Learning in and for collective action

Abstract

Collective action matters: out in the streets around us where people are reshaping the world through powerful protests. We see the significance and impact of collective action in uprisings around the world to contest racialized violence, to abolish police and prisons, to demand climate action, and to unequivocally assert that Black Lives Matter. Hong Kong student activists have innovated new technological and organizational tactics that protestors in other countries are using to develop their own anti-government actions. Chilean activists have mobilized massive protests against neoliberal policies and for significant political reform. In these cases, learning is taking place in contentious practice as people strive to transform power relations. Activists are organizing new forms of learning, new identity pathways, and transforming community values and ethics. They are doing this work through complex, volatile, and distributed collective action to shift the tactics, the framing, the recruitment, and the political imagination of social movements. Social movements, defined simply, are “collectivities acting with some degree of organization and continuity, partly outside institutional or organizational channels” that offer a vibrant way of challenging . . . or resisting change in such systems” (Snow & Soule, 2010, pp. 6–7). Social movements have led social change for justice, have inspired actions across communities working in solidarity with each other, and have suffered dramatic losses in the face of oppressive and divisive politics (Baldwin, 1972/2007; Garza, 2020). This special issue is a call to Learning Sciences scholars to study social movements as productive sites where people work together to critique, re-imagine, strategize, design, and re-make how we can engage with one another now and in the future. Learning in these dynamic spaces is understood as possibility, as shaped by relational, spatial, and natural structures and as improvised in and around structures as resources for creative resistance and