Prefiguration and the independent living movement

This article facilitates a productive encounter between social movement studies and the Independent Living Movement (ILM), a collective mobilisation that advances disabled people’s self-determination. More specifically, we analyse the ILM from the perspective of prefiguration, understood as the activist practice of collectively realising a desired future in the present. This helps illuminate pivotal aspects of the ILM that remain hidden in more instrumental or policy-oriented accounts of the movement. Such aspects include, for example, ILM’s bold experimentation and its important work on generating, exchanging, and preserving organic knowledge through self-education and norming. The first part of the article introduces the ILM and the concept of prefiguration. We then apply this framework to archival accounts detailing the activities of the first Centre for Independent Living (CIL) in the world – CIL Berkeley – in the 1970s. In the second part of the article, we shift our attention to the present by exploring attitudes to prefiguration displayed by young disabled activists in Europe in a recent research project. We conclude with some conceptual remarks about prefigurative research, complemented by a practice-oriented call to strengthen the prefigurative dimension of the ILM as a prerequisite for its more strategic, longer-term, and policy-oriented aspirations.