Abstract
Combining recent and foundational work in cultural theory in social movement research and cognitive psychology, this paper presents a synthetic model of cognitive processes in the context of political contention. Despite broad interest in the intersection between culture and cognition, and in the cultural dynamics of social movements, there has been little systematic effort to understand the cognitive processes of change in social movement settings. The paper constructs and illustrates a model of cognitive change with reference to a case study of opposition to workfare in New York City, where the legal and political construction of workfare workers has been marked by considerable ambiguity. In tracing the ways in which activists changed their minds about strategy and definitions, the paper integrates environmental, cognitive, and relational dynamics in explanations of political contention to advance a non-individualist, broadly materialist and pragmatist theory of cognitive development.
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