‘Building future politics’: projectivity and prefigurative politics in a Swedish social center

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to the concept of prefigurative politics by sharpening the conceptual distinction between future-oriented prefiguration and projectivity. My research suggests that a social movement group’s orientation to the future is an important dynamic in how prefigurative action unfolds. Based on a case study of the Swedish autonomous collective Kulturkampanjen and the social center they built, Cyklopen, I analyze three dimensions of projectivity: reach (temporal extension into the short- or long-term future), contingency (perception of the future as fixed or flexible), and volition (a group moves toward the future or the future moves toward the group). This article is also an experiment in understanding how language can provide insight into the dynamics of prefiguration. I used a ‘projective grammars’ framework for qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews, ethnographic fieldnotes, newspaper articles, activist produced media (flyers, blog posts, zines, etc.), websites, and ephemera. I suggest that this analytic tool may help social movement scholars investigate projectivity and prefiguration more thoroughly.

KEYWORDS:

• Autonomous social movements
• place
• temporality
• culture

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Kathleen Blee, Marie Skoczylas, Amanda Vincent, and two anonymous reviewers for their generous and thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this paper. This article also benefited tremendously from a conversation with Ann Mische at the Center for the Study of Social Movements at the University of Notre Dame (USA). Her work on projectivity continues to inspire me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kimberly Creasap

Kimberly Creasap is a sociologist and Director of Gender & Sexuality at Denison University. Her work has appeared in the Annual Review of Sociology, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Sociology Compass, and Feminist Teacher. She is currently working on a book manuscript about how gentrification shapes the geographies of urban social movements in Sweden.