On March 1, 1986, 1,200 activists set out from Los Angeles on a walk across the United States to call for an end to nuclear weapons. Within two weeks, a few hundred remained. They reorganized as the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament and successfully completed the nine-month, 3,325-mile walk to Washington, D.C. Two central questions guide this work: What is the relationship between long-distance walking and the politics of social movements? To what extent does “endurance” shape meanings of the March’s related but twin goals: the building of a collective, or “prefigurative” community, and a mass movement capable of attaining media coverage and achieving concrete, or “strategic” political outcomes? This study utilizes historical analysis, semi-structured interviews, and discourse analysis of print news media to apprehend different perspectives on long-distance walks and the Great Peace March. This project provides a multilayered account of the historical and cultural roots of long-distance walks for sociopolitical change, the March’s origins and organization, marchers’ understandings of their participation, and media representations of the March. It also examines Jamie Schultz’s categorization of “physical activism” in combination with “prefigurative politics,” of which Wini Breines claims the central task is to create and sustain within the live practice of the movement, relationships and political forms that ‘prefigured’ and embodied the desired society. The result is a more nuanced understanding of the ways physicality and endurance constitute a significant aspect of participation in social movements. This dissertation coins the term “endurance activism” as the articulation of endurance physical feats with political activism. The Great Peace March illustrates how social movement participants undertook endurance actions to communicate arduous and strenuous work for the cause. This project finds that endurance, physically, but also symbolically and metaphorically signifies particular meanings of movement for social movements such as persistence, focus, and determination to stretch limits and push boundaries. The marchers sought to accomplish a difficult physical challenge and maintain the solidarity of their community to analogize the coming into existence of their campaign’s equally extraordinary vision for denuclearization. The marchers experienced and communicated endurance to stress their movement as an act that has no end, and to solidify perceptions of themselves as lifelong activists. Their emphasis on endurance highlights the importance of the means of lasting work for social and political change that are valued in and of themselves. This study finds that collective effort and striving are crucial qualities that build solidarity in social movements, while also signaling the necessity of ongoing work for the cause and the forging of another way forward.

The Transition movement is a grassroots movement working to build community resilience in response to the challenges of climate change, fossil fuel depletion, and economic insecurity. Rather than focusing on the state as a site for contestation or change, the movement adopts a "do it ourselves" approach, prioritizing autonomy and prefigurative action. It also places importance on relationships and community in the context of local places. It is open-ended and characterized by an ethos of experimentation and learning. Transition shares these place-based and prefigurative features in common with many other contemporary movements, from the Zapatistas to alternative globalization movements, to popular movements in Latin America, to most recently the Occupy movement. Though often not seen as "political" by conventional definitions that understand social movements in relation to the state, I argue that Transition's choice of practical, place-based forms and commitments is an ethical-political one, based on the state's failure to meet crises of our times, and it has political effects. In exploring the movement in its own terms, this ethnographic study of the Transition movement in the northeast US demonstrates the ways in which activists are locating power and possibility in the local and the everyday. Operating in the terrain of culture and knowledge production, the Transition movement is engaged in an effort to shift subjectivities and social relations, and to resignify power, security, economy, and democracy. Paying attention to the Transition movement's specifically place-based, prefigurative features provides a better understanding of the potential of this approach and its political significance. It also sheds light on tensions, which in the US context include challenges in addressing racism, inequality, and the neoliberal state.

What motivates individuals to take part in anarchistic movements and spaces? For those who do, what occurs during engagement in anarchy? By collecting the oral histories of anarchistic activists, this study indicates how crises, personal and collective, is a not only a motivating factor for why individuals join and engage in anarchistic movements and spaces, but how crises are, in turn, radically transformed through engagement in anarchical practice. To understand this process, this study explores crises through the development of an eco-anarchistic dialectical framework--negate-subvert-create--to indicate how the crises of capital are embodied, consciously negated, subverted politically, and ultimately transformed through engagement in anarchy. Anarchy is accordingly conceptualized as a liminal spatio-temporality that allows individuals to reconnect their selves to their potentials to become something beyond the ecological destructive and dominant social world. These potential are realized through the embodiment of communitas, or collective liminality--a natural communality that individuals reconnect to engaging in anarchy. I end with an exploration of the possible outcomes and potential futures of anarchy by situating the current political, economic, social and ecological crises occurring around the globe within the eco-anarchistic framework developed in this study. Here, I indicate the importance of engaging in care practices and creating care-networks as a necessary outcome and future political practice for anarchistic movements as a way to mitigate and ultimately transform the crises of capital. / Ph. D. / What motivates individuals to take part in anarchistic movements and spaces? For those who do, what occurs during engagement in anarchy? By collecting the oral histories of anarchistic activists, this study indicates how crisis, personal and collective, is a not only a motivating factor for why individuals join and engage in anarchistic movements and spaces, but how crises are, in turn, radically transformed through engagement in anarchical practice. To understand this process, this study explores crisis through the development of an eco-anarchistic framework— negate-subvert-create—to indicate how the crises of capital are embodied, consciously negated, subverted politically, and ultimately transformed through engagement in anarchy. Anarchy is accordingly conceptualized as a liminal spatio-temporality that allows individuals to reconnect their selves to their potentials to become something beyond the ecological destructive and dominant social world. These newfound potentials are realized through the embodiment of communitas, or collective liminality—a natural communality that individuals reconnect to engaging in anarchy. I end with an exploration of the possible outcomes and potential futures of anarchy by situating the current political, economic, social and ecological crises occurring around the globe within the eco-anarchistic framework developed in this study. Here, I indicate the importance of engaging in care practices and creating care-networks as a necessary outcome and future political practice for anarchistic movements as a way to mitigate and ultimately transform the crises of capital.

abstract: The utopian impulse represents hope for another world; a reflection of the injustices inherent to the hegemonic order that are understood as natural, necessary, desirable, and unchangeable. Those who challenge this orthodoxy are heretical utopians; pioneers of the counterintuitive who explore the types of relations that rather than reproduce the dominant order, shatter it, and manifest new ones based upon principles of justice. This project explores how ideological mechanisms of control embedded within the hegemonic fascist imaginary landscape of the United States render the visions of emancipatory social movements, that challenge dominant ways of knowing and being, as the "merely utopian" so as to instrumentalize the behavior of civil-society towards the maintenance of the established social order and the suppression of alternatives (Gordon 2004). In a rapidly changing world reeling under the pressures of late-stage capitalism, it is essential for those who value social and political justice to incessantly cultivate the cultural imaginary so as to shift the boundaries of what types of social relations are possible, feasible, and desirable through the process of struggle in heretical spaces. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Justice Studies 2015

Social movements do not only protest and demand political change - they produce new spaces too. Why and how? If we understand this, we can appreciate better the specificity and potential of the last cycle of mobilizations involving the encampment of cities' squares. This paper shows how the Indignados movement in Barcelona evolved from symbolizing an alternative future in the square to constructing alternatives in the city after. We find that people in alternative projects re-appropriate and transform urban space because they want to live differently and produce a radically different city, now. We conceptualize these new spaces as "prefigurative territories", integrating the seemingly divergent anarchist theory of prefiguration with Lefebvre's Marxist theory of space production. Prefigurative projects have strategic horizons and struggle with conflicts when opening up. Against those charging the Indignados with a fetishization of the occupied square and a failure to achieve political goals, we argue for the continuing relevance of the movement as it moved from the production of differential, to the production of counter-spaces. Further research should investigate how these counter-spaces feed into processes of political change. / Series: SRE - Discussion Papers

In this paper, I make use of the game-theoretical concepts of cartel theory and coordination theory via salience and Schelling points in order to assess the viability of prefigurative politics when used by group actors to address the particular case of the climate crisis. I show that prefigurative politics as a strategy faces significant systematic disadvantages when used by social movements attempting to address climate change as compared to when it is used by social movements focused on other causes. These disadvantages are based on two factors: lack of motivation and a difficulty of coordination. In order to illustrate this point, I compare the situation for contemporary climate movements to a case example of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1957, showing how cartel theory worked in the favour of the civil rights movement, and how salience was crucial for the fast mobilisation of the African American community of Montgomery.

Twentieth century modernity has provoked multiple problems ranging from environmental degradation to human rights violations. Globally, diverse communities of people have organized to promote, not just reactive reforms, but a fundamental alteration of the foundational worldview underlying these issues. Radical activists committed their work to promoting an alternative ethos based on egalitarian, democratic, and ecologically-wise concepts. An array of methodologies emerged from these endeavors. More radical political groups focused on cultural tools to engage people in the construction of an alternative worldview. Radical activists utilized two forms of cultural politics: prefigurative politics, the physical presentation of an envisioned future and direct theory, the constant interaction between theory and practice. Within the artistic community, Ecological Artists centered their practice on cultural activism, creating publicly accessible, site-specific collaborative pieces that illuminate and utilize ecosystem principles to promote an eco-wise worldview. The concept of utilizing cultural production as a method for achieving social transformation has only recently been analyzed within the social movement discipline. Artists rarely utilize social movement vocabulary, or the term "activism" to describe their practices. To date, no correlation between artistic production and social movement strategies has been made. I argue in this thesis that Ecological Artists are cultural activists who simultaneously developed strategies and methods similar to those being worked out by radical social movement activists. While prefigurative politics and direct theory are terms defined within social movement discipline, the cultural activities are similar. Political activists' internal organization and external political work, prefigurative of an envisioned future and the result of constant interaction between theory and practice, correlates to the necessary collaborative organizations of Eco-Art and the physical presence of the work, a manifestation of the constant interaction between ecosystem theory and artistic practice. In this thesis I analyze the work of Ecological Artist Ruth Wallen as a form of cultural activism. I argue that the intention, execution, and content of her work are forms of prefigurative politics and direct theory. Ruth Wallen has been practicing Eco-Art for twenty years. Her work is focused on the heart of Eco-Art, its intention to produce an eco-wise future through artistic practice.

(in English): The purpose of this diploma thesis deals with library rules (regulations) of Municipal Library of Prague, Jiři Mahen Library in Brno, Helsinki City Library and with a prefigurative library rules for public libraries available on National Library of Czech Republic. The goal of the thesis is to build a model rules structure based on the analysis of the mentioned library rules followed by the definition an optimal content of public library rules. This work further studies library rules of the Municipal Library of Prague for automated branch offices with a focus on their contentual and formal changes during the validity of the library rule in the period from April 20th 1998 to April 12th 2010. Finally, the thesis offers a brief interpretation remaining library rules. The result of the thesis is the contentual definition of the optimal library rules and its structure intended for public libraries.