Interruptive Collective Action: Temporality, Spatiality and Affectivity of Change

ABSTRACT This paper develops the concept of interruptive collective action to theorise a contemporary form of protest through temporal, spatial and affective transformations. Although all protests suspend the ordinary, interruptive actions extend this suspension by exposing systemic injustices and refusing to operate within the representational or end‐goal‐oriented logic of constituent politics. These actions are often described as horizontal, leaderless or spontaneous. Rather than signalling disorganisation, we argue that such features articulate a destituent orientation. Against interpretations that frame these protests as failures for not achieving institutional or governmental change, we foreground their generative potential across three interrelated dimensions: temporality, spatiality and affectivity. Temporally, interruptive actions do not merely suspend linear time but instantiate an alternative temporality—one that collapses the distance between present and future and renders the now of the protests as the spaces of transformation. Spatially, they reconstitute urban environments as liminal places for collective experimentation, making new configurations of relation and belonging possible. Affectively, they mobilise shared feelings of anxiety and hope, which generate togetherness and open new possibilities for alternative ways of socialising. Through this framework, we conceptualise interruptive collective action as a mode of political practice that materialises social change in the here and now, not as an aspiration for the future but as an embodied enactment of it.