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This paper utilizes American pragmatism and phenomenology to illustrate that scholars must engage with both memories of the past and hopes for the future if we want to know how either influences activists’ actions in the present. A synthesis of these theoretical approaches highlights how, in the real experience of time, the past, present, and future are in constant flux and affect one another, shaping both our valuations of a moment and the actions we take. The Populist movement in the late 19th century USA illustrates how scholars should try to incorporate analyses of memories, contemporary context, and desired futures to fully understand the experiences and decisions of protesters. Engaging with time, both with the real experience of those we study and also how it affects our analyses, improves our understandings of social phenomena. By focusing on how actors attempt to synchronize disparate temporalities, we gain a clearer understanding both of the heterogeneity that composes a movement and what makes them unified into a singular social phenomenon.
Scholars and activists have recently taken particular interest in prefigurative politics, a type of action where activists embody their ideal social order in the present, pushing for change through leading by example. However, the prefigurative politics concept has had limited use in broader understandings of protest. This is because: (1) prefigurative politics became associated with leftist and antihierarchical positions; (2) prefigurative politics are conceptually limited to future-oriented movements. I propose a more encompassing understanding of this type of collective action: figurative politics. Figurative politics has two key dimensions: value-rational action and prolepsis. A sociohistorical analysis of a Depression-era agrarian organization called the Farmers' Holiday Association illustrates how this broadened concept provides unique insights into movement strategies and actions. Motivated by a catastrophic wave of farm foreclosures across the Midwest, the Holiday created pockets of an older societal form to delay or fix public foreclosure auctions.
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