On protest, discourse, and the livable life: the role of identity and affect

Building upon the poststructuralist turn in psychology, we reposition psychological knowledge of social movements via a discursive framework utilizing: 1) feminist frameworks of intersectionality and queer critiques of binarism that highlight the significance of multiple identities, and 2) affect theories that broaden the psycho-political scale to include politics beyond discursive framing and recognizable identities. We draw on contemporary scholarship describing discourse in social movements to propose a twofold model in which collective identity and affect capture the dynamics we see as fundamental for a psychology of social movements and societal change.