Dr Timothy Joubert

Profile

I am currently a Research Assistant in Leeds Social Sciences Institute, working on the project ‘Anchor Institutions and Economic Resilience in the city of Leeds’. This project is investigating procurement driven by local anchor institutions and how it can be used to deliver a more resilient and prosperous local economy. I’ve written a blog summarising this project here.

My background is in critical urban geography, where I have been interested in everything to do with the governance, politics, economics and infrastructures of cities. I am also interested in issues of social movement organisation and strategy, and the role of the state in capitalist economies. Bringing these together my main research interest is in where these overlap, in the question of state-oriented strategies for social change at the urban scale. I want to understand the connections between public institutions and civic and social activism in driving local economic change. My PhD from the School of Geography at the University of Leeds explored this question through a case study of the 1980s Greater London Council, when it was under the control of the ‘new urban left’ with roots in a wide range of social movements. This study explored how the left GLC presented a new urban imaginary for London and developed innovative local economic interventions, including working with and supporting urban campaigners. I showed how urban activists grappled with the restrictions and barriers of working within the state to develop new spaces of political autonomy through creative engagements with financial, legal, and internal bureaucratic structures.

That historical case study responded to present-day engagement with ‘new municipalism’, which names a novel form of radical urban politics that is grounded in ideas of the commons while open to engagement with local state institutions – including as elected councillors and institutional insiders. One of the key emphases of the municipalist movement is to transform not only the purpose, policies and outcomes of urban governance but also its conduct and processes. In the UK one of the influential currents of municipalism is ‘community wealth-building’, a local economic development approach aimed at nurturing local capabilities and keeping wealth circulating locally, rather than ‘leaking’ out to corporate profiteers. Among other things, this involves supporting the growth of alternative forms of ownership and control of urban assets and resources, through things like cooperative development agencies or helping ventures in the social and solidarity economy to access stable income through public supply chains.

My current research is exploring how the principles of community wealth-building can be embedded in the procurement policies and practices of local ‘anchors’ (large local employers, often with a public service remit like universities, hospitals, and the local council). This project, funded by Research England’s Policy Support Fund, is working with the Leeds Anchor Network to explore their procurement policies and practices, especially in light of new procurement legislation and the wider context of the government’s devolution agenda. We will be posting updates on our research on our project page.

Research interests

I am broadly interested in the question of how urban activists drive change through engagement with (local) public and state institutions. To explore this I have developed three linked research interests:

• Progressive urban economic governance. I am interested in how local institutional actors can reshape local economies to improve quality of life and support the development of alternative forms of ownership and control in local economies. I’m especially interested in identifying and exploring points of leverage for urban economic change, and how institutions involved in local governance can use specific processes, such as procurement, as tools for delivering transformative policy objectives.
   
• Public-commons partnership. I want to understand how public institutions can support the growth of collective ownership through forms of collaboration and partnership, especially where local states can use their legal and financial powers to de-risk common ownership and cooperative economic activity and act to help coordinate a wider ecology of commons projects. I am particularly focused on how this plays out in the everyday spaces of governance and engagement across state-community boundaries.
   
• Activist state-work. This strand of my work tries to understand the experience of institutional activists, or ‘guerrilla bureaucrats’, who bring political commitments into the spaces of governance and bridge the domains of activism and bureaucracy. What are the unique opportunities and challenges of acting with activist intent inside public institutional spaces? How do guerrilla bureaucrats negotiate the internal dynamics of public bureaucracies, and how do they deal with the contradictions of being simultaneously ‘in and against’ the state? I’m interested in how the actual labour involved in bridging activism and officialdom is undertaken, and how this unstable space might potentially generate creative approaches to wider institutional problems and the challenge of how to generate leverage for social change.

Qualifications

• PhD Geography (University of Leeds, 2022)
• MA Social and Cultural Geography (University of Leeds, 2015)
• BA Social Sciences (Leeds Beckett University, 2014)

Professional memberships

• Royal Geographical Society
• Association of American Geographers

Student education

I am not currently involved in teaching at the University of Leeds. I have previously been an Associate Lecturer at Leeds Beckett University where I have convened several modules in geography and sociology.