Defragment your self
London Renters Union, seeing itself as a radical organisation drawing on radical traditions, refers to a ‘right to housing’ seldom, bordering on never – at least in its formal literatures and trainings. Yet as this news clip featuring the union demonstrates, the idea of a right to housing does come up in the union’s street…
I have noticed that one key difference between people who are left wing activists and – for want of a better term – ‘normal people’, is that the former are motivated by the very idea of collective action. In the more orthodox left tradition this is collective action in the workplace, while in the post-60s…
It’s exciting to see tenants in Berlin campaigning to take formerly government owned properties back into public hands, but it does rely on specific elements of German law that we don’t have in the UK. So how could we equalise the relationship between renters and landlords in the UK – not in some hand-wavy level-playing…
There is today no strong relationship between therapy and radical politics. In my experience many people who are interested in changing the world are very unsure about therapy. They worry it will seek to dampen their anger. They worry that they will become better adjusted to a world which does not deserve to be accommodated….
Owning the Earth is an account of Western land ownership from the medieval period, through colonisation to the present, though it does not, alas, always recognise how geographically restricted it is. While I enjoyed the book’s account of private property in the Anglo-sphere I’d have to disagree with reviews that refer to it as ‘comprehensive’….
Academia likes to see itself as a producer of knowledge, and that’s difficult to argue with. But most of the time its self-conception goes further than this. We are the knowledge experts, think the academics. We are better at developing knowledge than other people. It’s what we’re paid for. Years of post-modernism has, curiously, failed…
The dissertation for my MRes in Geography, available here, was research with London Renters Union into member engagement during a period of high growth in the organisation. From the beginning I designed the research to have two outcomes, one being the dissertation, the other being the work with the union, and a small report I…
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…