PhD project summary:
Community organising is an approach to collective action that focuses on building grassroots power through using listening to identify local issues, constructing relationships of solidarity between community members, developing the leadership capabilities of grassroots actors, taking nonviolent political action, and engaging decision-makers to negotiate for change. The practice is shaped by decades of campaigning in the United States, but builds upon a much wider history of ordinary people acting together to create change against dominant hierarchies.
While community organising in its modern form took shape within the political backdrop of mostly stable liberal democracy, today many democracies are facing deep challenges, from popular disillusionment to the surging popularity of populist, anti-system parties. Increasing numbers of pro-democracy voices argue that democracy’s survival relies upon urgent democratic innovation, such as de-centering the importance of elections in favour of participatory and deliberative approaches that bring citizens closer to political power. Yet these proposals are often highly idealized and relatively infrequent. How citizens’ participation can be enhanced – at scale and across group differences – remains underexplored, leaving a gap between these ideal theories and here-and-now political realities.
This project asks whether community organising approaches have a particular potential to facilitate these political dynamics and thus help transform democracy in this moment of crisis. This project will investigate whether prefiguring democratic futures, through community organising approaches, could enable citizens to not only create change within status-quo electoral democracy, but build a foundation for far-reaching, constitutional democratic transformation.
As a methodology that seeks to transform ordinary citizens into political actors, capable of collectively shaping their own political fate, while building broad movements that cut across differences, what lessons might community organising hold for how to transform and revitalize democracy? If democratic transformation necessarily involves challenging existing power structures and hierarchies, could community organising provide a framework for such a political confrontation?
This project connects political anthropology with political theory to develop novel contributions to democratic theory. Drawing on collaborative, ethnographic research of and with communities in South London, it explores the potentialities for democratic transformation in the experiences, dynamics, and political-philosophical implications of present day community organising practice. Working in collaboration with Citizens UK – the ‘home of community organising in the UK’ – this project creates an opportunity for a PhD student to work alongside professional community organisers and grassroots leaders at the forefront of real political struggles to analyse whether their organising can meaningfully challenge conventional hierarchies of power in democratic life. The student would develop a collaborative project using community organising both as a methodological approach and the subject of analysis, and informed by participatory action research methodology, with the aim to produce both real-world impact and as well as scholarly insights, by building on this collaboration.
Supervisor(s):
Steven Klein: steven.klein@kcl.ac.uk
Farhan Samanani: farhan.samanani@kcl.ac.uk
CASE non-academic partner: Citizens UK: https://www.citizensuk.org/
LISS Institution: King’s College London, Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy, Political Economy
PhD Programme: Politics Research PhD
Full-time / Part-time: Full-time
1+3.5 or +3.5 studentship: +3.5
Fee Eligibility: Home‑eligible applicants only (UKRI eligibility guidance)
How to apply:
Submit your application via King’s Apply including the funder reference “LISSDTPCASE26-KLEIN”, and the documents below:
- LISS DTP CASE application form
- Academic transcripts
- References
Additionally, all applicants must complete:
- LISS DTP Diversity Monitoring Form (online)
Closing date for applications: 27th February 2026
Interviews date: mid-March, to be confirmed