics under the Coalition government, particularly in light of the ‘Big Society’ project. Compares, through a Foucauldian framework, the differences and similarities between the New Labour…
Dialogue About Dialogue ‐ Investigating Intersubjectivity in Interview Research
This essay represents a dialogue between the two co‐authors about the role of intersubjectivity in their respective fields of research‐intergroup dialogue and communication at the end of life. Using dialogue and intersubjectivity as both the topic and the method of their inquiry, the authors work together to articulate the nature of intersubjective moments in interview research, the relationship between dialogue and intersubjectivity, the conditi…
Getting back in the DeLorean: Modernization vs. anti-modernization in contemporary British politics
This article highlights a growing clash between mainstream modernizing and populist anti-modernizing forces in the UK. Whilst scholarship on UK party politics has, for the past three decades, focussed on processes of party modernization, little attention has been paid to the countervailing processes of resistance towards modernization. This contrasts with comparative studies, which show that throughout much of Europe modernization processes have …
Reflecting on What? Addressing Sexuality in Social Work
This article is written by five women from different settings in social work and academia, who are all qualified social workers. Their personal experiences and sexual identities are also different, but they hold a coherent commitment to improving social work practice by addressing sexuality issues in their work. The article considers a number of areas of relevance and interest to social work practitioners, managers and researchers, all focusing o…
Sustainable Development Policy in Britain: Shaping Conduct Through Global Governmentality
Storm Tracking: Scenes of Marital Disintegration
The purpose of the research was to explore the kinds of conflict cycles couples may engage in even as they struggle to overcome their problems. This script was developed from research notes, contemporaneously recorded during the weeks leading to the author's separation from her husband, using autoethnographic processes of systematic introspection.1 The play script form was adopted to reflect the coconstructed, embodied, and embedded nature of rel…
Desiring Dialectical Discourse: A Feminist Ponders the Transition to Motherhood
Contemporary discourse about career motherhood reifies a public/private dichotomy that ignores the evolving obligations and desires in women's lives. Problems arise when complex private stories of pregnancy meet the inflexibility of public discourse and its concomitant social practices. A relational perspective reframes “public/private” from static binary to dynamic dialectic. Mirroring the proposed public and private dialectic, this essay integr…
Sustainable Development Policy in Britain: Shaping Conduct Through Global Governmentality
Dialogue About Dialogue ‐ Investigating Intersubjectivity in Interview Research
This essay represents a dialogue between the two co‐authors about the role of intersubjectivity in their respective fields of research‐intergroup dialogue and communication at the end of life. Using dialogue and intersubjectivity as both the topic and the method of their inquiry, the authors work together to articulate the nature of intersubjective moments in interview research, the relationship between dialogue and intersubjectivity, the conditi…
Reflecting on What? Addressing Sexuality in Social Work
This article is written by five women from different settings in social work and academia, who are all qualified social workers. Their personal experiences and sexual identities are also different, but they hold a coherent commitment to improving social work practice by addressing sexuality issues in their work. The article considers a number of areas of relevance and interest to social work practitioners, managers and researchers, all focusing o…
Sustainable Development: Problematising Normative Constructions of Gender within Global Environmental Governmentality
Systems of governance are legitimised as an almost indispensable response to global co-ordination over matters of environmental degradation. Considering sustainable development as the key label for ‘common-sense’ political approaches to environmental degradation and a key informant for international environmental policy-making activity, this article seeks to problematise such a widespread discourse as (re)productive of (hetero)sexist power relati…
Theorising Cameronism
This article represents an early and, largely speculative, attempt to make sense of Cameronism as a distinctive political project. Herein, we present three separate, but potentially overlapping, narratives that could be employed to locate the significance of Cameronism within broader trends in British and global party politics. In this respect, we view Cameronism as: a continuation of Thatcherism; a development in the unfolding of forms of neo-li…
The Personal is Not Political: At Least in the UK's Top Politics and IR Departments
Through mapping the provision of teaching gender and sexuality studies on politics/political science and international relations (IR) programmes, this article asserts that the top-ranked politics and IR departments in the UK offer very little provision of such teaching. We argue that this lack of gender and, more so, sexuality teaching is highly problematic for the discipline. Moreover, we suggest that the lack of such provision is not reflective…
International sustainable development policy: (Re)producing Sexual Norms Through Eco-Discipline
This article contends that the global thrust towards population management, legitimised by the concept of sustainable development, works to construct identities along the lines of gender and sexuality. This article focuses on the operation of what Foucault termed, biopower, as operational through and (re)productive of the United Nation's (UN) population/sustainable development discourses. I argue that the said disciplinary narratives and apparatu…
Physicians’ Stories: Autoethnography, Presence, and Rhizomatic Inquiry
This article reflects on a project in which the author guided several physicians as they wrote their first autoethnographic research articles, which were then presented at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in 2011. Revisiting three of the physicians’ stories, the article articulates the significance of having physicians—scientists by training—engage autoethnography as an emotional, literary, poetic, and embodied practice. The auth…
What Kind of ‘Big Government’ is the Big Society? A Reply to Bulley and Sokhi-Bulley
Research Highlights and Abstract This article Contributes to the debates applying Foucauldian theory to contemporary British Politics and invigorates the debate through a discussion with Bulley and Sokhi Bulley Develops understandings of contemporary British Politics under the Coalition government, particularly in light of the ‘Big Society’ project. Compares, through a Foucauldian framework, the differences and similarities between the New Labour…
Gendering Global Conflict: Towards a Feminist Theory of War
Within the growing discipline of feminist security studies and given the increased attention awarded to mainstream security studies, in what is a geo-politically unstable period for many areas of t
Narrative and the Subjunctive Imaginary: An Expatriate Autoethnographer Reaches for Home
This article is a narrative response to an invitation from the editor of this special issue to meditate on the theme of “home.” The central narrative is a retelling of a retelling—the author's brother recounting how he met “the man who saved his life” 20 years earlier and learned from him details of the story that were missing. For the author, the experience of listening to the story prompts an exploration of theories about the relationship betwe…
Implementing the Employability Agenda: A Critical Review of Curriculum Developments in Political Science and International Relations in English Universities
This article draws on research commissioned by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and conducted during 2013. It interrogates the ways in which the employability agenda has been fed through to the level of individual politics departments. The project was particularly concerned with establishing whether, and how, colleagues in politics and international relations (IR) had taken ownership of student employability at the level of the curriculum. In t…
Academic Labor in the Age of Anxiety: Autoethnography Matters
In this autoethnographic essay, I reflect on three spheres of academic work-program administration, teaching, and scholarship-and find evidence of the effects of neoliberalism in each sphere of practice. Specifically, I articulate the prevailing emotional experience of my academic work as anxiety, which is a consequence of internalizing the construction of students-as-consumers and responding uncritically to the demands of academic organizations …
Getting back in the DeLorean: Modernization vs. anti-modernization in contemporary British politics
This article highlights a growing clash between mainstream modernizing and populist anti-modernizing forces in the UK. Whilst scholarship on UK party politics has, for the past three decades, focussed on processes of party modernization, little attention has been paid to the countervailing processes of resistance towards modernization. This contrasts with comparative studies, which show that throughout much of Europe modernization processes have …
Perceived Efficacy of Medical Cannabis in the Treatment of Co-Occurring Health-Related Quality of Life Symptoms
For persons living with chronic conditions, health-related quality of life (HRQoL) symptoms, such as pain, anxiety, depression, and insomnia, often interact and mutually reinforce one another. There is evidence that medical cannabis (MC) may be efficacious in ameliorating such symptoms and improving HRQoL. As many of these HRQoL symptoms may mutually reinforce one another, we conducted an exploratory study to investigate how MC users perceive the…
Self-Efficacy in Researching and Obtaining Medical Cannabis by Patients With Chronic Conditions
Background. Due to the increasing availability of medical-grade cannabis for treatment of chronic conditions, we examined how prospective users navigate the process of researching, procuring, and using cannabis. Given the barriers prospective users experience, self-efficacy may be a factor for those who incorporate cannabis into treatment. Aims. The purpose of this study was to identify behaviors associated with self-efficacy in the context of re…
Impact of a health marketing campaign on sugars intake by children aged 5–11 years and parental views on reducing children’s consumption
A health marketing campaign had a positive impact in reducing sugars intake but reductions in sugars were not sustained. Parents want to reduce their child's sugars intake but societal barriers and confusion over which sources of sugars to avoid hamper efforts to change
Other People’s Children: Conscience, Complicity, and Collective Engagement
Integrating personal stories of maternal connection and separation with a detailed analysis of the 2018 crisis of migrant family separation in the United States, this autoethnographic essay examines the continuum between parental responsibility and collective engagement for the greater good. A comparison is made between the current crisis of family separation and the case of the Stolen Generations of Indigenous children in Australia, particularly…
Ecofeminism revisited: Critical Insights on Contemporary Environmental Governance
Echoing other articles in this special issue, this article re-evaluates a collection of feminist works that fell out of fashion as a consequence of academic feminism embracing poststructuralist and postmodernist trends. In line with fellow contributors, the article critically reflects upon the unsympathetic reading of feminisms considered to be essentialising and universalistic, in order to re-evaluate, in my case, ecofeminism. As an introduction…
“Inter and Enter: An Invitation to Collaboration Thru Autoethnography”
This performative and collaborative autoethnography plays with the homophonic or maybe homiletics of “inter” and “enter” as the invitational aspect of collaborative autoethnography. The contribution of diverse collaborators from differing racial, ethnic, geo-spatial locations, and generational standpoints speak to/between experiences with the dialogic aspects of autoethnography; the speaking of self with and for others that is always a part of au…
There Was an Old Woman Who . . . Lost Patience With the Academy and Performed Her Frustration at a Public Meeting
Taking as its starting point the nursery rhyme about the old woman who swallowed a fly, this autoethnographic performance text presents a fable of an old woman who first becomes invisible and then realizes that she can reclaim her power, but only once she rids herself of all the “rubbish” she has consumed. The text adopts the traditional format of a play script and references core themes of critical performance studies—gender, power, the body, pr…
Autoethnographies of Precarity: Risky Business, Uncertain Futures, and … the Work Continues
This article serves as the introduction to the special issue “Risky Business, Uncertain Futures, and ... the Work Continues.” The special issue emerged from the preconference of the Autoethnography Special Interest Group of the International Association of Qualitative Inquiry meeting in 2025. The article presents autoethnography as inherently risky and as a methodology that can sustain us through uncertain times and events that call us to reflect…
Introduction to Presence Tense: Moving Collectively Into a New History
This introductory essay introduces the themes of the gathering at the 20th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry that gave rise to this special issue, and frames the ten contributed articles with four intersecting themes related to autoethnographic inquiry: autoethnography as making space , embodied futurity , intergenerational responsibility, and resistance
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Pedagogy (7 works)