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...
Harry Lewis
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
New preprint (with @profjohndrury.bsky.social ) on prefigurative politics in Chile’s 2019 social explosion, based on interviews with participants in demonstrations and cabildos🧵:
