Schneider, Julius and Warren, Rebecca and Glynos, Jason (2025) Community Organising and Radical Democracy From Praxis to Theory and Back Again. Journal of Language and Politics, 24 (1). pp. 69-90. DOI https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.24201.sch
Schneider, Julius and Warren, Rebecca and Glynos, Jason (2025) Community Organising and Radical Democracy From Praxis to Theory and Back Again. Journal of Language and Politics, 24 (1). pp. 69-90. DOI https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.24201.sch
Schneider, Julius and Warren, Rebecca and Glynos, Jason (2025) Community Organising and Radical Democracy From Praxis to Theory and Back Again. Journal of Language and Politics, 24 (1). pp. 69-90. DOI https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.24201.sch
Abstract
Community organising is a way of doing democratic politics distinct from electoral and radical protest politics yet has been largely overlooked in discourse studies and activist scholarship, particularly when compared to the attention paid to ‘flashier’ grassroots movements. We aim to contribute to rectifying this shortcoming by exploring the conceptual connections between community organising and the political discourse theory of radical democracy. Our theoretical argument is supplemented with an illustrative vignette-based exploration, drawing on the experiences of community alliances and their members within Citizens UK, the UK’s community organising umbrella organization. We show that while radical democratic theory can help ground community organising practice and its dilemmas in a conceptually illuminating way, community organising practice, in turn, can help put some valuable ‘flesh’ onto what many consider to be the rather abstract pronouncements associated with radical democracy and its failure to elaborate what an agonistic politics looks like in practice.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | community organising, radical democracy, agonism, discourse theory, social movements, Citizens UK |
| Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences Faculty of Social Sciences > Government, Department of Faculty of Social Sciences > Essex Business School Faculty of Social Sciences > Essex Business School > Essex Accounting Centre |
| SWORD Depositor: | Unnamed user with email elements@essex.ac.uk |
| Depositing User: | Unnamed user with email elements@essex.ac.uk |
| Date Deposited: | 05 Nov 2025 16:13 |
| Last Modified: | 05 Nov 2025 16:14 |
| URI: | http://repository.essex.ac.uk/id/eprint/39887 |
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Filename: jlp.24201.sch.pdf
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