About

This project is about the micropolitics of grassroots community spaces. Such spaces can play a crucial role in the formation and development of the identities, capacities and solidarities that underpin political action. Potentially, they can make a significant contribution to strategies for macropolitical social change. 
 
The research focuses on emancipatory cultures and the practices that enact and reproduce them. It charts those practices in their everyday multiplicity, through social interactions and material structures, spaces and things. It attends to the affective circuits through which the social and material dimensions interrelate, and to the circular process of their mutual reproduction.
 
At the heart of the project is an ethnographic case study of Marsh House in Luton, south east England. Run "by and for the local community", Marsh House is also connected to a wider array of campaigns and social movements. It houses an events space and bar, recording studios, a community radio station, and an arts organisation. The driving force behind the space is an activist collective with roots in the unlicensed rave scene of the 1990s. 
 
Marsh House provides a base for practices of resistance and a refuge from markets, a necessarily imperfect space of decommodified social relations and human flourishing. It functions as a prefigurative experiment, a catalyst and, potentially, a building block for future social change. The research explores conditions of possibility for what could be termed, to borrow from the sociologist E. O. Wright, a "real utopia".