Prefigurative politics, utopian desire and social movement learning : reflections on the pedagogical lacunae in Occupy Wall Street

Social movement learning is now an established field of educational research. This paper contributes to the field by offering a critical case study of Occupy Wall Street (OWS). The paper surveys the claims made by the movement’s supporters that transformed utopian subjectivities emerged in and through the process of participation, the prefigurative politics of the movement becoming an educative process of dialogic interaction and a moment of self-education through struggle. Drawing on the extensive range of first-hand accounts, and analysing the anarchist and autonomist ideas animating the movement’s core activists, the paper highlights the pedagogical lacunae in OWS and reflects on what we as educators, working in and with social movements, might learn from these. What the experience of OWS points to, the paper argues, is the need to avoid romanticising the creation of alternative spaces of learning and overstating the pedagogical possibilities opened up when people gather together and occupy a space. The paper suggests that the pedagogical lacunae within OWS demonstrate the need within social movements for organised pedagogical direction. Without concerted pedagogical intervention, alternative spaces run the risk of merely reproducing existing relations of power, privilege and oppression. Movements heralding themselves as cracks in capitalist space-time through which utopia is being enacted here-and-now might just end up becoming dead spaces in which the inchoate utopian desires that originally gave them life wither away through neglect.