Introduction to the Special Issue: Foregrounding social movement futures: collective action, imagination, and methodology

ABSTRACT

The future – as a theme, research orientation, and mode of framing societal challenges – is becoming important in the social sciences. Yet the absence of collective action in many such accounts makes clear the potential contribution of social movement studies. In social movement studies, meanwhile, the future has been discussed directly and indirectly. Assumptions about timing, activist orientations towards the future, and causation are embedded in understandings of strategy, agency, mobilisation, tactical choice, consequences, and in concepts of waves, cycles and diffusion. Conceptual developments around temporalities, real utopias and grassroots initiatives, imagination, and prefiguration offer some alternative perspectives and promising new directions. Foregrounding social movement futures also has implications for protesters themselves: ideas and emotions relating to the future are central to activist debates about goals, winning, utopia, hope and burnout. This introduction reviews the societal and academic context for the renewed interest in futures that are relevant for social movement studies, before outlining three major movement areas or debates where futures are implicated, and which need to form part of future research. These areas, and the subdiscipline as a whole, it is argued, may also benefit from a more direct analysis of movement futures.

KEYWORDS:

• Social movement futures
• temporalities
• future
• imagination
• strategy
• prefigurative politics

How does collective action shape visions of future society, and how might these visions shape collective action? What are the benefits of including processes of struggle, conflict, collective action and competing imaginaries in a social scientific understanding of the future? In what ways do political movements create and negotiate prospects and visions? If power inheres to social relations of every description, what imaginaries should guide political action? Foregrounding social movement futures allows us to bring together some of the most interesting recent theoretical and empirical work in movement scholarship, and to reinterrogate some core assumptions and dilemmas. In what follows, we map out a range of social scientific approaches to negotiating the future in social movement studies and suggest some ways of advancing them. To begin and to orientate discussion, we discuss the societal context in terms of debates about futures and the role of movements. The next sections then review existing relevant literature, which we integrate into three central ‘tensions’ that social movement futures must navigate in order for the potential benefits of the approach to be realised.

Why study social movement futures?

In The End of Illusions, the sociologist Andreas Reckwitz (2019) argues that disillusionment with the promise of modernity has recently become widespread, with events increasingly challenging the liberal late-modern narrative of progress. Climate change, war, coronavirus, nationalism, artificial intelligence, inflation and rising energy costs, among other challenges, have highlighted the sense of multiple intersecting crises or ‘polycrisis’, and their global nature. The economic crisis in 2007/2008, and the wave of mobilisations which followed, mainstreamed critiques of neoliberal capitalism and the status quo that were developed in the alter-globalisation movement. These critiques and the shift in how the future is perceived in popular consciousness have since evolved to become important across right- as well as left-wing social movements, political parties, and governments.

Contemporary crises have intensified discussion of economic, political and ecological alternatives that highlight the contingency of neoliberal capitalism (e.g. Frase, 2016, Morozov, 2022; Gibson-Graham, 2006; Wright, 2010). The dominance of capital in organising and subordinating social and economic life has been influentially challenged, for example, by the idea of diverse economies. There is a tendency to assume capitalism will outlast humanity itself (Fisher, 2009), to understand it as ‘hegemonic, or even the only, present form of economy and that it will continue to be so in the proximate future’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006). Yet traditional market-oriented economic exchange is far less all-encompassing as an economic logic than this (Gibson-Graham, 2006), and capital flows, and even the value of money (Graeber, 2001), rely heavily on ‘fictional expectations’; assumptions which are based on unreliable neoclassical economic modelling and extrapolation (Beckert, 2013). Furthermore, the rapid changes accompanying new digital technologies have given rise to the production of scenarios presenting possible alternative political economies that may emerge from collective struggles (Bastani, 2019; Muldoon, 2022Frase, 2016). Political responses to coronavirus, meanwhile, showed that neoliberal orthodoxies around public spending could, after all, be suspended for political expediency. In this context, the social sciences and humanities, and movements themselves (Eyerman & Jamison, 1991), are playing an increasingly important role in debates about prospects, expectations, and imagination in relation to transformation. Increasingly prevalent critiques of neoliberal capitalism and globalisation, then, appear to have opened up new space for discussion and have arguably brought some alternative futures closer in doing so (Wright, 2010).

This has coincided with a moment in which ecological degradation dominates political imaginaries. Global norms of neoliberal capitalism are at odds with the political economic shifts required to address climate change. The recipe for overcoming poverty and inequalities with economic growth is intrinsically ecologically problematic; the ‘ecological-economic dilemma’ (Dörre, 2020). Naomi Klein (2015) argues that this challenge, presented starkly as ‘capitalism vs the climate’, suggests that a fundamental reorganisation of the world economy is needed. Indeed, climate forecasting, social movements, and the imaginaries of film, literature, art and the media, have led to a particularly poignant collective orientation towards futures. Urgency is a prevailing narrative, and is only heightened by opponents’ delay tactics, who sense political advantages and continued profit in questioning an uncomfortable consensus. Statements by Greta Thunberg such as ‘I want you to panic’ (Thunberg, 2019) seek to use the leverage from dystopian visions, the growing reality of climate change, and language around emergency, to mobilize action. This framing of a dystopian future has found expression in other diverse forms, from Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for the Future (e.g. Daniel & Exner, 2020) which work across national boundaries and communities, to the media statements and legal defences for the civil disobedience and direct action groups such as Just Stop Oil.

Finally, tensions around racialised inequalities, identity, and migration are another essential and overlapping element of the context to contemporary social movement futures. Globally, there has been a resurgence of authoritarian right-wing governments, driven by well-funded reactionary movements, conspiracist imaginaries of population replacement, and over-determined nationalist politics. Authoritarian trends are refracted through imperialism, opposition to imperialism, and imperial nostalgia (Tinsley, 2021). In many countries, renewed nationalist orthodoxies permit the attribution of responsibility for society’s problems to outsiders, usually immigrants, in justifying the infringement of civil rights (Valluvan, 2021). Elsewhere, authoritarianism itself has been framed as a strategy of resistance to forms of colonial domination, with promises of emancipation justifying the elimination of democratic frameworks. At the same time, anti-racist and anti-colonial mobilisations have accounted for some of the most significant political mobilisations of the last decade, from Black Lives Matter, to Rhodes Must Fall. They demand a fundamental reappraisal of the past and present through the lens of racial and ethnic inequalities and injustices. The nature of identities is established and reproduced through memory, commemoration, visions, and imagination.

Thus, the current context presents some obvious areas where futures – as a theme, research orientation, and mode of framing societal challenges – are becoming important in the social sciences and in public debates. Yet in mainstream futures research, scenario planning, and much public debate, social struggles and collective action are missing. Collective consensus about goals is assumed, competing visions are flattened, and conflict and democracy tends to be seen as context, rather than shaping the possibility and direction of transformation. These absences only add to the the breadth and depth of the already rich potential contribution of social movement studies for futures research (Schulz, 2016).

Foregrounding futures also offers several benefits for social movement studies, where the topic is indirectly very important, and a key component in recent conceptual development. Futures have long been implicit in the theoretical paradigms dominant in studies of protest. Assumptions about them operate in influential heuristics describing trajectories of movement activity taking the form of waves, cycles, careers, and diffusion curves. They are fundamental in claims about strategy and strategic action that form the bedrock of understandings about agency and explanations of mobilisation, tactical choice, and consequences. Social movement futures are also central to recent conceptual developments around temporalities, real utopias and grassroots initiatives, collective imagination, and prefiguration. A more direct approach to social movement futures might help in dialoguing across and integrating theoretical approaches, and re-interrogating some of the assumptions that are core to social movement studies.

The potential of analysing social movement futures, then, is in underlining the role of imagined futures for: understandings of social struggles and collective action in discussions of societal challenges; in reflecting on and re-evaluating how action, agency and strategy work in theories of movements; in sharpening our social scientific understanding of possibility, explanation, prospectus, and prediction; and in appreciating, listening to, and contributing to debates about ‘the future’ in activist debates. For these reasons, this introduction argues that social movement futures should be analytically ‘foregrounded’ – brought more directly into debates – and proposes bringing together theoretical and empirical insights to deepen our understanding of the topic, as the contributions to the special issue begin to do. The next three sections add to this by reviewing the extant literature on social movement futures. They do this while mapping out a set of three paradoxes that must be navigated in order to study social movement futures, and to allow the area to fulfil its potential in enriching and advancing social movement studies at large.

Navigating the hidden assumptions and emerging concepts of social movement futures

Here, we outline some of the perspectives relevant for exploring the relationships between social movements and orientations towards the future. We do this by identifying three debates or paradoxes: around futures as agency, strategy and expression; around political imagination as artefact or practice; and future-oriented methodologies. The first is the challenge of understanding future oriented action not only in terms of rational processes but also as emotional, contested, embodied, collective, and expressive. The second set of tensions are around viewing the future in terms of established goals, scenarios and utopias; as opposed to seeing imagination as a process open to participation, experimentation and contingency. The third set of tensions concerns the diverse forms and approaches needed to study social movement futures. Here, one methodological challenge is about how to enrich movement scholarship beyond its mainly presentist or historical/narrative-based register and into the future. The second of these methodological challenges is about scale: researcher proximity to phenomena is important for capturing the intimate and interpersonal dynamics of imagination, while wider temporal arcs and spatial ranges will also be necessary dimensions to appreciate trends, narratives and comparison when researching futures.

Tensions around action and agency: expressive and strategic protest

The first tension in social movement futures is around action and agency itself themselves. Here, cognitive and rational processes have tended to take strong precedence over emotional, expressive and embodied activity (Emirbeyer and Mische, 1998; Emirbayer & Goldberg, 2005). While phenomena such as emotions (we prioritise emotions below, but expressive protest, the body, the material and the sensory are treated similarly) are increasingly recognised as hugely important in social movements, their discussion has long been peripheral, instrumentalised, and individualised (Goodwin et al., 2004). To move forward an understanding of social movement futures, we must navigate this epistemologically controversial landscape: protest generates visions and goals, and is inspired and informed by them, through action that is neither merely expressive nor coldly rational, and is irreducibly collective.

An element of this has become uncontroversial: it is now commonplace to acknowledge the significance of emotion in relation to social movements, especially around mobilization itself (Flam & King, 2007; Goodwin et al., 2001; Ruiz‐Junco, 2013; F. G. Santos, 2020). Yet here, we are particularly interested in the implications of studying emotions as temporal, processual, collective phenomena. In this way, a range of emotional orientations link the present with the future in ways that are directive as well as expressive, for example and especially through what has been called the ‘politics of hope’ (A. C. Dinerstein, 2015; C. A. Dinerstein & Deneulin, 2012). These are exceptions to the problem that scholarly demands for social movement studies to acknowledge emotions have often taken a somewhat generic form. Indeed, to ‘bring in’ something like emotions can sometimes appear as a platitude that is either echoed or ignored, rather than incorporated as an element of both description and explanation.

In social movement studies, this problem is compounded by long-standing dualisms where emotions are part of one side’s argument; for example between strategic and expressive forms of political action, wider assumptions about distinctions between body and mind, and the particular trajectory of social movement studies, where emotion has been sharply contrasted with cognition and rational action (Cohen, 1985; Edwards, 2014; Emirbayer & Goldberg, 2005). Where the discussion remains a zero-sum game, with the assumption that acknowledging emotions detracts from understanding strategy, or worse, might replace it as a concept, progress has been slow. Yet it is clear that temporalities are crucial to analyses of social movement emotion – including in plans or strategies for another future. As memory might be associated with sadness, anger and resolve (Daphi & Zamponi, 2019; Merrill & Lindgren, 2020), particular ‘affects’ and emotional states or practices help create, sustain, and reproduce activism over periods of time (Fawcett et al., 2019). Affects and emotional practices are also salient in studying the transformation of fields in ways that remain invisible for those outside them (Useem and Goldstone, 2022) and may also help describe and explain the diminishing or transformation of protest. Emotions shape and precede, accompany, and follow protest, then; and are central to practices both front- and back-stage, from confrontation itself to movement reproduction.

A second issue, relating to the reification of the differences between emotional and cognitive realms, is that the field has been better at dealing with emotions descriptively than analytically. In this way, emotions help to render the atmosphere of protest and the upending of usual social practices, through thick descriptions. This kind of engagement with emotion is present in important ethnographic or other closely described accounts of protest (e.g. see Juris, 2008; Maeckelbergh, 2011). Concepts which offer potential to link these insights to wider issues in social movement studies are therefore particularly needed. An example might be collective effervescence, which persisted from Durkheim through collective behaviour literature into contemporary debates (e.g. Case, 2021; Crossley, 2002). Collective, or ‘contentious’ effervescence is useful in acknowledging particular patterns and structures of social orders that are temporarily breaking down or becoming suspended, that could be usefully mapped, and those patterns connected to temporally significant moments in protest, such as the emergence of collective actors, tactical decision-making, and outcomes. As yet, emotion has, in good part due to the challenges highlighted above, remained as little more than a residual in the dominant paradigms of the sub-discipline, conspicuously absent, for example from the discussion of mechanisms in Dynamics of Contention (McAdam et al., 2001; see also Goodwin et al., 2004).

As suggested above, if emotions, alongside bodies, affects, atmospheres and the sensory are relatively neglected in the mainstream of the subdiscipline, this is because they tend to be contrasted with 'strategy' – its more effective, cognitive and political counterpart. The concept of strategy is ubiquitous in discussions of collective action, from Gamson (1990 [1975], to Jasper (e.g. 2004), to Fligstein and McAdam (2012). Despite appearing much more popular among movement scholars than emotion, few studies tend to interrogate strategy directly (although see Ganz, 2000; Doherty and Hayes 2019; Rossi, 2017). Yet it is invoked in a range of ways, from characterising the courses of action of movements and other actors (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012; Jasper, 2004), to the plans for action or ‘strategies’ themselves, to the practices of strategizing (for a discussion of strategic practices of organisations see Jarzabkowski et al., 2022). Strategy has long carried assumptions about rational action, where goals are generally presupposed rather than seen as a process of continual negotiation among the parts of an actor, and the coordination of action towards those goals is seen as straightforward as delegation in a bureaucratic organisation such as a corporation.

The problem is that the concept of strategy has so far tended to exclude wider perspectives on orientations to the future, such as those which are emotional, or which draw on established visions or utopian or dystopian discourses (see e.g. Mische, 2009, and below). Strategy is essentialised or black-boxed as being a kind of fundamental ‘social skill’ (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012) (Welch & Yates, 2018). A small literature is beginning to understand strategy differently and in a broader sense. For example, Doherty and Hayes (2019) draw attention to reflexivity vis-a-vis other actors; cultural challenges and forms of activity that are about framing or presenting the social and political world in a different way; and the everyday practices of strategizing, which highlights that decisions about what to do as a collective actor are heavily influenced by habits, routines, repertoires, and traditions (2019, p18). This literature (see also Rossi, 2017) has the potential to question, too, the privileging of particular forms of action over others, which has been widely recognised as underplaying or overlooking the roles of women and ethnic minority populations in wider mobilisations (e.g. Stall & Stoecker, 1998) or ignoring them altogether because they are assumed, commonplace, or local as to not register in analysis of social movements (MacGregor, 2021). One solution to the elision of groups and practices that are traditionally invisible or less highly valued has been to understand strategy as being part of a process of coordination rather than simply leadership, a broader conception of strategy similar to that of Doherty and Hayes (2019), see also Nunes, 2021; Yates, 2021).

Emotions need to be part of understanding social movement futures in a way that recognises their dynamic, situational and collective nature, and their relationship with so-called cognitive and ‘strategic’ elements of protest (Emirbayer & Goldberg, 2005). Empirical and theoretical attention to the temporality of emotions is also important for understanding the motivations, atmospheres, rhythms, forms of traction, and ways of ‘winning’, that situate social movement formation and imaginings of the future. We would suggest that examining emotional orientations towards the future as a way of distinguishing certain states from others might help for more systematically exploring temporality, affect and activity – the ways that nostalgia and dreaming connect, for instance – and how memories of hope and the feeling of possibility, or their lack might sustain or hamper movements during periods of restricted opportunities or abeyance.

In sum, foregrounding social movement futures means engaging with theories of action, strategy, agency, emotion and rationality: not only acknowledging elements which are often neglected by the subfield but finding ways of further incorporating them into analysis. That entails appraising and interrogating the consistent emphasis on rational action in social movement studies, suggesting that more direct focus on concepts such as strategy and agency, and their theoretical tensions, would be fruitful for advancing understanding of movement futures but also of collective action, agency and strategy per se. Empirically, that is likely to mean talking to activists and reading activist texts seeking to understand visions, dreams, feelings and inspirations as well as motivations, demands, and goals. If this section covers the nature of future-oriented movement action and agency itself, the next two sections expand on how these futures – imagination, visions, and plans – can be conceptualised and studied.

Tensions around political imagination as artefact or practice: visions, experiments and democracy

As we have argued, the nature of future-oriented action is caught up in a set of long-standing tensions. Understandings of political imagination itself, meanwhile, are subject to another tension, one between futures as artefacts such as visions, goals or utopia, versus a more open-ended and processual understanding of futures being about experimentation, revision, and democratic participation. These concern the political orientations that agents collectively hold towards the future (Brown, 2016; Khasnabish & Haiven, 2014).

The growing body of research exploring prefigurative politics shows that the building of alternative practices, counter-institutions or forms of protest is often explicitly oriented towards imagined alternatives (Jeffrey & Dyson, 2020; Maeckelbergh, 2011; Monticelli, 2022; Yates, 2021). These have examined the theme of temporalities in a sophisticated way, and are increasingly being deployed in contexts outside the global North (Baker, 2016; Bonilla, 2010; Motta, 2011), and outside the sphere of left anti-authoritarian politics (Yates & de Moor, 2022). Empirically, prefigurative approaches sometimes examine the ‘means and ends’ of activism, and the micropolitical concerns of how to organise (Gordon, 2018), but are most often employed to investigate green alternatives, such as ecovillages or grassroots initiatives relating to sustainability (see Daniel, 2018, 2020, Forno and Graziano, 2014; de Moor et al., 2021). Prefigurative politics is not just about ‘framing’ social movement futures, although normally an implicit agenda is being advanced; rather, understandings or visions are implicated in an ongoing way, with action seen as the instanciation of a vision, yet also as contributing experimentally towards it.

The concept of utopia and the influence of utopian studies contributes understanding towards this agenda, though social movement futures extend beyond them. Many concepts relating to utopia, like prefiguration, pose a relationship between vision and action. Real utopias (Wright, 2010), working utopias (Crossley, 1999), everyday utopias (Cooper, 2014), and laboratories (Chatterton et al., 2018; Melucci, 1996), all propose an attempt to reach beyond the present, concrete, and local; to possibility and symbolism. A wider literature still concerns what we might understand as arguing about the discursive nature of imagination. For many years, social movements have been seen as pivotal in producing, disseminating and institutionalising radical ideas, demands and challenges (Eyerman & Jamison, 1991). As Jameson (2005) suggests, at certain times, perhaps especially when envisioning the future is most challenging, the production or circulation of utopias might be the most appropriate mode of resistance. Indeed, ‘this increasing inability to imagine a different future enhances rather than diminishes the appeal and also the function of Utopia’ (232), which constitutes a ‘rattling of the bars and an intense spiritual concentration and preparation for another stage which has not yet arrived’ (233). In this context, scholars have found useful the ideas of Ernst Bloch (1995), who frames utopia in the broadest of terms, covering the daydreams of everyday desires from circuses, fairy tales, film, and even advertising and department stores. His distinction between abstract and concrete utopias differentiates visions that do not reflect or reference present possibilities, from those which reside in and extrapolate from the present and its necessarily incomplete nature (1995, p197). Bloch proposes that activists recognise the radical open-ness of everyday experience with what he calls a ‘militant optimism’ (p198, see also Daniel, 2022; Dinerstein, 2014).

Bloch’s distinction between abstract and concrete utopias captures a tension between future as artefact and as practice, which can be seen as running through the literature and as central to concepts such as prefiguration or ‘working utopias’. The tension has its own politics and political history. As Eskelinen et al. (2020, p4–8) point out, utopia has regularly been framed as ‘absolutist’, or closed off from further participation or democracy. The discursive or static nature of a vision, even if it is not presented as a blueprint, is therefore sometimes seen as politically suspicious. According to these fears, explain Eskelinen and colleagues, summarising the positions of Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin, the rational organisation of the perfect society must inevitably be managed by a minority, and achieved at the sacrifice and potentially violent suppression of other ideas. These hesitation about utopia resonate with concerns about how alternative economic systems as goals have been used in the justification of violence – political themes important for the ‘new left’, new social movements, and in debates around socialism since at least the 1960s. Yet, Eskelinen et al. (2020, p. 7) suggest that these perspectives go too far, risking ‘losing utopias as tools for reflection and imagination … the very human capability to conceive of a different world’. Such tensions between struggling for defined goals versus open-ended democratic processes tend to be part of most anti-authoritarian social movements, and play a key role in micropolitics, decision-making and internal arguments (Polletta, 2002). The way that futures are discussed can be sources of controversy in such contexts, how these micropolitics can be collectively negotiated is an important research area for both academics and activists.

Finally, concepts such as ‘dimensions of projectivity’ (Mische, 2009; 2014), ‘prospectus’ (Brown, 2016), and, in a different way, ‘aspirations’ (Appadurai, 2013), offer more empirical ideas for exploration of the ways in which imagination plays out in the context of social movements. Mische (2009), contrasting her approach with that of Bourdieu, Schütz and Giddens, suggests analysing the different ways that actors survey the future through a series of ‘dimensions’ which allow us to compare and consider differences and similarities in the nature of orientations towards the future. These included reach (the degree of extension that imagined futures have), breadth (the range of possibilities considered), clarity, contingency, expandability, volition (importantly, the relation of influence that the actor feels they hold), sociality, connectivity (‘principles of linkage’ between events), and genre (the narrative form that is used to structure visions). A futures perspective in social movement studies might differentiate and usefully parse out different elements of ‘goals’ in discussions of strategy by considering variation on these criteria in relation to other characteristics. One observation here is that despite being generally understood as an individual property, and in Mische (2009) projectivity is largely a cognitive process, imagination unfolds its potential for social transformation when being debated, agreed upon, and employed by collectives (Fuist, 2021).

So far we have suggested several important directions for research that have implications for the way that futures are studied in relation to social movements. We have done this through discussing two tensions, between emotion and strategy; and between established visions and participation, or experimentation, around possible futures. Beyond this incomplete summary of work that is close to the themes of social movement studies, there are theoretical resources and empirical studies with interesting insights pertinent to questions around imagination, strategy and future-oriented affects that future research might productively engage. Further research on hope (C. A. Dinerstein & Deneulin, 2012; Dinerstein, 2014), social navigation (Vigh, 2009), and aspirations (Appadurai, 2013) could provide inspiration to social movement research, and offer specific research opportunities around them, as the concepts share an interest in how the future is imagined, and how utopian or dystopian visions urge individual and collective actors to seek alternatives.

Tensions around methodology: time and scale in social movement futures

Cutting across the above themes and literatures is a third set of tensions, about methodological and epistemological approaches to studying futures. Here, we are inspired by Ruth Levitas’ (2013) interest in framing utopia itself as method. The methodological tensions in social movement futures have two dimensions: one temporal, the other related to scale. The first emerges from the observation that the social sciences, particularly since the retreat of Marxism, have tended to bracket off debate and analysis of the future (Halford and Southerton, 2023). The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai claimed in 2013, for example, that Economics had become ‘the science of the future’ ‘by default’ (2013, p. 180). While social movement studies, particularly work that explicitly attempts at explaining transformation, is more historical than most sociology and political science, this opens up interesting questions for the empirical agenda of social movement futures. The second dimension of methodological tension is around scale. On the one hand, many of the phenomena described above, for example the way that activists discuss the future, establish visions, navigate them, encourage or discourage participation in them, tend to require proximity and intimacy to understand and describe them. On the other hand, the consideration of movement emergence and movement consequences require a different perspective or lens, more likely to be characterised by archival and secondary analysis, comparison, and narrative. We explore these tensions together below.

Imagination itself, the role that desires, ideas and goals play in orienting and making sense of action in meetings, actions and confrontations; are often best analysed through qualitative methods able to highlight and sensitively explore dynamics and processes in a detailed way. Yet, despite their flexibility, some questions pertinent to the agenda of social movement futures cannot solely be addressed with ethnographic and other intimate qualitative methods. One’s proximity to phenomena can undermine, as well as enhance, how and how much we ‘see’ (Juris, 2008). In a subfield still dominated by single-case studies analysed in a single moment in time, the importance of comparison and diachronic narrative methodological approaches has rightly been highlighted (McAdam and Boudet, 2012). The fundamental uncertainty of futures, moreover, means that movement consequences cannot be assessed except retrospectively – even then, there is legitimate debate about which kinds of consequences, and what kind of timescale, is most appropriate for such scholarship (Bosi et al., 2016). Another danger around ethnography is that the high costs of participation, travel and time may reproduce the centrality of particular global North contexts, the English language, and those movements that are most well studied in the study of collective action. For many of the questions highlighted above and in order to better understand what is meant by strategy, we would also suggest that greater use of comparison may help explain the particular role of different elements of future orientations.

These potential frictions between proximity and distance can be navigated. While attentiveness to the present and to faraway futures might appear to be contradictory, contributions such as Burawoy (1991) open up the possibility of shifting place and time in conducting ethnography in order to examine themes such as globalisation, an approach which could be similarly employed to look at movement temporalities. How are imagined futures, dreams, visions, utopias inscribed in actions, messaging and framing, referenced in discussion, and part of activists’ daily psychic and emotional life-worlds? Networked ethnography (e.Gerharz, 2012; Lachenmann, 2010) and ‘global ethnography’ (Burawoy, 1991) have enabled researchers to grasp such transnational and translocal dynamics, increasingly in social movement research (Juris & Khasnabish, 2013). According to Garbe (2022, p. 75), this approach allows for the analysis of activists and campaigns beyond particular localities that can make ‘networked expressions of solidarity’ intelligible for study. An ‘everyday orientation’ might be another way of thinking and analysing economic and political transformation through and in performances, instances and practices (Yates, 2022).

Finally, an additional tension rests on the politics of knowledge and different theoretical orientations for studying social movement futures. In post-colonial, feminist and queer scholarship the history and production of knowledge with regard to hierarchies is increasingly being challenged (Bhambra & Santos, 2017; Boatcă & Costa, 2010; Gerharz & Rescher, 2020). This opens up the question of the extent to which it is legitimate to analyse contemporary and future movements based on paradigms developed only in very specific, imperial, state regimes during a very specific time period. Social movement studies have thus been rightly challenged for their ‘western, colonial, ethnocentric, Eurocentric, imperialistic, and Orientalist biases’ (MacSheoin, 2016, p. 181). Moving beyond mere critique of these hegemonic trends, however, Fadaee (2016) argues for the need to deprovincialize ‘canonical social movement theory’ (2017, p47) and recognize southern movements not to mark a geographical location, but, rather, ‘as an analytical category’ to account for experiences of ‘colonial and post-colonial and/or imperial epochs in their histories’ (ibid, see also Bringel & Domingues, 2017; B. S. Santos, 2007). To engage and rethink some of the basis of social movement research as well as ‘accommodate’ newer and more diverse perspectives, it is also a matter of increasingly integrating research on social movements of the global South into the Western-dominated scientific landscape (Burawoy, 1991). This, however, relates to challenges concerning the relationship between the researcher and the research participants and the paradoxes that attend to intimacy in the context of hierarchy and power inequalities. Horizontal approaches enabling the co-production of knowledge address some of the hierarchies that often shape research relations in the Global South (Daniel & Neubert, 2019) as well as marginalized groups in the Global North. The future of studying movements, as well as social movement futures as a research theme, will be fundamentally shaped by these epistemological debates and struggles. They are particularly relevant for studying futures because existing epistemologies, conceptual frameworks and academic infrastructures cannot be superseded all at once, and any approach to challenging them and their adequacy also relies upon these same embedded relations and histories.

In summary, the ways in which studies of activism, movements and protest approach the idea of the future need to navigate a politics of epistemology, the tensions between proximity and distance, and existing methodological conventions that for obvious reasons prioritise historical analysis. We can see relevant moves to foregrounding social movement futures being made in relation to emotions, strategy, framing, utopia, experimentation, prefiguration, ethnography, the everyday, and postcolonialism, marking out a range of areas where research could usefully progress our understandings. Work that touches more directly on the topic already exists across a variety of epistemological, thematic and theoretical traditions. Our argument is that new work must foreground social movement futures by building on recent theoretical moves, creating links and common vocabularies for deepening and furthering analysis, while reinterrogating the core paradigms of movement studies.

Articles of the special issue

This special issue, in addition to advancing an agenda to foreground social movement futures, aims to introduce some of the dynamic and challenging work happening in social movement research which already begins to do so. The papers which follow capture many of the tensions and themes described above in referring to strategy, emotions, imagination, process, experimentation, consequences, methodology and narrative. Correspondingly, they showcase diverse methodological traditions including long-term ethnographies, observation and descriptions of the temporalities of meetings, interviews, surveys and media analysis. They also take into account different movements and national contexts, thus opening a space for further dialogue and cross-fertilisation among social movement scholars from different world regions.

The first two articles by Birgan Gokmenoglu and Minwoo Jung sensitise us to the importance of looking at the temporal conditions of political action. Protest is temporally situated, but time – events, processes of transformation, expected arcs of repression, and legislative change – play an additional, almost agentic role in organizing practices, configuration of actors and constraining the spaces of action. From an ethnographic perspective, thus, Gokmenoglu explores how the transitional and politically volatile times in 2017 in Turkey shaped the campaigning of anti-authoritarian social movements for the ‘no’ vote against the regime change. The author shows how the temporal framework of the political context, and a sense of urgency around repression, framed and foreclosed certain forms of political action. These temporal conditions are described as the ‘politics of anticipation’, where ‘the future’ and temporality itself become the object of political contestation by protestors. Minwoo Jung also addresses the temporal context of social movements, in a case study of marriage equality movements in Taiwan. In the context of rising geopolitical tension between China and Taiwan, marriage equality activists symbolically used the rainbow flag and Taiwan’s sovereignty symbols to instill ‘Taiwan pride’ in a dual sense: in order to symbolize pride of the nation’s recognition of LGBTQ people, and the pride of the sovereign nation. Here, the temporalities of macro-political interaction, in particular the uncertain future of the nation-state which in many ways may foreclose the opportunities of Taiwanese people, shaped the choice of symbols.

Articles in the special issue also focus on activists’ imagination. These articles explore the imaginaries, visions, and prefigurative processes which drive activism. In so doing, they shed light on how activists enact the future and on the basis of what ideas a future worth living or a good life should look like. Anja Habersang, in this vein, investigates the indigenous women’s movement in Argentina and their role in prefiguring a ‘good life’. With rich empirical evidence, she argues that women organize protests in order to overcome the global capitalist development project of resource extraction which destroys nature and human’s relation to nature. As a counter-image of a good life – her invocation of the concept of buen vivir—she offers an imaginary that demands a reciprocal relationship between humans and nature, calling on themes of horizontality, spirituality, and autonomy. In so doing the article reveals how social movements imagine and aspire to desired futures. The article also draws our awareness to the idea that understandings of temporality are culturally shaped, as the women’s movements in the article contrast a cyclical temporality with what they see as a dominant Western understanding of linear time. Antje Daniel and Josh Platzky Miller also focus on imaginaries and aspiration of social movements in their analysis of the students protests at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, known as #RhodesMustFall (#RMF), which led to nationwide protests under the banner #FeesMustFall. The authors describe how students occupied an administrative building, which symbolically and spatially shaped the imaginaries of protesters. The occupation was seen as a prefigurative break from reality that catalyzed students’ imaginations, honing their critiques of society and shaping two central imaginaries of alternative futures, decolonization and intersectionality. The authors explore the relation between occupations, imagination, and prefiguration by drawing on a ‘philosophy of the imagination’ inspired by Sartre and Fanon.

While the development and prefiguration of the imaginary of the desired future already implicitly indicates how the future is defined, the two final articles in our special issue examine the framing of futures and understandings of their success. Roger Soler-i-Martí, Ariadna Fernández-Planells and Laura Pérez-Altable consider the dystopian framing of the future of the Fridays for Future movement in Spain. The authors examine social media (Twitter and Instagram) with a mixed methods approach to explore the role of emergency for youth environmentalism. The authors show that an ‘emergency’ framing includes an urgency which appears to accelerate time, simultaneous to a discourse on immediacy, clarity of objectives, and hope. ‘Emergency’ framings are linked to a positive view of the future via an emotionally laden evocation of the scarcity of time. This potent rhetorical combination of urgency and potential hope appears to correlate with increases in the impact of social movements’ social media communications.

The last article of our special issue explores how social movements frame futures in terms of movement consequences. Simone N. Durham analyses the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests in the US, based on interviews with young protesters. The article examines what activists see as success and how they think change has already happened and might be possible in the future. Most interviewees are sceptical about BLM’s ability to effect fundamental structural change, yet perceive cultural change is possible and has already been achieved. The article shows how imaginaries themselves are not only resources for activists, but, also, constitute understandings of change and the way that activists interpret movement outcomes.

The special issue, as a collection of papers, opens up a multiplicity of new questions regarding the negotiation of ‘the future’ with respect to social movement studies. Although theoretical resources in this area exist, they also lie across several core debates and paradoxes. Future research on social movements and the future must engage with and balance questions of how we can understand these tensions around action, imagination and methodology.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Luke Yates

Luke Yates is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Researcher at the Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester. His research explores everyday life, political movements, consumption, and the struggles around the new digital platform economy.

Antje Daniel

Antje Daniel is a substitute professor at the Department of Development Studies, University of Vienna and associated researcher at the Centre of Social Change, University of Johannesburg and at the Friedrich-Alexander University Nurnberg-Erlangen. Her research focuses on social movements, civil society, utopia, future, imagination, democratisation and conflict as well as environment, youth and gender.

Eva Gerharz

Eva Gerharz is Professor for Sociology of Globalisation at the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences, Fulda University of Applied Sciences and a Corresponding Member of the Institute of Development Research and Development Policy at Ruhr-University Bochum. Her research focuses on indigenous activism, youth movements, utopia and religion, democracy, violence, conflict, migration and development in South Asia.

Shelley Feldman

Shelley Feldman was University Professor of Development Sociology, Cornell University, Professor of Sociology, Binghamton University, and Senior Fellow, Max-Weber-Kolleg fur kultur-und sozialwissenschaftliche Studien, University Erfurt, Germany. A scholar of Bangladesh, she has published widely in journals that include Journal of Peasant Studies, REVIEW, Interventions, Globalizations, and Historical Sociology, and edited books including Accumulating Insecurity: Violence and Dispossession in the Making of Everyday Life and Unequal Burden: Economic Crises, Persistent Poverty, and Women’s Work. She is currently completing a manuscript on In-situ displacement and the making of the Hindu other.