Birkbeck Centre for British Political Life

Description

The Birkbeck Centre for British Political Life is based in the Department of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, Bloomsbury.

Politics is never only about what elected politicians do within the formal institutions of democracies, deciding what is in their constituents' best interests and how best to distribute resources to the ‘people’. Indeed, politics determines who constitutes the people and who does not; what counts as interests that merit representation, and whether what is to be represented reflects shared identities or some other basis – the common good, the nation, particular classes or ideologies, for example.

Politics is moreover everywhere: it structures citizens and non-citizens relationships with government, parliaments and elected office but it also mediates relationships between individuals and groups in public and associational life; more broadly still, politics constitutes and reproduces power hierarchies in everyday institutional and interpersonal interactions. In the Centre's view, the study of British political life cannot also be divorced from political ideas.

The Birkbeck Centre for British Political Life is, then, also committed to the study of political actors and acts that would likely fall outside a very restricted and traditional concept of what constitutes British politics. In the Centre's view, such actors, activities, power relationships and dynamics are very much about or ‘of politics’, and hence merit academic attention.