Exploring the lifeworlds of community activists: an investigation of incompleteness and contradiction

This research investigates the lifeworlds of community activists, paying particular attention to the issues of incompleteness and contradiction. My interest in the subject area arises from a three-fold context – the development of my own subjectivity; enhancement and understanding of work-based learning; and the impact of structural inequalities, privileges and hierarchies embedded within UK society. This study deploys a multi-site action research (MSAR) methodological framework to explore (auto)biographical accounts of activists’ working contexts. Using a combination of appreciative inquiry and Lacanian analysis, the methods of this research enable an investigation and impact analysis of how political difference is formulated, articulated and mobilised in landscapes, established and characterised by disparity of access, injustice and social struggle. Hence, having identified and celebrated the key contours of community activism, these findings are critiqued and placed within the wider turbo-capitalist context. In response to the aforementioned critique, this research concludes by exploring the opportunities and challenges faced by community activists in a global age. Particular focus is given to the issues of weakness, abeyance within social movements, cracks within the capitalist system, and anarchic readings and future developments of community activism.