We bring our distinctive power-aware lens to research that identifies and supports the knowledge, action and leadership needed for better lives. We pioneer new methods and new ways of generating knowledge for change with communities, activists, academics and professional co-researchers from both the global North and South, using qualitative, ethnographic and action research.
Using a power lens on all our work, we examine popular forms of contestation. We’re particularly interested in contestation over rights, entitlements and justice that goes beyond institutionalised forms of participation.
Our Power and Popular Politics cluster focuses on:
- Critically engaging with voice, accountability and citizenship in established, changing and and emerging civic spaces, including the interface between the online/offline.
- Exploring through a post-civil society lens organised and non-organised, violent and peaceful social and political action and unruliness.
- Addressing intersecting inequalities with ethnic and religious minority groups and others who have been marginalised or rendered invisible.
- Investigating the mechanisms of social change arising from global crises and local responses seen through a moral economy lens.
- Mobilising new understandings of power to counter patriarchy and other structural drivers of the backlash against movements for equality and accountability.