PhD Student - Christopher Wellbrook

Details

Thesis title: The Spark: political language and social change

Start year: 2008

Supervisors

Research Topic:

What is the relationship between political language, actors and social change? This research attempts to raise this question in two ways. What can political discourse tell us about systems of social control and political authority? and what does the interaction of political actors with dominant narratives tell us about movements (and indeed moments) of social change?

It is the purpose of this research to augment the more typical structuralist understandings of political movements with an approach that emphasises the negotiated, reflexive and ultimately social qualities of political reality. This study will utilise elements of critical discourse analysis and ethnographic study to better capture (and define) these political actors and shed greater light on the propensity for social change.

There is a current weakness in the existing literature that fails to adequately explain what these movements actually are and what they have to contribute to our understanding of social reality. Political scientists still struggle to understand and explain often rapid changes in the political agenda, the purchase of the approach I intend to take is outlining how the culmination of the collective understandings of political actors (negotiated through an interaction with popular discourse) inaugurates a process involving the exposure, redefinition and renegotiation of the conditions imposed on agency.

Module Tutor

Pol110 – History of Western Political Thought

Professional Affiliations:

Anarchist Studies Network (a PSA specialist group)