The COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements and renewed action against climate change all highlight grassroots pressure for political and social change on a global level. All are opposed by the international rise of market-driven neoliberalism and Right-wing populism. This growing conflict also spotlights the increasing gulf between narrowly based dominant political ideologies and popular demands for social justice, peace, environmentalism and human rights. Such grassroots campaigns have many different origins and expressions. But what they largely have in common is a desire to have more say and control over prevailing policies and values.

This book connects with this global intellectual and political challenge by examining for the first time the exclusionary nature of prevailing political ideologies. It does this at a time of rising interest in grassroots, citizen and service user participation in academic, research, policy, professional, political, social and cultural agendas. It not only offers a detailed critique of how we have got to present approaches to ideology and their limitations, but the crucial importance of moving to more participatory approaches, as is now recognised more generally for public policy and practice, and how this may be achieved.

The popular struggles now taking place and forcing themselves into news headlines and all our consciousness are not the one-minute wonders some of their critics might have hoped to dismiss them as. They have deep roots in history. The #MeToo movement's first high profile expression connected it with Hollywood and show business, where a long history of marginalising and abusing women was institutionalised in ugly clichés like ‘the casting couch’. But the #MeToo movement had its origins in –and rapidly gained mass profile and support for highlighting – the pervasiveness of sexual abuse and assault in society (Fileborn and Loney-Howes, 2019).

Similarly, the Black Lives Matter movement did not come out of nowhere. Over many decades there has been a catalogue of attacks on African Americans by US police and a frequent matching failure of the criminal justice system to convict the guilty.