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Article published In: Discourse Theory and the Turn to Practice
Edited by Benjamin De Cleen, Nico Carpentier, Jason Glynos, Jana Goyvaerts, Maximilian Grönegräs and Yannis Stavrakakis
[Journal of Language and Politics 24:1] 2025
► pp. 69–90

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Community organising and radical democracy

From praxis to theory and back again

ORCiD logo with link | University of Essex | University of Oxford
ORCiD logo with link | University of Essex
ORCiD logo with link | University of Essex
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Essex.

Published online: 7 January 2025
DOI logo with link
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.
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
  • References
References (37)
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