Practices Of Solidarity Research Articles

Why Mourning for Minks Matters: Rebellious Grief as Practice of Solidarity

The paper advocates the idea of grief as a key emotion for transformation. Following Judith Butler’s concept of grievability, it agues that a critical reflection on who (or what) is mourned reveals the normative orders of a society as well as its possible blind spots. As a particularly telling case, the mass culling of Danish minks that took place in 2020 as a preventive public health measure in the Covid-19 pandemic is examined. The response to the case sheds light on the various barriers of broadening the moral community. The paper explores some of the reasons for the practical disability to mourn for animals bred for use and argues that it is part misleading to focus on the species-line. Rather, it is a question of selective moral responsiveness which is dependent on the specific cultural context and way of life. In the last part of the paper, it is suggested that ecological grief work is a means to move from grief to empathy and solidarity and finally resistance. When others are discovered as grievable, they are acknowledged as vulnerable fellow beings which have to be morally considered. Grief, then, can be understood as a disruptive emotion which questions the current understanding of normality.

Changing welfare solidarity: social policy and solidarity ventures during COVID-19 outbreak in Indonesia

ABSTRACT This study aims to draw the solidarity patterns of welfare providers, i.e. state and non-state responders to COVID-19, and how their acts of solidarity reacted to the crisis and its impacts. These data are based upon secondary literature and semi-structured interviews with relevant stakeholders associated with each particular case. We suggest that interactional patterns of solidarity between institutionalized type and informal solidarity have changed twice during the crisis. First, a shortage of public resources in the early phases of the crisis encouraged informal solidarity to play a significant role, even conditioned, in providing social services to citizens. The relentless spread of COVID-19 has also resulted in the interactional patterns of both solidarities shifting in a more contingent manner, resulting in a collaborative partnership between state and non-state actors. The evolving phenomenon of changing welfare solidarity practices has been largely disregarded in the midst of a rapidly expanding literature that scrutinizes the transformation of social policy in the Global South during the crisis, while also highlighting the emergence of fragmented solidarity within the country.

Homestay Accommodation for Refugees (in Europe). A Literature Review

In the aftermath of the rapidly increasing number of refugees arriving in Europe following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, nonprofit organizations, private companies, and also public institutions have promoted homestay initiatives: That is, local households hosting refugees. In order to reflect on the political issues that homestay accommodation for refugees raises, the article charts and synthesizes the available research on homestay produced in 75 works written in English, French, German, and Italian, and with a particular focus on the European context. Most of those texts were published in the second half of the 2010s and focused on the homestay initiatives that developed in the context of the so-called 2015 “refugee crisis.” We analyzed this material by focusing on three different levels: First, hospitality as an inter-individual relationship within the domestic sphere (micro level); second, refugee homestay as diverse accommodation arrangements, implemented by informal groups, nonprofit organizations, and public institutions (meso level); and, third, the (non-) contentious dimension of homestay accommodation (macrolevel). The review also identifies theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives for future studies on homestay. We call for more attention to be given to the intersectional inequalities and power relations between hosts and guests; to the life trajectories of refugees; and to the interplay between homestay initiatives and political contexts. We argue that homestay is an exemplary case to reflect on the ongoing evolution of refugee support towards solidarity practices that ambivalently interact with border regimes.

A People’s Sea: Palestine and Popular Thalassopolitics in the Mediterranean Sea

This article draws on fieldwork, interviews, and archival research on the maritime campaign of the International Palestine Solidarity Movement to challenge the embargo on Gaza. I make three main arguments: first, in addressing the Mediterranean Sea as a platform for international solidarity, the Ships to Gaza inadvertently contrived a novel and largely understudied instance of popular politics at sea, which I coin ‘popular thalassopolitics’. I theorize this emergence in its own right and not solely within state-centric analyses or as a mere expansion of the terrestrial plane. This article urges us to read the sea through the lens of internationalist solidarity and the popular politics it invokes. Second, the popular thalassopolitics of the Ships charts and navigates an ‘insurgent terrain’, creatively assembling the well-established activist practice of solidarity vis-à-vis a decades-long indigenous struggle in Palestine with an emerging perception of the sea as a common and shared but dissimilar space for action. Thirdly, I argue that this history of the popular thalassopolitics of the Ships allows us to reread the scholarship on refugee rescue boats and civil activism at sea. This reading inadvertently challenges a Eurocentric bias in the emerging politicization of the sea as a humanitarianism space in which western saviors come to the aid of agentless refugees. La mer des peuples : La Palestine et la thalassopolitique populaire en mer Méditerranée

The Cuerpo-Territorio of Displacement: A Decolonial Feminist Geopolitics of Re-Existencia

ABSTRACT In this article we examine the root causes and consequences of forced displacement in Guerrero, Mexico. Drawing upon Latin American and Caribbean decolonial feminist thought, we use ‘cuerpo-territorio’ (body-territory) as a lens for understanding multiscalar violence in the region. This centres the experiences of women and children, key figures both in the (re)production of embodied, communal, and territorial ties and in the phenomenon of forced displacement. Their testimonials complicate understandings of internal migration in Mexico and asylum-seeking in the US, disrupting typical re/victimising narratives while acknowledging the interconnected, intimate-global violences these women and youth often face. In connection with ‘cuerpo-territorio’, we incorporate the decolonial concept of ‘re-existencia’ (re-existence) to show how those suffering displacement actively transform possibilities for being-in-the-world. In conversation with feminist geographic work on oppositional resistance, resilience, and re-working, we explain ‘re-existencia’ as solidarity practices that move beyond mere survival. Instead, these practices draw on longstanding indigenous ways of being to infuse new life into territories dispossessed through violence. This article aims to deepen dialogue with feminist geographic literatures outside of the Anglo-centric canon, and calls for greater attention to Latin American and Caribbean decolonial epistemologies in analyses of displacement in the Americas.

Oaxacalifornia: Indigenous transnational spaces as Grassroots Cosmopolitanism

Paradoxically both immigration and indigeneity are common conditions for exclusion from full citizenship in contemporary settler nation-states. Marginalized populations such as immigrants and Indigenous groups, resist the homogenizing rules dictated by dominant notions of culture and citizenship deployed by settler colonial states, entailing often hegemonic practices of control from institutions, such as the school and media. This essay discusses the creation of a transborder space between Mexico and the US named “Oaxacalifornia”. This “deterritorial” space was named and is maintained by Mexican Indigenous migrants from the state of Oaxaca who spend their daily lives interacting through communicative and civic practices of resurgence and solidarity. These practices enable the interaction with multiple locations and groups of people, fostering grassroots cosmopolitanism, or a worldly engagement challenging the oppressive forces of globalization, such as the state, the dominant cultural spheres, and the market; and the creation of spaces of diversity, resurgence, and solidarity.

“At first, I was only a subscriber”: re-mediating food citizens’ solidarity practices through digital technologies

In this paper, we explore how digital technologies re-mediate solidarity practices in alternative food networks (AFNs). To do so, the first author conducted an 8-month (auto-)ethnography of a community supported agriculture (CSA) initiative in Switzerland and 12 semi-structured interviews with CSA members. We identified three types of solidarity practices in our analysis that aim to support social inclusiveness, increase responsibility and sustainability, and foster the sharing of risk, work and infrastructure amongst CSA members. Digital technologies are central for joining and becoming a member of the CSA and also play a vital role in sharing information and organizing members’ work assignments. By becoming a member, consumers become subscribers voting with their wallet. If they regularly engage in farm work, they become prosumers or co-producers. Thus, our analysis foregrounds the continuum of food citizenship in the CSA we studied. However, the number of subscribers increases through digital technologies, transforming the initiative from an alternative to the market to an alternative within the market, whereby certain aspects of solidarity, such as social inclusiveness and sharing, are not realized anymore. Our study contributes to the emerging field of digital food studies by showing how solidarity is digitally enabled and negotiated in CSA, and how this shapes food citizenship.

Post‐2015 refugees in Germany: “Culture of welcome”, solidarity or exclusion?

Post‐2015 refugees in Germany: “Culture of welcome”, solidarity or exclusion?

Realizing the Future in the Present: Parent Organizing as a Practice of Solidarity

Imagining systemic change can be a lot to ask of Black and Latinx families in urban communities in light of long, sometimes intergenerational histories of marginalization and dehumanization in schools. For twenty years, CADRE (Community Asset Development Redefining Education) has been building the power and leadership of Black and Brown families in South Los Angeles “to protect and promote children’s dignity, opportunity to learn, and self-determination, by being at decision-making and policy-making tables and having the tools to monitor accountability in policy implementation.” When the community organizing group first engaged with the Family Leadership Design Collaborative (FLDC), CADRE had already successfully gotten the district to adopt new school discipline policies to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline and had continued to monitor implementation (CADRE, 2017). However, the fundamental relationships and interactions between families and teachers in schools continued to reflect racist, dehumanizing ideologies entrenched in inequitable power dynamics. Maisie Chin, the Executive Director of CADRE, facilitated a series of codesign sessions with CADRE parents between 2017 and 2019 to not only surface these dynamics but to re-imagine how parent-teacher conversations and interactions might be different. CADRE co-designers undertook role-playing and collective reflection to intervene in moment-to-moment interactions as a way to change broader systemic dynamics.

Acting in solidarity with the poor? Some conceptual and practical challenges

ABSTRACT Monique Deveaux’s Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements makes a timely, compelling, and important intervention in the philosophical literature on poverty and global justice, and improves our understanding of the nature and extent of responsibilities of variously situated agents towards the poor. Deveaux’s focus on poor-led social movements emphasizes that effective poverty reduction requires building up the collective capacities of the poor to engage in joint collective action to oppose and dismantle unjust structures. This approach politicizes poverty and provides a powerful refutation of some previous approaches that primarily formulated responses to global poverty to consist in mere charity to lighten the poor’s deprivations, or top-down solutions imposed by technocrats and other development experts. Deveaux then extends the concept of solidarity to characterize the political responsibility of the nonpoor, which consists of acting in political solidarity with poor-led organizations and movements. It is this latter move to extend the concept of solidarity to characterize poor-nonpoor cooperative activities that I question in this commentary. When the concept of solidarity, understood as identification-based joint action, is stretched to encompass cooperation between all those who may act together to resist, oppose, and dismantle the structures of domination and oppression that constitute poverty, there is the danger of obscuring the alienation and oppositional social positions that attend conditions of structural injustice. To acknowledge the limits and dilemmas of solidarity practices between the poor and nonpoor is perhaps a sober reminder of one of the major costs of living in conditions of structural injustice.

Learning Islam “ala Gaza”: Palestinian Shaykhs as Figures of Religious Authority in Indonesian Palestine Solidarity Practices

Abstract In recent years a variety of activities have emerged in Indonesia that invite Palestinian shaykhs as figures of religious authority. These practices are a by-product of humanitarian initiatives carried out by Muslim solidarity organizations of the Tarbiyya movement. Analyzing these practices through the lens of Muslim cosmopolitanism, I argue that they reflect a cosmopolitan patriotism, in which the umma and the nation are mutually constitutive frameworks of belonging. Mobilizing Indonesians for the Palestinian cause, while teaching them Qurʾan memorization skills that Gazans are believed to exceptionally possess, serves to create a pious generation as envisioned by the Tarbiyya movement.

The andro-white marketization of volunteer and community services: A case study of London’s social reproduction crisis

Neoliberal austerity has hit hard for people of colour and women living in deprived urban spaces, where we observe unprecedented levels of inequality in access to care and food. In this context, volunteer and community services (VCSs) have become fundamental to compensating for the lack of urban public services that support human needs. This article deploys a social reproduction framework to analyse the andro-white marketization of VCSs occurring in the care and food solidarity practices in London. By unpacking this multidimensional process through a combination of material and methods, it untangles the racialised, class and gendered forms of material exploitation and cultural domination exercised on and through VCSs circuits operating in marginal communities. Along these lines, it reflects on the transformational limits of the neoliberal care system in supporting the social reproduction of unequal cities.

The Provincial Forms of Masculinity: Male Power Relations, Strategies and Collaborations in Van

Male gender identities are constructed in different forms depending on variables such as age, sexuality, class and ethnicity. This research focusing on male gender identities in the city of Van aims to discuss masculinity through factors such as tribe, sexuality, power relations between men and local dynamics. Masculinities considered through these variables that occurred based on sociocultural expectations are planned to discuss within the framework of theories of male domination, hegemonic masculinity and structured action theory. Having examined the discourses of heterosexual and gay men through qualitative methods, the practices of control, exclusion, and solidarity which are performed among men during the construction of male gender identities is examined. In addition, male power relations that men perform to be positioned in the hierarchy of masculinities or to settle in a higher position against other men will also be discussed in relatin to power dynamics.

“If women stop, the world stops”: forging transnational solidarities with the International Women’s Strike

ABSTRACT Having roots in women’s struggles in different world regions, the International Women’s Strike (IWS) has, since 2017, generated a global wave of feminist mobilization against attacks on gender equality and sexual rights, neoliberalism’s multiple crises, and authoritarian, fundamentalist, and neo-nationalist politics. This article discusses the IWS from the perspective of transnational solidarities, with a focus on its manifestation in Turkey. First, differentiating between supra-political and left-leaning currents in transnational feminist politics, I outline the guiding principles of the IWS campaign as an acknowledgment of the systemic dynamics of gender oppression, a broad definition of women’s labor, and an intersectional understanding of solidarity. Second, drawing on field-based and digital ethnography, participatory action research, and interviews with activists from the coalition Women Are Strong Together, I discuss how the IWS principles overlapped with political dynamics and conflicts of interest between different women’s groups, hindering the possibility of a women’s strike in Turkey. The article demonstrates the tensions and transformations occurring at the intersection of the supra- and sub-national levels in feminist politics and contributes to the understanding of how different currents in transnational feminism dovetail with different imaginations and practices of solidarity.

A Crisis of Political Solidarity in the European Union and the Western Balkans

Abstract While the narratives of democratization and Europeanization had significant mobilizing potential in the Western Balkans during the 1990s and early 2000s, their relevance has been largely undermined by recent political developments in the region and growing crises of solidarity within the EU. This article offers a novel perspective for understanding the prospects of an EU future for the Western Balkans, through a discussion of the ideas and practices of political solidarity. It introduces the need to differentiate between reactive and institutional solidarity, and argues that institutional solidarity has a unique potential to mobilize the attention and commitment of citizens by offering a projection of a durable and sustainable political community organized around the principles of social justice and equality. Operationalizing this has become a necessary precondition not only for the “European future” of the Western Balkans but also for the future of the European project itself.

Advancing Indigenous futures with two-eyed seeing: Strategies for restoration and repair through collaborative research

This article builds on the Indigenous research concept of two-eyed seeing, that is, learning from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of Western knowledges and ways of knowing. We do so by drawing on the authors’ multiple standpoints (Karuk Tribal Member, Karuk Enrolled Descendent, and non-Indigenous ally) and experiences building longstanding research collaborations that apply biophysical science, ethnographic methods, and Karuk oral traditions to tribal lands protection. Using Kovach’s conversational methodology, we discuss problems of health and well-being that arise from two-eyed seeing research collaborations affecting Indigenous lands, waters, and resources. We specifically examine interventions for advancing Indigenous leadership in research that intersect with the Karuk Tribe’s ecocultural revitalization initiatives through (1) stewardship of baskets alongside basket-weaving communities (human and nonhuman); (2) family based management of ceremonial trails, and (3) allyship for tribal–academic collaborations. Our analysis emphasizes how the aliveness of Karuk knowledge resists ahistorical essentialism, for example, by engaging with the joy of human/nonhuman relations, ceremonial scale, and solidarity practices. Responding to ongoing challenges with knowledge hierarchies, this work recognizes the importance of mutual acknowledgment of persons across systems for advancing Indigenous research as a multi-vocal initiative with the capacity for restoration and repair.

Health-saving behavior and quality of life of military pensioners of working age in the process of their re-socialization after discharge from military service: qualitative and quantitative study

BACKGROUND: The problem of resocialization of military pensioners of working age in the civilian community is currently one of the urgent problems of both the state and society. Being a potential labor resource, this social group faces the need for a radical restructuring of its lifestyle and trajectories of labor activity (employment), the need for professional retraining.
 OBJECTIVE: The purpose to study the features of the resocialization of military pensioners of working age in the main areas of its course, as well as to identify the main problems of the process of their resocialization.
 MATERIALS AND METHODS: The article presents studies implemented using the methods of focus group discussions (two focus groups n=9, n=5), a questionnaire using a standard questionnaire for determining the quality of life SF-36 (n=413) and an authors questionnaire (n=413).
 RESULTS: The health-saving behavior of military pensioners is contradictory: on the one hand, they strive to preserve the useful health-saving habits acquired in the army (sleep and nutrition, commitment to sports) and at the same time note a two-fold decrease in physical activity; they understand the value of health, putting it in first or second place in the system of value orientations, and at the same time demonstrate a decreased the level of their own health-saving behavior, not paying enough attention to prevention and timely access to medical care. One of the most important motives for the re-socialization of modern military pensioners is the desire to maintain a high level and quality of their lives, as well as the lives of their families, which is significantly reduced due to their retirement.
 CONCLUSION: Socially useful qualities and skills acquired by respondents during military service should be used as much as possible in the process of their re-socialization into civil society. It will not only help military pensioners adapt, but will also contribute to solving a number of personnel and demographic problems at the level of public administration, as well as strengthening the practices of social solidarity in modern Russian society.

Mobile Commoning from the Margins to the Fore? Hostipitality on the Polish-Belarusian and Polish-Ukrainian Borders (2021–2022)

The article was written as an intervention piece in the midst of the massive escape of war refugees to Poland during the first four weeks of the war in Ukraine (24 February-24 March 2022). It aims to map and discuss the condition of grassroots hospitality (and inhospitality) in Poland between Autumn 2021 and Spring 2022. It was a time of shifting context in terms of policies: from the state of exception, migrant push-backs, and walling the border with Belarus, to the policy of solidarity with war refugees, legitimized humanitarianism and open border with Ukraine. In the course of half a year, the frames of bottom-up hospitality on Eastern borders of Poland changed entirely and abruptly. When a couple of thousands of migrants from the Middle East and beyond were camping in the border zone between Belarus and Poland, unable to claim asylum in the EU, practices of solidarity from the bottom up were barely tolerated by Polish state, if not criminalized and condemned. In these realities, structures of support remained an informal, fugitive, and underground network. But with the Russian attack on Ukraine on 24th February 2022, Poland opened its border for the unprecedented arrival of over two million people (during first month of the war) and bottom-up solidarity became a massive response of Polish society, which started to organize shelters, transportation, food and medicines. The same politicians and media which were fighting hospitality to migrants — in terms of ‘crimes of solidarity’ — on the border with Belarus, this time welcomed it with enthusiasm and support. The article proposes to view the nascent rise of grassroots hospitality with Ukrainian migrants in terms of ‘mobile commoning’: precarious, makeshift and autonomous practices of solidarity with people on the move. Mobile commoning is considered here as potential basis for a different migration policy in the EU. At the same time, the Polish case is analyzed as an instructive study of the limits of political universalism which are constructed at and by the borders.

Labors of Love and Loss: Radical Acts of Human, Plant, and Nonhuman Mothering

As we begin to pick up the scattered pieces of our lives upended by a global pandemic, there is still little clarity about what comes next; and yet it has been laid perfectly bare that mothering is both essential and chronically undervalued. For the two editors of this special issue, we are among millions who are raising kin (human and nonhuman alike) in the Anthropocene. Who both worry desperately for what the future will look like, and who practice love and care in the face of crisis, extinction, contamination, aggression, and more. We are interested in taking seriously mothering and other forms of caregiving as radical acts of ecosurvival, and so we invited human animal collaborators to this special issue to help us collectively think through the ways in which love, intimacy, mothering, caregiving, and/or kinmaking are practices of resistance, solidarity, or world-making. The response to our invitation – in both scope and depth – was immense. Scholars and poets and artists everywhere have already been imagining – and witnessing – a new world being born and broadened to allow new stories of survival and kinship to take hold.

Queer Sex and the Crisis of Capital

Queer Sex and the Crisis of Capital