Planning the future amidst shifting temporalities. The case of Italian social movement actors

Over the past decades, a series of recurring crises have bound democratic politics to a never-ending presentism. Reduced to the management of day-to-day emergencies, democracies have been stripped of their ability to project toward the future. Increasingly challenged in imagining possible futures, democracies struggle to act and plan in the face of epochal challenges. On the contrary, against this backdrop, futures have been central in social movement activity. Imagined futures are indeed key drivers of social movement action. By contesting the status quo, movements inherently open new horizons of possibility and compete as players in the arena for the negotiation of the world to come. They plan their activities, combining strategy with anticipation; they produce knowledge, challenging established paradigms; they engage with prefigurative politics, anticipating the social change they are pursuing in their practices. While discussions about the future in social movement studies have touched upon how assumptions of time and temporality influence action and strategy, little has been said on how movements see and plan the future in times marked by shifting conceptions of time. How are grassroots civil society actors discussing, imagining and prefiguring the future in their action? How does the sense of urgency triggered recurring emergencies impact on their strategy negotiation? What are the visions of the future? This paper aims to address these questions by focusing on the Italian case. In particular, it considers a series of grassroots civil society actors in prominent issue areas (labour, gender, environment, migration), based on qualitative interviews. In doing so, the paper engages with discussion on temporality and movement strategy while advancing knowledge on an under-researched area of study concerning future and collective action.