Beyond Class Struggle? Class Positioning, Reflexive Embodiment and Regenerative Activism In the Twenty-First Century

The contemporary landscape of collective action is marked by the emergence of regenerative approaches to collective action, which combine demands for structural transformation with practices aimed at personal, relational, and cultural change. Climate movements, solidarity economy networks, commons initiatives, regenerative communities, and other socio-ecological mobilizations increasingly integrate concerns with emotional well-being, collective care, spirituality, embodiment, self-reflexivity and emergence into their political projects.

These developments raise important questions for the sociology of social classes and social movements, particularly about the relationship between structural inequalities and processes of subject formation.

Do such practices represent a depoliticization of collective action or the emergence of new forms of political agency?

How do they reshape class identities, solidarities, and movement cultures?

What tensions arise between material redistribution, cultural transformation, and inner change?

Do regenerative practices strengthen class alliance-building capacities for challenging the status quo, or do they risk displacing attention from material inequalities and political-economic structures?

This session seeks to critically examine both the emancipatory potential and the limitations of regenerative collective action under conditions of ecological crisis, democratic uncertainty, and widening inequalities.

It invites contributions addressing the following dimensions of regenerative activism:

• The relationship between class, culture, affect and somatic experience;

• Embodiment, practices of self-reflexivity, and political subject formation;
• Post-extractivist practices like permaculture, degrowth and agroecology;
• Tensions between regenerative approaches and institutional politics in post-capitalist experimentation.