We, the research team 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,” published articles, organized a conference, and presented research in 2025.

Articles Published in 2025

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 29, no. 1 (2026): 153-158.

Online first in 2025.

Multimodal reconstruction of street protest events combines news media and social movement organization (SMO) texts with audio-visual (A/V) sources and is an opportunity to conduct and enhance analyses of protest. However, there are fundamental issues that the nascent literature on this topic has not adequately considered. These issues include the various forms of bias from the sources of A/V materials and the ethical issues of both incorporating public surveillance technologies and archiving the data. We discuss biases from media, SMOs, and researchers, and the ethical issues of creating a sophisticated research panopticon to holistically collect and monitor protests past and present, and in archiving such potentially intrusive data.

Dubrow, Joshua, and Olga Li. “Future orientation and political participation in Europe.” Comparative European Politics 23, no. 6 (2025): 1080-1097.

Online first in 2025

Political participation is an inherently future-oriented activity. Whereas single country case studies suggest that future orientation can influence voting and non-electoral political participation (NEP), its cross-national generalizability and an empirical test of the national political and economic context that would moderate this relationship has not been conducted. We address this gap via a multi-level analysis of the European Social Survey 2018; the political opportunity structure, measured with a liberal democracy index, and economic instability are, respectively, the macro-level political and economic factors. We found that general future-orientation is correlated with voting and NEP even controlling for standard micro-level factors. Whereas the level of democracy does not change this relationship, higher levels of economic instability weaken the link between future orientation and political participation. Predicted probabilities are modest. Thus, there is empirical support for the theory that future orientation is associated with political participation across European nations.

Conference Organized in 2025

We organized the conference, Empirical Research on Protests and Social Movements in Central and Eastern Europe: State of the Art, at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences (IFiS PAN), 72 Nowy Swiat, Warsaw, Poland, December 4 – 5, 2025

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Presentations

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

Dubrow, Joshua, Anna Radiukiewicz, Alan Żukowski, and Michal Nawrocki. 2025. “Protests as imagined futures.” Presented at the conference, Empirical Research on Protests and Social Movements in Central and Eastern Europe: State of the Art, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, December 5, 2025 in Warsaw, Poland.

Abstract: 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 article 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.