Future-Making from below: Social Movements, Temporalities, and Sociologies of the Future

This session explores how social movements imagine, contest, and enact alternative futures from below. Rather than approaching movements only as actors of resistance or reaction to crisis, the session invites contributions that examine their future-oriented capacities: their ability to prefigure new social relations, produce collective horizons of possibility, challenge dominant temporalities, and generate practices of democratic experimentation.

Bringing together social movement studies and the sociology of the future, the session asks how movements construct visions of desirable futures, how these visions are embedded in everyday practices and organizational forms, and how they respond to uncertainty, crisis, and competing narratives of what is possible. It also seeks to examine the temporal dimensions of collective action, including memory, anticipation, urgency, waiting, hope, and prefiguration.

We welcome theoretical, methodological, and empirical papers addressing diverse movements, contexts, and scales of action. Contributions may explore how movements make futures through protest, mutual aid, institutional experimentation, ecological struggles, feminist and decolonial practices, digital activism, or community-based alternatives. The session aims to open a dialogue on how sociology can better understand future-making as a central dimension of collective action and social transformation.