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Synchronic Entanglements and New Social Imaginaries: Anti-War Activism in Brazil and the United Kingdom in the Twenty-First Century (SENSIAWABUK)
Start date: Jan 1, 2013, End date: Dec 31, 2015 PROJECT  FINISHED 

The project aims to investigate the practices and modes of association of anti-war activists in Brazil and in the UK, while formulating an interaction ritual theory that places emotions and synchronicity at the centre of social process. Building on interaction ritual chains theory (Randall Collins), I articulate a notion of synchronicity that emerges from a theorisation of the relationship between social suffering, creativity, and collective process. In short, I show how actors create novel social form while synchronically entangled with one another. While proposing an innovative multi-method approach for the study of social movements, which relies on biographic interviews, network analysis, and sequence analysis, I aim to illuminate: (1) the relationship between the biographic events of activists, and the events of the movements, thus setting the stage for an eventful sociology of social movements; (2) the structure and dynamics of networks of peace activists, understood as interaction ritual chains, and having as a result particular forms of solidarity; (3) the forms of actorness and political imaginaries of the social movements. This methodology grounds a novel way of construing the relation between micro-events and macro-events; and it allows to observe how the practices of anti-war activists in the past decade rework the boundaries between state and society. In particular, the project contributes to understanding how “war” and “peace” are construed as symbolic objects in contemporary political imaginaries. Anti-war movements are privileged sites of research for studying synchronic entanglements, especially in the aftermath of the 9/11 events, the US response to them, and the revival of pacifist mobilisation that followed. Brazil and the UK constitute two very different but equally telling cases of this revival, while also being part of a global space of anti-war mobilisations.

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