Life What Else

The aim of this practice as research PhD is to use the writing of contemporary fiction to explore impacts of neoliberal policies and actions in the UK.

Impacts of neoliberal ideology in recent decades, including the reduction in life expectancy, increases in homelessness and unemployment, and rises in food bank use, have been well documented. This PhD uses the writing of the novel Life What Else to address the effects of overlooked impacts on protagonists whose lives are less overtly precarious, but nevertheless adversely affected.

Life What Else consists of twelve chapters, each of which centres a different, inter-related protagonist living in, or from, the same (unnamed) town in the south-east of England.

The novel uses present-tense fiction written in the realist mode to show that whilst a character may be absorbed by the day-to-day events of their own life, the remodelling and, in some areas, withdrawal of the UK state detrimentally affects either the quality of their life, or the quality of life of those around them.

Themes explored in the novel include the impacts on young people's attitudes to sex, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for emotional support, underfunded prisons, crises in UK housing and the NHS, irregular migration, and gaps in state support for early years' parenting.

This practice as research PhD is significant in that it informs our understanding of the various and multiple ways in which the refocusing of the UK state, away from welfare and towards commerce, affects the lives of people across the social spectrum.