PAP0210 - Identities, Knowledge and Life-World: The case of Portuguese Social Movements
Inspired by diverse philosophical, political and scientific theories, social movements’ actors produce theories about the world and about themselves and the others. They are great doers of knowledge that especially include axiological knowledge, scientific knowledge, everyday knowledge and identity knowledge. Borrowing Raymond Boudon’s sociological language, they generate descriptive ideas (representations of their immediate and more distant environment, positive collective beliefs) and prescriptive ideas (evaluations, normative and axiological collective beliefs). Thus, they carry out an important cognitive activity that both precedes and orients concrete actions but also that is built from the latter. They think about themselves and theorise on who they are, where they come from and on who they should be. They follow a temporality in which the past (their social origins), the present (their current life) and, more significantly, the future or the becoming (projections of invented and desired selves that can become possible and be concretised within forthcoming projects and actions) are intellectually reworked but not necessarily in a linear way. By this reflexive process, they necessarily come to define the Other as well.
Their cognitive praxis converts their movements into public spheres, areas of public life or life-world open to the (in)formation, communication and debates on public issues. To speak with Jürgen Habermas, they construct “communicative reason” as when they denounce “instrumental rationality” under its economicist and neoliberal variant or when they call into question globalisation in its current and hegemonic form. Movements are places for “ideal speech situation”, that is, for rational discussion and criticisms, notably via assemblies, print and virtual media.
Furthermore, identities and knowledge are always socially situated. In that sense, it is relevant to regard the sociocultural context wherein the movements take place and to observe the dialectic between identities/knowledge and society. The sociology of identity and of knowledge along with further theoretical approaches will be particularly significant for understanding and explaining these movements.
Thus, in this paper, I shall observe and analyse the formation of identities and knowledge (notably values), and the life-world within current Portuguese social movements.