Emancipative Movements, Emancipative Agency: Framing New Conceptualizations

The aim of this presentation is to rise some questions about a fundamental stake for social movements: that of emancipation. Indeed, the way in which movements claim for emancipation, and the contents of the very idea of emancipation can change across time and space, across history and cultures. Albeit emancipation is considered as a central concept of western modernity, with its history of emancipative mobilizations, it has been a fundamental element of collective action far beyond the western world. Hence, the sense of emancipation as political and cultural component of social movements, the role of emotions on which the search of emancipation is based, the idea from what or from who one should be emancipated can change across the cultural and temporal contexts. In the presentation we shall analyse the pluralist nature of emancipation inside collective actions, bridging together analytical finings of different researches on emancipative social movements.