Political Activation and Material Indignity

By far the majority of people in our world live in economically precarious communities in which daily experiences of material indignity are reinforced by disrespectful treatment from public authorities. Although these communities experience the collective trauma of material indignity and social nonrecognition, they tend to engage frequently in collective activism to demand dignified lives. Sometimes the collective action is very public, e.g. street protests against the lack of sanitation. At other times the collective action is less public and under the radar, embedded in everyday livelihood activities. These forms of activism not intended as political; they emerge out of necessity. In this paper I explore a number of inter-related questions: what kind of political activation emerges from experiences of being treated less than human in material and recognition terms? What kind of psychological frame does political activation offer for the emergence of identity and subjectivity? How do people move between experiences of painful non- recognition toward political thoughts (and collective action) about being rightful citizens? What does it mean for unformulated experience to become represented through political activation as a mode of building a sense of self with one another? The paper seeks to contribute to a fruitful dialogue on activism between psychoanalysis and the social sciences.