Making Movements: Voices from a World of Change

Douglas Rogers
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  • SOCIETY & CULTURE

In our rapidly destabilising world, it's clear that nothing will get better without large numbers of people working together. But social movements remain mysterious and under-studied creatures: Making Movements (formerly Social Movement Appreciation Project) aims to shine a warm and loving light on today's many efforts at collective agency and system transformation.

  1. TRAILER

    Social movement MANIFESTO

    What and who is this podcast for? Why are social movements the best way to change the world? What kinds of hideous baggage and assumptions is host Douglas bringing to this work? What's with the upload schedule? Is it ok to think about things from London? (short answer: no!) Can a podcast be more than a podcast? Some of these questions will be answered in what is essentially a retroactive launch episode! Follow me on Bluesky @douglasrogers.bsky.social‬ or Twitter at @writingDouglas if you're into that kind of thing

    29 min
  2. Build the Lifehouse! Mutual care, movements and spiritual politics

    10/29/2025

    Build the Lifehouse! Mutual care, movements and spiritual politics

    One of my favourite interviews!  I sit down with Adam Greenfield, activist and author of the book Lifehouse, for a deep discussion of his work, its underpinnings and its implications. His book explores anarchist success stories for inspiration in the face of a ‘Long Emergency’ of climate and political instability, featuring classic case-studies like the Black Panthers, Occupy and Rojava among others. Instead of just duplicating a book I’d love people to read, we delve as much behind Lifehouse as into it. We consider the ideas and realities shaping his thought: primarily a certain version of anarchism, but also an unusually askance and informed perspective on social movements in general, from Extinction Rebellion to Your Party to Collapse tendencies to the incipient Lifehouse movement itself. From there we reflect on the dynamics – at once highly personal and deeply structural – configuring today’s collective politics. Throughout, Adam retains a deeply grounded orientation towards practicality and action, replete with unusually un-theoretical suggestions on the things we can do and the ways we can do in this chaotic context: chiefly a kind of practical spirituality, inquisitive politics, and a dash of conventional prepping.   Something I could have got into with Adam but didn’t is his plenitude of past lives: his stint in the US Army’s psy-ops unit (!), his work first implementing and then criticising information technology, and his study and writing on urban design. Maybe another time!   Snippets: ‘A movement is a way of avoiding doing the thinking and the work for yourself’ ‘If your assembly does not have dispositive power over resources – I think it’s counter-productive. It is not you developing your muscles - it’s simply re-inscribing your own impotence. Because ultimately there’s this dynamic of supplication’ ‘We’re here to care for one another! We’re here to care for one another and anything that expands our capacity to do that and to extend the frame and the fabric of our ability to care is something I’m interested in’   Writing we mentioned: Gail’s Lifehouse piece: https://buymeacoffee.com/gailbradbrook/so-now-what Tadzio Mueller’s leadership piece: https://steady.page/en/disrupt/posts/3f4ac939-b805-431d-93e7-b8ff498f4242 End music: Roses and Bread, sung by Penny Stone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZbkK6DGft0 Check out Penny's work! http://www.singlouderthanguns.com/ Follow me on Bluesky @douglasrogers.bsky.social‬ or Twitter at @writingDouglas if you're into that kind of thing

    1h 45m
  3. Care and critique in Kollapscamp

    10/24/2025

    Care and critique in Kollapscamp

    Kollapscamp may well turn out to be a significant moment in movement history, with the climate scene evolving into new forms to meet the new realities of ‘long emergency’. At the same time – and very much relatedly – the camp was a physical and social space with real people bringing varied and sometimes rivalrous motivations, identities and needs. As the camp packed up, I caught up with Scully to discuss both parts of that work. Internal tension is pretty much a certainty in any gathering of this scale and ambition, but it’s rare to find such a lucid example of those tensions being raised and processed – and even rarer to debrief it all with one of the core organisers! If you want an understanding of what holding a serious movement space looks like in 2025, and/or a snapshot of the complicated collapse-politics constituency, stay tuned.   Editor’s note: we talk a bit about Tadzio Mueller, one of the Camp’s foremost organisers alongside Scully, and a pre-eminent voice communicator on collapse politics. He’s been a significant social movement presence in Germany since the early noughties, involved in alter-globalisation activism, LGBT struggles, and the climate movement – notably helping to set up Ende Gelande.  To get a direct sense of his inimitable style , check out his collapse pitch here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XODlnqPvpv8   How we’re feeling at the end of camp What the camp’s aims were and if it met them Minor tensions in the camp The critique session The contested place of Tadzio Mueller Accessibility questions How racial diversity can come down to money How racial diversity can have deeper roots Comparing Just Collapse to Deep Adaptation The wider marketplace of collapse politics projects The importance of cultures of care in collapse   Some further reflections on the camp from its organising team:  https://steady.page/en/friedlichesabotage/posts/7323dbfe-5ce4-421f-b9f1-3a7922201ef7   End music: people at Les Résistantes singing Le Pieu, a Basque song of collective resistance https://www.lesglottesrebelles.com/le-pieu/   Follow me on Bluesky @douglasrogers.bsky.social‬ or Twitter at @writingDouglas if you're into that kind of thing

    1h 23m
  4. Flooded People UK

    10/24/2025

    Flooded People UK

    The water is coming. By 2050 8 million homes in England will be at risk of flooding - that’s *one in four*! But for hundreds of UK communities this existential threat has already arrived. Flooded People UK is an innovative organising project which aims to recast the people in flood-hit places from passive victims into active citizens with expertise, collective interdependence, and policy demands. I talk to FPUK organisers Harry and Sanjay to learn about this project’s unusual movement composition, the work it does, and its orientation in the bigger stories of climate and collapse. We cover: How FP is a convergence of the cultures of professional disaster management with the grassroots climate movement What FP does: creating national scale political pressure, alongside fostering networks of direct support within and between flooded communities How flooding can impact a person, household and community Re-imagining the policy position of flooded people - into a proactive political constituency What needs to be done policy-wise How climate framing is and isn’t valuable in flooded contexts How mitigation relates to adaptation Thoughts on Kollapscamp and its collapse framing See more at floodedpeople.org.uk End music: People Gonna Rise Like Water, sung by XR Bristol Follow me on Bluesky @douglasrogers.bsky.social‬ or Twitter at @writingDouglas if you're into that kind of thing

    1 hr
  5. What is Kollapscamp

    10/24/2025

    What is Kollapscamp

    Collapse – what’s the pitch?! Kollapscamp was a summer gathering of 900 people in Brandenburg, Germany. It has clear roots in the climate movement, but represents a very novel tendency within – or break from – that movement. The key shift being an assessment that some level of societal upheaval is now unavoidable (thanks in part to world leaders’ failure to limit carbon emissions), and that this has deep implications for all our movements’ strategies going forwards. The German ‘Just Collapse’ scene is one of several independently emerging scenes in Europe – but it’s the first to run a camp! The programme spanned a broad range of collapse-type classics: from the stereotypical ‘hard’ skills like martial arts and first aid training, through to emotional work, at least one very cool ‘organising in a crisis’ scenario training, and panels on/from specific issues from ‘Internationalism in Collapse’ to British flood management (see next episode). Plus all the usual and essential off-programme action of meals, parties, and formal and informal networking. If that sounds like a lot: it was! I sat down with Scully, one of the camp’s two key organisers, to discuss the ideas and intentions behind the camp.   We cover: Quick intro from me on the broader context of collapse politics Why Kollapscamp? Ambitions for building up networks Building Collapse as a movement Who’s turned up to KC How Collapse relates to climate movement strategies Building alternative economic structures The content of KC The reality-breaking outcome of How to Defend a Pride March How KC relates to the UK’s Deep Adaptation   Snippets: ‘We won’t find the button to save the world or making everything perfectly fine again, so we have to deal with things getting worse’   Tadzio Mueller's ultimate collapse pitch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XODlnqPvpv8 Kollapscamp’s programme: https://kollapscamp.de/en/program/   End music from a spontaneous performance at Les Résistantes by what I think was La Criée, a feminist choir Montreuil in Paris. Embarrassingly I don’t know the name of this song but will update when I have it! Follow me on Bluesky @douglasrogers.bsky.social‬ or Twitter at @writingDouglas if you're into that kind of thing

    38 min
  6. Western Sahara and how to create activists

    09/30/2025

    Western Sahara and how to create activists

    Benjamin and Sanna spent three years cycling around the world to spread the word about the Western Sahara: the world’s largest remaining colony, the last such project in Africa, and a weirdly (but not accidentally) under-covered topic. Tune in and cover it with us!   We also cover: Benjamin’s year-long walk from Sweden to Palestine The strange lack of social movements in Sweden A burgeoning ‘activist cafe’ project What Les Résistantes means to us as visitors, and the role it could play in pan-European organising   I can’t help but note in passing that the activist cafe concept is quite reminiscent of Joël’s frame-building mentality in the previous interview. Could space-holding be the new leadership?   For more about the two’s work, check out Solidarity Rising: https://solidarityrising.com   End music end music from a spontaneous performance at Les Résistantes by what I think was La Criée, a feminist choir Montreuil in Paris. This song is ‘Canción sin miedo’, a feminist hymn. Follow me on Bluesky @douglasrogers.bsky.social‬ or Twitter at @writingDouglas if you're into that kind of thing

    55 min
  7. Les Résistantes: the trailblazer for European organising

    09/26/2025

    Les Résistantes: the trailblazer for European organising

    Les Résistantes was a beacon of joyful social movement ambition. Something like 10,000 people came together representing struggles from across not only France but Europe and beyond. An activist event of this scale and substance must be seen to be believed.* Where on earth did it come from? I caught up with Joël, one of the festival’s core organisers. He explains how Résistantes is really just a by-product of a five-year effort uniting local struggles into national coalitions. He shares some ‘secret sauce’ techniques which might explain how Terre des Luttes - the group driving these efforts - has had so much success where others struggle, going from seven people in a room to 200 organising a festival for 10,000. And, in a striking exception to every other conversation I have in these four days, we take a glance at the world-historic hurricanes on the horizon: the quickening breakdowns in our climate and political systems, and what they might mean for our movements.   *As a close substitute I’ll be offering my own reflections from during and after the festival – where I get into the delightful, difficult and sometimes dramatic details – on a Patreon feed as soon as I can get around to setting it up. In the meantime you’ll just have to take my word that it was a good time. The foundational Terre des Luttes map : https://terresdeluttes.fr/qui-sommes-nous/   End music from a spontaneous performance at Les Résistantes by what I think was La Criée, a feminist choir Montreuil in Paris. This song is a feminist re-appropriation of the Chant des Corsaires, a Flemish sea-song. https://www.lesglottesrebelles.com/le-chant-des-corsaires/    Follow me on Bluesky @douglasrogers.bsky.social‬ or Twitter at @writingDouglas if you're into that kind of thing

    50 min
  8. The French anti-nuclear movement

    09/26/2025

    The French anti-nuclear movement

    You might be as surprised as me to learn the anti-nuclear fight is one of the biggest social movement scenes in France. I sat down with Pauline Boyer to learn about France’s current nuclear crossroads and its peculiar economic, cultural and geopolitical dimensions. We also consider nuclear as an ideology and Type of Guy, and discuss Pauline’s journey into activism through Alternatiba, a 2010s movement which created joyful, utopian spaces before it was cool.   End music from a spontaneous performance at Les Résistantes by what I think was La Criée, a feminist choir Montreuil in Paris. This song is ‘La Danse des Bombes’. It’s about the fighting for the Paris Commune in 1871  Follow me on Bluesky @douglasrogers.bsky.social‬ or Twitter at @writingDouglas if you're into that kind of thing

    58 min
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Trailer

About

In our rapidly destabilising world, it's clear that nothing will get better without large numbers of people working together. But social movements remain mysterious and under-studied creatures: Making Movements (formerly Social Movement Appreciation Project) aims to shine a warm and loving light on today's many efforts at collective agency and system transformation.

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