The Cultural Impacts of Animal Advocacy: The Case Study of Bristol, c.1970-Present

This research project will analyse the impacts of the British animal advocacy movement on public conceptualisations of animal issues between 1970 and the present. It will do this with the intention of understanding how social movement strategy affects their success at creating these cultural shifts. Focusing on the case-study of Bristol's movement, the project will use a mix of qualitative and quantitative methodologies to first identify the emergence of discursive frames within the movement, and then analyse the extent to which these frames emerged within broader society during the period under study. Changes to language in British society will be traced to particular campaigns in the movement - and by doing this, the relative success of each strategy will be identified. This project will fill significant gaps in knowledge on the history of this movement and will also contribute towards significant advances in understanding how social movement strategy impacts upon their ability to generate cultural change.

The core research question of the present project will be: 'How have the strategies of the British animal advocacy movement affected its ability to change cultural perceptions of animals?'.

The methodology of this project builds upon those of existing analyses, to ensure that its aims are both realistic and achievable. Although academics have stated that drawing links between cause and effect 'can be much harder than expected where social movement outcomes are concerned,' Nella Van Dyke and Verta Taylor have recently suggested that methodologies do exist which make it possible to overcome these. Examples include D'Anjou's, Thomas Rochon's, and William Gamson and Andre Modigliani's studies. In each of these, scholars utilised the concept of frames for their analysis to understand how an issue has been understood in a protest movement (or in Gamson and Modigliani's case, from politicians) and then propagated in public discourse in the following years. The present project will adapt this analytical process to study the impacts of the animal advocacy movement's tactics.

The project's mixed-methods approach grants it the ability to 'address all dimensions of the research question'. (Lockyer 2006) It will combine two different approaches, frame analysis and quantitative analysis, to understand the meanings being conveyed and the level of their reception in broader society.

Analysis of the animal movement will predominantly use frame analysis to gauge the key language and frames which it uses, and their intended meanings. Organisational and publicity-oriented sources from each part of the movement will be used, from archives such as the RSPCA's in Sussex, alongside newspaper statements by these organisations.

Once these meanings have been assessed, each section will go on to identify changes to conceptualisations of animals in broader British society. To add validity to this analysis, and to save time, it will begin by using quantitative techniques to highlight key moments of change to this language. Having pinpointed these, it will then follow through with close reading of this discourse, to see whether the meanings behind this usage mirrors those within the movement or not. Key sources here will be newspaper records (including published letters), Mass Observation records, council discussions, and political party records through the Labour and Conservative Party's archives in Manchester and Oxford. The variety of potential sources gives the project an opportunity to discern relative successes in protest strategy between different cultural spheres; they also give the project the opportunity to be appropriately scaled for its timeframe without affecting its validity by including or leaving out different spheres.