Community organising and radical democracy

From praxis to theory and back again

Bibliographic Data

ID6084375
AuthorsJulius Schneider (0000-0001-8449-0497), Rebecca Warren (0000-0002-2946-2650), Jason Glynos (0000-0002-4801-4001)
Year2025
Volume24
Issue1
Pages69-90
Publication date2025-01-24
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Language and Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1569-2159 • E-ISSN: 1569-9862
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/jlp.24201.sch
OpenAlexW4406143575
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited18

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

Argument (complex analysis · Community organizing · Democracy · Epistemology · Grassroots · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Scholarship · Sociology · Vignette · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Psychology · Social Media and Politics · Social Work Education and Practice · Law · Social Psychology

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access