Defragment your self
I have been interested in community organising for some time, and am currently part of an organisation trying to do it. When you try to do it, you find it is hard, or at least, we find that. But has it always been this hard? I’ve been reading some historical accounts of community organising in…
I’ve just finished my first attempt at Participatory Action Research within a social movement organisation, specifically London Renters Union. I designed the research so that there would be two types of participatory interaction – interviews and workshops – and two different outputs, one for academia and one for the union. I wouldn’t expect anyone in…
I have been re-reading a classic of social movement studies ‘Poor people’s movements: Why they succeed and how they fail’ by Piven and Cloward. It has energised me a lot more than most social movement studies texts because it’s authors are very concerned with how to win. Their thesis was provocative in the 1970s and…
There isn’t much academic work on deepening the involvement of new members in a social movement organisation. Since I am doing some research around this I wanted to get beyond Hahrie Han’s ‘How organisations develop activists’, which while excellent, is limited by only a couple of case studies in fairly middle-of-the-road organisations. So I was…
The world is messed up and that’s why a lot of people do politics. Saying the world is messed up is also a way of saying we are messed up. Our mental health needs constant attention and activist organisations don’t always pay enough attention to it. In fact when I searched recently for tools to…
It was the first truly warm day of spring and the fourteenth day since the beginning of the coronavirus lockdown. For my government-mandated exercise I had been exploring by bicycle the Quaggy River, after which my housing co-operative is named. There was no particular reason to do this except for the arbitrary name of the…