Protests as Imagined Futures

Street protests are expressions of grievance and dissent that seek social change. Yet, scholars rarely theorize about protests' inherent future‐orientation. In this article, we build on the “imagined futures” approach to understand street protests as collective, future‐oriented performances that envision social change. The imagined futures approach shows us that the concept of the future has long been a central idea in social science theory, and for political sociology, its interdisciplinary roots are in cultural studies' social imaginaries and fictions, and in social movement studies' framing, narrative, and prefiguration. We trace these roots to argue that protests are an emergent phenomenon such that contextual conditions and organizational instigation, along with the dynamics of the protest itself, interact to co‐create a protest's vision of the future.