A Deeper Inquiry #13: Breaking Through Ideology, Cognitive Dissonance and Hopelessness A Deeper Inquiry

What makes up our beliefs, actions, and our desires to change the world?

As activists and organisers, we tend to inherit a liberalist theory that good arguments will win the day, even if all the evidence points the other direction. We tend to imagine that just getting people “on the streets” is enough, but we don’t ask what will make them stick around for the long haul. We tend to forget or downplay how important movements are at providing spaces of self- and community-formation, for good and for ill.

In this deeper inquiry session our speakers Sarah Stein Lubrano & Max Haiven will dive into the depths of social movement psychology, looking at what gives people a sense of agency to change hearts and minds – despite the dissonance that may arise between their belief systems vis à vis their actions -, as well as what are the new worlds activists are already dreaming of – and building – at the centre and edges of social movements.

Our speakers

Sarah Stein Lubrano has been organizing since she was 18, when her college feminist group ran Female Orgasm Day. During the pandemic, she coordinated mutual aid for her ward in London. She is also the Head of Research at the Future Narratives Lab, where she strategises about how to talk about social problems. She just finished a PhD at Oxford in Political Theory, and her research focuses on cognitive dissonance and how it can help explain the gaps in people’s political consciousness. She has a book coming out about why talking about politics is often so ineffective, which will be released by a major publishing house in 2025. She’s been on a lot of other people’s podcasts, including Derren Brown’s audible series, The BBC’s Moral Maze, and Women’s Hour. She frequently speaks to the public.

Max Haiven has been organizing grassroots movements since he was 12 in anti-capitalist and anti-colonial initiatives. Today he works as the Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination at Lakehead University and directs RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab, a platform to bring together social movements and radical ideas. He is the author or editor of 9 books which all focus on the relationship between capitalism and the imagination. Along with Alex Khasnabish, he is the author of The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (2014) and is currently working on a book titled The Player and the Played: How Financialization Fosters Fascism.