Ideology and Audience Responses to Protest During Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (1997-2010)

This project looks at how ideology affects the ways in which different groups understand and respond to protest. To study this, it will focus on responses to the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) campaign against animal experimentation, which lasted from 1997 until 2010.

Three different audience groups will be looked at during this project. These will be animal welfare organisations, scientists, and business groups. For each, the role of one ideology in shaping the audience's response to SHAC will be analysed. These will be Animal Welfarism, Empiricist Science, and Neoliberalism, respectively. In each case, the key values and ideas of the ideology will be outlined, before studying the ways in which this ideology affected how the audience understood and responded to SHAC. This will include which parts of the campaign were focused upon, and whether the ideology in question opened up or closed down opportunities for engaging with the protesters' views.

The main hope for the project is to better understand why audiences respond to protest in the way that they do. By improving understandings of this, movements can improve their communication to be able to reach different audience groups.

To achieve its aims, this project will mainly use Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as its approach. CDA is a method which takes an in-depth look at texts and tries to understand why they are the way that they are, and how they justify or reinforce repression. One of the concepts it uses to understand this is ideology. This project will use CDA to analyse texts where the three groups being studied responded to the SHAC campaign. It will look at the language and arguments being used, and how these may have been shaped by the ideologies under study. Finally, the findings from each case study will be compared to see whether there is a general effect of ideology, or whether each ideology behaves differently.
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