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How does women's labour market disconnection impact on health and well‐being? The paper seeks to explain how economic isolation can cause low self esteem for women. Neighbourhood analysis provides the opportunity to explore some of the operational contradictions in public policy and how they are experienced in regeneration areas.

Local dynamics of employment and health are examined in neighbourhoods in two UK cities. The research draws on focus group data involving local women as well as interviews with representatives of statutory and voluntary organisations. Examination of relevant statistical data supports the evidence base on women's well‐being in these regeneration areas.

By analysing labour market characteristics and local women's experiences, depression and low esteem in relation to low incomes, barriers to employment and discrimination emerge as particularly important aspects of well‐being. The paper suggests that policy makers often fail to make the connections between women's marginalisation from the labour market and the causes of persistently high levels of poor health.

Policy implications suggest that public agencies seeking to promote economic sustainability need to consider health issues along with other neighbourhood characteristics as part of a holistic approach to labour market activation.

The originality lies in engagement with several areas of public management practice aimed at addressing poverty and improving community well‐being. By exploring issues of economic inactivity, employability and ill health among women the findings help inform policies seeking to address problems of worklessness in local neighbourhoods.

Preservice English teachers are expected to use literary theories and criticism to read and respond to literary texts. Over the past century, two of the most common approaches to literary encounters in secondary schools have been New Criticism – particularly the practice of close reading – and Rosenblatt's transactional theory, both of which have been expanded through critical theorizing along the way. Elucidated by data produced in iterative experiments with Frost's “The Road Not Taken,” the authors reconceptualize the reader, the text, and close reading through the critical posthuman theory of reading with love as a generative way of thinking outside of the habitual practices of European humanisms.

In “thinking with” (Jackson and Mazzei, 2023) desiring-machines, affect, Man and critical posthuman theory, this post qualitative inquiry maps how the “The Road Not Taken” worked when students plugged into it iteratively in processes of reading with love, an affirmative and creative series of experiments with literature.

This study mapped how respect for authority, the battle of good v evil, individualism and meritocracy operated as desiring-machines that channeled most participants’ initial readings of “The Road Not Taken.” In subsequent experiments with the poem, the authors demonstrate that reading with love as a critical posthuman process of reading invites participants to exceed the logics of recognition and representation, add or invent additional ways of being and relating to the world and thereby produce the possibility to transform a world toward greater inclusivity and equity.

The authors reconceptualize the categories of “the reader” and “the text” from Rosenblatt’s transactional theory within practices of reading with love, which they situate within a critical posthuman theory. They eschew separating efferent and aesthetic reading stances while also recuperating practices of “close reading,” historically associated with the New Critics, by demonstrating the generativity of critically valenced “close reading” within a Deleuzian process of reading with love.