Alan Johnson

mi, 22.04.2003 04:50

Ok, so here is my introduction. I am currently working with my colleague Graeme Chesters on questions of organisation, process and 'leadership' in protest movements using ethnography, in-depth interviewing, and the life-history.

Ok, so here is my introduction. I am currently working with my colleague Graeme Chesters on questions of organisation, process and 'leadership' in protest movements using ethnography, in-depth interviewing, and the life-history. I am interested in the possibility of human self-emancipation and the relation to it of what I call 'democratic leadership' . I realise many think all leadership equals domination. I think there is/can be a kind of organising and acting that facilitates self-emancipation and I think this kind of acting is very important but very hard to do. That is what I mean by 'democratic leadership'. Others prefer to talk of action within 'leaderless cultures' . Graeme and I have many productive discussions over this! I wrote about this stuff with Colin Barker and Michael Lavalette in Leadership and Social Movements, (MUP, 2001). I am also an editor of the journals Historical Materialism and New Politics.

The two experiences I have which are most relevant to Merijn's excellent initiative are these. First, I organised what I called radical focus groups - groups of users to discuss issues of health, mental health and local services - and I wrote on the potential such groups could have for subverting the traditional research relationship. I wrote that up in 'Its Good to Talk: The Focus Group and the Sociological Imagination' in The Sociological Review, Vol.44, No.3 August 1996. Second, I worked with Hilary Wainwright on The Socialist Policy Bulletin, an effort in what we called 'policy from below' .

One interesting question for me is how to ensure such research experiences and relations can really contribute to movement capacity-building and be genuinely liberatory because sustained over time and flexible in organisation, rather than being simply cathartic.

I am also writing a book about the US marxist Hal Draper and think of myself as a 'socialist from below'.

I hope to see some of you at the Alternative Futures and Popular Protest conference in Manchester in the spring!


Alan Johnson