In this paper Tom Brock and I argue that relationality is key to understanding the constitution of social movements: how do individuals ‘fuse’ into a collective? Our focus is on the relational bonds that emerge between participants, consolidated through situated action, in relation to which individuals come to value their reciprocal action towards a shared goal. If we ignore this relational dimension then collective agency can only be understood as the subsumption of the individual within the collective – participation is exhausted by hierarchical relations and participants surrender their evaluative capacities in the process:
Mark Carrigan 