Theme Panel: The Political Ethics and Praxis of Liberation

September 9, 2025 APSA Annual Meeting, Theme Panels Comments Off on Theme Panel: The Political Ethics and Praxis of Liberation

In-Person Full Paper Panel

Participants:

  • (Chair) Erin Pineda, Smith College

Session Description:
Social movement collectives offer us a deep understanding of the conditions of ongoing injustice, and radical movements readily generate dreams of future just arrangements. Internally, members generate collective and individual-level practices to toggle between the current injustice and the present/future visions of justice. What are the personal and political ethics that arise in the context of radical social movements? How have movements conceptualized the place and meaning of these practices? As scholars of liberation politics, we can look to existing and past social movements to better understand the moral and spiritual practices of those who continuously bear witness to imaginations of a more just world. Some examples of these sorts of political ethics include Robin DG Kelley’s notion of freedom dreaming, a collective act engaged in practices of love, freedom, and imagination. Foucault argues that revolutionary movements that can critique relations existing at a hyper-local level render the reproduction of the state within the movement impossible. The Combahee River Collective advances a practice of constant reflection through practices of criticism and self-criticism.

In this panel, we will specifically theorize about, debate and discuss ethical practices of liberatory social movements. Ethical practices are ways for individuals and collectives to interrupt the operations of the unjust social structure. If the self and the collective are sites of reproduction of structure, then how have social movements conceived of an ethics that might interrupt injustice and realize liberatory alternatives?