Small-scale citizen action movements have become more common in the political arena in the last 20 years and most research on them has been done at a very broad level. This project uses an ethnographic approach to observe first-hand the organization, level of citizen participation, and the history of one such group in Britain: women tenants of public sector housing developments (council estates). Through the use of consensus modeling and other sophisticated research methods, the researcher will determine what new knowledge activists learn about the social order through their participation in local-level political campaigns and the degree to which participants' values and attitudes are transformed. This work will result in one of the few thorough studies of citizen action in Western Europe, and will contribute to the growing corpus of anthropological literature on contemporary social movements and on women's forms of political action.
