Every protest envisions social change. In this NCN grant, we examine the imagined futures expressed in over 200 protests on Covid-19 pandemic policies in Poland.
Abstract
Protests often emerge from a mix of grievance and hope – i.e., dissatisfaction with the present with an aim to change it for the better. Whereas street protests are commonly understood as physical, dynamic, interactive, and collective expressions of objection and dissent, less common is the idea that this form of collective action is future-oriented; it is designed to achieve a desired outcome, or “imagined future.” We build on the imagined futures approach to argue that every street protest expresses a collectively imagined future. In this theory-driven qualitative project funded by the National Science Centre, Poland (2021/43/B/HS6/01155), we ask: In Poland, what are, and what drives, protesters’ imagined futures, i.e. visions, of post-pandemic society? To glean an imagined future from a protest event, we argue that the first task is to reconstruct the protest event through a holistic investigation of the demands, actors, actions, interactions, locations, and performances in a multimodal approach, ideally with publicly available data. As such, we developed a method called Protest Event Reports (PER), which are a multimodal — text and audio-visual materials (A/V) — qualitative dataset of street protest reconstructions based mainly on news media articles and, to a limited extent, social movement organization website information. We examine over 200 protests specifically about pandemic policies, based on ACLED’s (Armed Conflict Location & Event) special protest event data called the “COVID-19 Disorder Tracker” that spans January 2020 to April 2021. The pandemic sparked tens of thousands of protests worldwide. In our in-depth, qualitative expansion of the Polish data, we reveal the imagined futures of a range of groups, including Covid-antiestablishmentarians, farmers and small business owners, and parents and teachers, among others.