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Journal of Language and Politics: Online-First Articles

Community organising and radical democracy

From praxis to theory and back again

ORCID logo | University of Essex | University of Oxford
ORCID logo | University of Essex
ORCID logo | University of Essex
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.
Keywords: community organising, radical democracy, agonism, discourse theory, social movements, Citizens UK
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Community organising: The Case of Citizens UK
  • 3.Community organising in critical political theory and in relation to radical democracy
  • 4.Enhancing our exploration of the theory-praxis nexus through a DT‑informed illustrative discourse analysis
  • 5.Partisanship
  • 6.Alliances
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
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