Ambivalent Activism edited collection is out

I’m pleased to have a chapter on Rosa Luxemburg and prefigurative politics in this exciting new volume about Ambivalent Activism: Working with Contradiction, Hesitation and Doubt for Social Change.

What if doubt, hesitation and ambivalence weren’t barriers to activism but powerful tools for change?

Challenging the idea that activism is fuelled only by anger or hope, this bold collection explores how activists across anti-racism, climate justice and mental health navigate uncertainty to sustain their work. Blending scholarship with on-the-ground perspectives, this book highlights ambivalence not as a weakness but as a dynamic force.

This is essential reading for anyone engaged in activism or emotional research, redefining what it means to feel and act for justice in a complex world.

Have a look at the book here.

My chapter is titled Facing Defeat: Rosa Luxemburg in Dialogue with Prefigurative Politics. It explores how Luxemburg’s practice of learning from failure can enrich prefigurative engagements with failure.

I examine failure as a prominent site of ambivalence that activists must face up to rather than disavow. In line with the focus of the edited collection, I approach ambivalence as a simultaneous experience of contradictory feelings about resistance that may result in hesitation, doubt or even disengagement, yet that may also serve as an opportunity for critical self-examination and recuperation. I explore how ambivalence manifests itself in the challenge of responding to failure, which necessarily involves negotiating and working through difficult and contradictory feelings of hope and despair, of possibility and loss, of commitment and uncertainty, or hopelessness and resilience.

I argue that while prefigurative approaches recognise the fallibility of political action and foreground the necessarily experimental nature of revolutionary practices, they also focus primarily on prefiguring positive practices and examples. Luxemburg’s practice of learning from failure, in contrast, allows for a deeper recognition of both the crushing impact of failure and its potentially productive political value. It enjoins the revolutionaries to accept ambivalence and confront the contradictory feelings of loss, hopelessness, uncertainty, commitment and resilience as an inevitable part of their involvement in revolutionary politics. I suggest Luxemburg’s learning from failure valuably complements the focus on prefiguring positive futures, offering prefigurative politics additional and perhaps more robust resources to weather disappointment and face defeat without lapsing into defeatist narratives. In addition, it shows how ambivalence can become a space of self-examination, learning and possibility.