Jodie Bradshaw (UCL) - 2024-25 Students
uclzjpb@ucl.ac.uk

Empowering Radical Democracies in Anti-Racist Struggle: Learning from Activists in Britain and France

Following the lethal police shootings of Nahel Merzouk in 2023 in France and Chris Kaba in 2022 in Britain, anti-racist protests have risen exponentially in recent years, continuing the long and enduring history of anti-racist resistance to structural, institutional, and systemic racism. Mass mobilisation has coincided with increased popular disaffection with liberal representative democratic institutions. Emerging as a corrective for this democratic deficit, social movements are an increasingly preferred means of redress for discriminatory treatment rather than traditional avenues of influence within liberal representative democratic regimes. While anti-racist social movements are prominent sites of resistance, they adopt divergent strategies to empower members and confront internal power relations.

This research foregrounds the epistemological insights of activists to identify their different radical democratic practices adopted to foster empowerment, challenge processes of racialisation, and collectively imagine alternative cosmovisions. This is examined through a convergent parallel mixed-methods study consisting of: (1) Participatory Action Research, (2) ethnographic direct participative study of grassroot social movements, (3) semi-structured interviews with anti-racist activists (individually and in focus groups), and (4) an analysis of social movements’ published materials. The data collected will be analysed qualitatively and quantitatively through feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis and the discourse quality index using the software NVivo.

Principal Supervisor: Dr Kevin Inston

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