“Planning for anything, not for everything:” Uncertainty and temporal coordination in social movement organizing

Abstract

A month before the 2020 US presidential election, then President Trump amplified a false claim about poll watchers monitoring early voting in Philadelphia, stating “They were thrown out. They weren’t allowed to watch. You know why? Because bad things happen in Philadelphia, bad things.” The months preceding the November 3rd election featured many similar discursive attacks on the integrity of Philadelphia's election systems, part of a larger right-wing campaign to delegitimate election outcomes in advance. Fearing what this might portend for election day, dozens of local progressive movement organizations and activist groups formed the “Philadelphia Action Council” (PAC), a coordinative space for organizing and planning a mobilized response to a contested election. Strategic collective action involves the coordination of complex temporal orientations, at multiple scales, however, PAC activists couldn’t be sure when, where, or for how long they may need to mobilize, nor what sorts of targets or messages or tactics the action should be orientated around. In fact, they couldn’t be sure if they would need to mobilize at all. In this paper, I analyze the temporal structure of the PAC's “action council” model, arguing that the contingent, eventful temporality embedded in the structure of the PAC engendered similarly contingent modifications in the temporal orientations of its participants, allowing PAC activists to embrace uncertainty in ways that they typically strive to avoid. I then demonstrate how the embrace of uncertainty (somewhat paradoxically) expanded the PAC's collective capacity for improvisation and adaptation in the days following the election. This research draws on (and contributes to) critical time studies to further the emergent project of temporalities research in the field of social movements studies.