At a time when representative democracy and traditional systems of representation are in crisis, this chapter describes and analyses the practices of a local social movement which has permitted the creation of a local public space for dialogue and participation, and the re-specification of the concepts of freedom, democracy and power. This is a movement that has been fighting for decades for the reestablishment of Canas de Senhorim as a municipal seat (concelho). Based on an ideology of radical egalitarianism and opposition to the hegemonic powers, in an interchange of memories with different temporal densities, this movement has produced alternative political sociabilities, giving voice and citizenship rights to different groups in the locality. An important issue is the active participation of women, which raises tensions between an emancipatory political practice and the reproduction of a patriarchal logic in the household space.

Contrary to many theories of social movements, special emphasis is also given to the role of emotions and of violence in the definition of the personal and collective identities of the participants in the movement studied. The goal is to investigate how indignation and criticism are transformed into collective action, giving rise to a radical and utopian localism which allows resistance and, at the same time, the construction of spaces of citizenship, of dialogue and of transformative tension.