Jeremy Deller, the London-based artist who describes himself as “part alchemist, part social anthropologist”, is the winner of this year's £25,000 Turner Prize.

Deller, who was favourite to win the prize, received the award for his documentary film “Memory Bucket” (2003), shot in Texas, which mixes archive footage with interviews of local people in two politically loaded locations: Waco, site of 1993's Branch Davidian siege, and President Bush's home town of Crawford.

The judges praised Deller's “generosity of spirit across a succession of projects that engage with social and cultural contexts and celebrate the creativity of individuals.”

Deller, 38, is one of the most socially and politically engaged artists to win the prize for many years recent awards have gone to more colourful and controversial characters such as Grayson Perry, Keith Tyson and Martin Creed.

Deller's best-known work is “The Battle of Orgreave” (2001), which brought together veteran miners and members of historical re-enactment societies to restage one of the most violent clashes between miners and police during the 1984-5 strike. The project resulted in a film directed by Mike Figgis.

In “Memory Bucket”, Deller interviews survivors from the Waco siege, an elderly Quaker woman giving her reasons for attending an anti-Bush rally, and the owner of President Bush's local diner. The film ends with a lingering shot of about 3m bats emerging from a cave in an evening ritual, a sharp reminder of the resilience of the natural world in the face of transitory socio-political events.

Deller's work also shows a fascination with oral history. For his room at the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain, he has employed experts on the various themes covered in his works to walk round the London gallery, and talk to visitors.

Another interest of the artist is the unlikely juxtaposition of various cultural traditions: with “Acid Brass” (1997), Deller invited a traditional brass band to play reworked acid house anthems, bringing together the two genres for their common working-class roots and resistance to the right-wing government of Margaret Thatcher.

In “The History of the World”, also on display at the current Tate show, Deller has drawn a huge chart that makes connections between various social movements to show how they are related. The artist claims hewas inspired by a quotation by Lenin, that “everything is connected to everything else.”

In his 1999 show “Unconvention”, Deller brought together various art works that had inspired the rock band The Manic Street Preachers, and invited organisations that sympathised with the band's left-wing beliefs to set up stalls at Cardiff's Centre for Visual Arts. Arthur Scargill gave a speech and the Pendyrus Male Choir performed in front of Andy Warhol's self-portrait.

Deller's interest in the cultural landscape of the US was brought to fruition in his “After the Goldrush” (2002), a kind of guidebook to northern California that included personal narratives from various local figures, intertwined with cultural landmarks highlighted by Deller himself.

A similar fascination for cultural landscape inspired his “A Social Parade”, for which he organised a parade on the central boulevard of San Sebastian in Spain, comprising a cross-section of the city's low-profile social groups. The piece was chosen to mark the opening of the international art bienniale Manifesta 5.

In all these projects, Deller, who studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, has styled himself as a “collaborator”, acting as mediator, director, publisher and curator across a range of activities that lie on the fringe of mainstream culture. “A good collaboration is like going on a long journey without a map, never knowing quite where you will end up,” he has said.

Of “Acid Brass”, he says in the commentary for his Tate show: “I have to say it was one of the most pleasant experiences as an artist to work with a brass band, to hang out with those guys and to go to the concerts with them, which were just great social occasions. And that's something that I try to bring out in my work: a sense of enjoyment of what I do.”

For his new series of photographs, also on show at Tate Britain, Deller has made and commissioned a series of memorials to figures from recent history, including an official bench near the Belgravia house in London of the Beatles manager Brian Epstein, and a road sign to commemorate the death of a cyclist.

After a series of Turner shortlists in recent years that have been derided for their lack of substance most notably by culture minister Kim Howells, who criticised 2002's artists for producing “cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit” this year's Turner shortlist was widely commended for its choice of more serious artists.

Deller's rivals for the prize were Kutlug Ataman, who interviewed members of an Arab community in Turkey, near the Syrian border, about their past lives; Langlands & Bell, whose virtual-reality videos included a simulation of the house of Osama bin Laden; and Yinka Shonibare, whose colourful sculptures and videos resonate with a post-colonial sensibility.

As usual, there was no painting on show among the works of this year's shortlisted artists, but a strong suggestion that video-based art is more and more becoming the new orthdoxy among the British art establishment.

The other three shortlisted artists each received prizes of £5,000, increasing the total prize money to £40,000 in the first year that the prize has been sponsored by Gordon's Gin.