Collective action research has become very good at explaining why people protest — focusing on what people bring: beliefs, motivations, and psychological states. This tends to background what can happen *through* participation, including how action comes to be understood in radically different ways.
These are often described as prefigurative politics — efforts to enact desired future social relations through present-day practices. But how do participants themselves come to see them that way?
Acting together made alternative social relations feel feasible, compelling, and widely shared, reshaping how participants engaged in the struggle — from opposing the existing order to enacting the kind of society they sought.
In many contemporary uprisings, people don’t just confront power — they do so while also organising participatory assemblies, caring for each other, and making decisions horizontally.
New re-vamped @crowdsidentities.bsky.social website, with new @sussex.ac.uk brand formatting -- looks good!
www.sussex.ac.uk/research/lab...
New preprint (with @profjohndrury.bsky.social ) on prefigurative politics in Chile’s 2019 social explosion, based on interviews with participants in demonstrations and cabildos🧵:
This points to a broader shift for social psychology: collective action participation is not only something to be predicted from prior beliefs and states — it is a site where identities, empowerment, and social change are produced in practice.
Interviews from Chile’s 2019 uprising suggests that a prefigurative understanding of participation was not simply carried into the mobilisation — it was consolidated and transformed through collective action.
New from @daclarkecruz.bsky.social and colleagues - towards a new way of thinking about and studying collective action
Interested in the psychology of disruptive behaviour at music events? Well have a read of this. Highlights include me, @lewisdoyle.bsky.social & @sanjeedah.bsky.social throwing ourselves around in mosh pits for science (plus in-depth interviews & a big old survey). dx.doi.org/10.1111/asap...