Protests often emerge from a mix of grievance and hope – i.e., dissatisfaction with the present with an aim to change it for the better. Whereas street protests are commonly understood as physical, dynamic, interactive, and collective expressions of objection and dissent, less common is the idea that this form of collective action is future-oriented; they are intended to achieve a desired outcome, or “imagined future”. An imagined future can be defined as an envisioned situation that has not happened and may (or may not) happen. In the “imagined futures” approach, perceptions of the future are social phenomena sui generis, and have potential implications for individual and collective beliefs, attitudes, and action. Through performance in social spaces, futures can become shared between people and groups, forming a collective vision of the future.

We build on the imagined futures approach to argue that every street protest expresses a collectively imagined future.

In this presentation, we (a) articulate an imagined futures approach for street protests and (b) develop a multimodal methodology to observe protest visions. We call this methodology, Protest Event Reports (PERs), that reconstructs the complexity of past protest events by focusing on actors, actions, interactions, demands, performances, and physical spaces and by integrating textual and audio-visual data from news media and social movement organization sources.

As an empirical illustration, we conducted a thematic analysis of PERs of same-day, multi-city Covid-19 pandemic protests in Poland to extract the emergent visions of their desired future.

This presentation contributes to the literature on social movements by linking protest behavior to collective imagined futures and by providing a novel methodological framework for the reconstruction and analysis of past street protest events.   

We presented this research at:

Dubrow, Joshua, Anna Radiukiewicz, Alan Żukowski, and Michal Nawrocki. 2025. “Protests as imagined futures: Street-level visions of social change.” Presented at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje (UKIM) in Skopje, Macedonia, on October 14, 2025.

Dubrow, Joshua, Anna Radiukiewicz, and Alan Żukowski. 2024. “The October 10
COVID-Skeptic Protests in Poland: Visions of Post-Pandemic Society.” Presented at the workshop, Conservative mobilizations: Intellectuals, Movements, and the State, IFiS PAN, May 16-17, 2024, Warsaw, Poland.

This research is funded by the National Science Centre (NCN), Poland (2021/43/B/HS6/01155) grant entitled “The Construction of Post-Pandemic Society: Covid-19 Street Protest in Poland.”

See also:

Dubrow, Joshua, and Olga Li. “Future orientation and political participation in Europe.” Comparative European Politics (2025): 1-18.

Radiukiewicz, Anna, Joshua Dubrow, and Alan Żukowski. “Multimodal approaches to the reconstruction of street protest events using publicly available information: methodological issues.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology (2025): 1-6.

Dubrow, Joshua K., Anna Radiukiewicz, and Alan Żukowski. “Government justification of police actions against protesters: biopolitics in Poland during the Covid-19 pandemic.” International Review of Sociology (2024): 1-19.

Radiukiewicz, Anna, Alan Żukowski, and Joshua K. Dubrow. “The Polish Government’s Response to Covid-19 Protests: Restrictions and Contradictions in Moments of Madness.” Partecipazione e conflitto 17, no. 2 (2024): 541-558.