Prefiguration as Learning

Abstract

Prefiguration refers to a political theory of mobilizing philosophies into action, understood as the ways that people live their politics through their tactics. This theory comes from political organizing spaces, and over the last years, has come to the attention of learning scientists as a significant space of learning which allows for the political dimensions of learning and ideology to come into focus alongside practice. In this primer, we describe the theory of prefiguration, briefly review its use in movements and in recent learning sciences research, and argue that prefiguration is fundamentally a learning process and target, that ought to be engaged with from learning sciences perspectives.