Looking after each other. Shifting cultures of democracy among Finnish queer activists and extinction rebels.

Social movements have prefigured participatory practices now considered best practice in public governance, and they continue to reshape and inspire new repertoires of political action and alternative ways of being (Polletta & Amenta 2025). A contemporary hallmark of many radical social movements is a constructionist conception of democracy (Ferree et al. 2002) that extends beyond formal procedures, voting, or rule-setting. Instead, these movements practice a more expansive democracy grounded in values such as inclusion, recognition, and care (Holdo 2025). This paper examines two such counterpublics: Elokapina (Finnish Extinction Rebellion) and queer activist communities in Finland. We argue that, besides their public acts of political protest, these movements intentionally decentre the institutions of liberal democracy as the focal point of political action in favour of building spaces of commonality and solidarity through oppositional consciousness (Morris & Braine 2001). Taking a pragmatist position that meaning must be understood through action, we interpret the shifts of meaning these activist practices give to democracy, their underlying critique of liberal democracy, and the commitment to creating temporally and spatially situated utopian cultures. Although sometimes viewed as antithetical to democratic pluralism, interactional rules grounded in familiarity recur across a range of political communities. Feminist research has elaborated the metaphor of home as a social space for developing belonging and relations among people with shared values (Ackelsberg 1996; Jäntti 2012; Perheentupa 2019). Iris Marion Young (1997) conceptualkises home as a site for the construction and reconstruction of the self through reciprocal support. Forms of belonging emerge through habitual practices until they are disrupted, politicised, and endangered (Yuval-Davis, 2011). Using ethnographic fieldwork data, we show how these movements build democratic communities that transcend liberal representative models of democracy – both as a means of cultivating a regenerative culture by caring for movement adherents, but also as an effort to prefigure new modes of democratic engagement. Our findings bridge the gap between what is and what could be by showing how movements challenge hegemonic political norms. In doing do, we highlight the diversity of practices that activists regard as democratic and political, and offer an example of long-term community building in an age marked by short-term engagements and individualism.