Practices Of Solidarity Research Articles

Epistemic silences, subversive politics: post-disaster economic assessments as technologies of persistent coloniality and route to an emancipatory climate justice agenda in the Caribbean

ABSTRACT Economic analyses of losses and damages or post-disaster needs assessments (PDNAs) are silent about the longstanding reparatory claims related to the legacies of African enslavement, colonial violence and indigenous dispossession that compound uneven racialized geographies in the Caribbean. This paper unpacks these so-called ‘objective’ valuations drawing attention to their (neo)liberal framings, technocratic underpinnings, and historical origins in the Caribbean plantation economy. Using case studies of catastrophic hurricanes Matthew (2016), Irma (2017) and Dorian (2019) in Haiti, Antigua and Barbuda, and The Bahamas respectively, the paper exposes critical tensions, knowledge hierarchies, and contradictions embedded within empirical assessments that justify and prioritize preferred policies of powerful international development, financial and governance institutions. PDNAs under-value and neglect important community and local knowledge, solidarity practices, cultural institutions, and relational ethics in the face of climate disasters in these Caribbean islands. Taking a Black geographies and political economy approach, the paper addresses the limitations and risks associated with PDNAs, deemed political tools or technologies of climate disaster that reinforce oppression. To advance an emancipatory climate justice agenda to enable more radical reparative measures and possibilities, the paper suggests that analyses and political strategy must be grounded in people's history, cultural, ethical, and communal governance practices.

The Antecedents of the Entrepreneurial Intention of Cooperative Founders: The Case of the Province of Larache

This paper aims to identify the antecedents of entrepreneurial intention among the founders of cooperatives in the Larache province of Morocco. The theoretical model used is Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behavior, which explains intention based on attitudes toward behavior, social norms, and perceived behavioral control. Our analysis adopts a quantitative approach for 57 founders of cooperatives. The data underwent exploratory analysis using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and confirmatory analysis through linear regression using the SPSS software. Our findings suggest a relationship between attitude toward behavior and intention while rejecting the link between social norms and intention, as well as perceived behavioral control and intention. Our findings also underscore the role of ancestral solidarity practices in empowering indigenous peoples. In this regard, the Georgist political economy approach provides a suitable perspective to promote cooperative entrepreneurship in Africa.

Solidarity as subversion: Attempting climate justice practice within the Neoliberal University

The neoliberal higher education model has often co-opted efforts from justice-based movements to disrupt academic complicity in a capitalist and colonial system of exploitation. Higher education institutions have already begun looking to, and appropriating, language and ideas from the climate justice movement to perform a response to the injustices that have led to and resulted from the climate crisis. As one way of subverting this appropriation, this article articulates, and reflects on, a specific approach to the Vertically Integrated Program (VIP) model, an educational idea originally developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology where undergraduate students work as researchers with faculty and graduate students. The approach put forth in this article is one based on the experience of the authors in developing a VIP that aims to foster and practice a culture of solidarity with an organisation that is addressing the causes and effects of historical injustices facing the community from which it grew. The practice of solidarity at a time of climate crisis offers a potential solution, showing students that it can be used to break down the walls of higher education, to practice solidarity with those excluded outside of it, and to remind us all of our humanity.

“They Would Plant the Rose Garden Themselves”

This article theorizes how femme sociality and world-making provide a counterpoint to a politics that aims for neutrality or innocence, arguing that neutrality or innocence are hallmarks of different forms of patriarchy. Instead, the authors offer embracing complicity as a concept that structures practical ethics centered in abolitionism and nondisposability. Complicity is formulated as a mode of self-understanding that guides action, evading the social hierarchies demanded by a claim to innocence, uprooting (neo)liberal attitudes that look to evade friction by doling out punishment and exclusion. The proposal to embrace complicity is followed by a proposal for solidarity based on openness. Rather than being “right” or “solving problems,” a turn to the sensuous provides a form of world-making that can hold difference—without reducing life to the single organizational forms characteristic of liberalism. As a key part of this form of solidarity, the authors show how trans femmeness emphasizes possibilities for social and sensorial transformation. Practices of care and solidarity allow one to entangle with different forms of life. Instead of reforming the structures of oppression, femme practices encourage us to unlearn and uproot institutional forms that reproduce social and material oppressions, and to take agency in (re)constructing and nourishing one's own worlds—to collectively plant the rose garden of struggle for liberation.

Anti-racist beauty micro-enterprises: Black women’s subversive entrepreneurship in Cali, Colombia

ABSTRACT This paper explores how Black women entrepreneurs in Cali, Colombia confront racism and sexism, as they engage in the expanding neoliberal beauty market. We argue that anti-racist entrepreneurial experiences in Cali are shaped by four interconnected processes: First, changes in gender and development policies, aligned with inclusive neoliberal development projects. Second, the limitations of state neoliberal multicultural policies, which has made activists aware of the need to address racism and sexism. Third, activist’s appropriation of the intersectional turn, allowing them to recognize articulations between racism, classism and sexism. Fourth, the adoption of anti-neoliberal discourses supporting distributive and solidarity practices. Our analysis suggests that while entrepreneurial anti-racist actions do not generate radical or permanent changes in the beauty industry, they do have material and symbolic effects in Black women’s experiences of racial justice.

Argentine exiles in Spain: Translation as a practice of solidarity

s part of its solidarity activities with Chilean, Uruguayan, and Argentine exiles in Catalonia, the NGO Agermanament led by Father Josep Ribera and the Lliga dels Drets dels Pobles published a register of exiles organized according to their professional activity in the magazine Agermanamentin 1979. The categories included in the list were “visual artists, doctors/psychologists, psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, musicians, actors and singers, publicists, jurists, architects, and photographers”. Translatorswere not included in the list, even thoughtheirprofessional status had been recognized by the UNESCO in 1976 and thousands of Latin American exiles who had fled dictatorships and arrived in Spain without refugee status were working as translators. Due to the toll on the publishing sector, heavily damaged by political and cultural repression, numerous exiled Latin American intellectuals and writers entered the Catalan publishing industryas translators, proofreaders, and editors. Thisarticle aims to shed light on the quantitative and qualitative importance of translation as a practice of solidarity within the publishing sector during the Spanish transition to democracy. I want to show that members of the Latin American diaspora contributed to the constitution of a transnational publishing space, which was possible thanks to the solidarity of local publishers and exiles who created a labor network through the commission of translations.

Bringing care in: The meaning of care in refugee solidarity movements

Abstract This article investigates the meaning that refugee solidarity activists supporting people on the move across the Western Balkans migratory route and at the Italian–French border attribute to the notion of ‘care’, which they use to define their solidarity practices, particularly in the aftermath of the global pandemic. By means of a content analysis of in-depth interviews with representatives of grassroots solidarity groups, the article demonstrates that ‘care’ is conceived of as having a political character, as it responds to both the crisis of health care and the restrictions on freedom of movement; a non-hierarchical connotation, which informs in- and out-group relationships; and a transformative orientation, as acts of care prefigure a society in which freedom of movement and health rights are granted to all, in contrast to the existing model of migration governance.

Refugee solidarity activism in times of pandemic: reorganizing solidarity practices at the EU border

ABSTRACT This article explores how grassroots refugee solidarity groups adapted their solidarity practices to the unprecedented challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic. By taking as a case study the EU border between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, which is situated along the Western Balkans migratory route, this piece explores how grassroots solidarity groups continued to provide first aid in the field to people on the move during the pandemic by adapting their practices to the changed circumstances. Combining a spatial and relational perspective to the study of solidarity activism, this article found evidence that solidarity groups managed to continue their activities during the pandemic thanks to two specific conditions: the existence of established networks and strong ties between international and domestic actors; and the spatiality of the border, which provided fertile ground for these relationships and ties to develop and thrive. The study placed social movement literature into dialogue with critical border studies and critical geography and is based on online and offline participant observation as well as in-depth qualitative interviews with solidarians engaged in refugee solidarity activism.

Care-full resistance to slow violence: building radical hope through creative encounters with refugees during the pandemic

ABSTRACT This paper explores the slow violence of the state towards those seeking asylum, alongside resistance to it, through a critical discussion of the role of arts-based practice, care-full practice and the potential for a new politics of hope. It reflects on a series of creative online workshops led by two arts-based refugee organisations based in London, Stories & Supper and Phosphoros Theatre, during the COVID-19 lockdowns in the UK in 2020 and 2021. Exploring these workshops and their legacies against the backdrop of precarity, uncertainty and slow violence, the article considers some of the ways in which these workshops – and their focus on play, creativity and care – enabled practices of resistance, solidarity and radical hope to emerge.

Homeless migrants’ commoning practices. “Our House” solidarity project in Athens’ Omonia square

In recent years, Athens has been at the center of the so-called “migration crisis”, as thousands of newcomers have found temporary or permanent refuge in the city. However, because the state’s housing policies have reduced the available positions of those who have the right to settle in state accommodation structures, an ever-increasing number of newcomers facing homelessness and live in city’s streets, parks and squares. In this context, a solidarity collective kitchen named “Our House” was self-organized by a group of newcomers on the city’s central square, Omonoia Square, where it remained for two years. Our House project activities, based on mutual help and commoning practices, claimed the homeless migrants’ right to the center of the city. However, in 2019 the square was turned into a construction site and Our House activities were prohibited. This paper is based on ethnographic urban research and discusses the solidarity practices of homeless migrants through the theoretical approaches of the right to the city, as well as critical approaches to homelessness and urban commons. The main findings of the paper focus on highlighting the homeless migrants’ commoning practices, and the paper’s contribution lies in the enrichment of theoretical discussions on the right to the city and urban commoning practices through the case homeless migrants’s self-organization.

Relativizing Relativism? Variations on a Theme in Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis

AbstractWhile the rise of a ‘dictatorship of relativism’ was a longstanding concern for Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, some commentators have suggested that—for better or for worse—the challenge posed by relativism appears to be less of a priority for Pope Francis. Indeed, Francis's remark, ‘Who am I to judge?’ appears to have become as much the defining soundbite for his papacy as the ‘dictatorship of relativism’ was for Benedict's. Contrary to these perceptions, this article argues that a critique of relativism is in fact a central aspect of Pope Francis's magisterium. Francis exhibits continuity with Benedict by amplifying his concerns about the danger of attempting to reconstruct reality according to human desire, but Francis also develops his predecessor's teaching by introducing the category of ‘practical relativism’. With this development, relativism cannot be dismissed as a theoretical problem that only plagues those who refuse to assent to the truth intellectually. The willingness to set aside the truth to which one assents when it proves inconvenient represents a more pernicious—precisely because more subtle—form of relativism that Francis argues must be rooted out, not by argument, but through self‐examination and the practice of solidarity.

Facing the Limitations of Teaching and Learning Committed to Solidarity and Social Justice: A Feminist Approach

This study examines how 52 graduate students enrolled in a social justice program in a large urban university in Canada relate to others in and outside the college classroom. Using a method involving creative student audio productions and self-reflections, the study finds that despite extensive learning about others and engaging with postcolonial, race, feminist, Indigenous and other critical theories and knowledges in the program, both racially privileged students and those who are members of disadvantaged and marginalized social groups enact relations extending power structures imagined as “solidarity.” These relations have important gender aspects and are shaped by broader historical forces, such as racism and colonization, as well as contemporary aspects of Canadian academia that have not been studied fully in relation to social justice education. These findings call for social justice curriculum and pedagogies that move learners from thinking critically and feeling empathy for others to behaving ethically and standing in political togetherness with those others as equals. The study suggests that transnational women and feminist political practices of solidarity mobilizing cross-racial and cross-national women’s movements in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s present valuable pedagogies that could position college students for such relating.

Intime Infrastrukturen: Feministisch-geographische Perspektiven auf Energie

Abstract. Facing multiple and embodied inequalities inscribed in the energy system, this intervention argues for a feminist perspective on energy geographies. Extending critical research on urban infrastructure with concepts of care, it seeks to contribute to more just energy relations. In a first step, the article examines two energy fields: The home, where gender identities are produced and challenged, and the urban, where practices of solidarity oppose the conditions of care work in the context of neoliberal service provision. Shedding light on those „labourious spaces“, where urban materialities and its subjects are closely interconnected (Lancione and McFarlane, 2016), I reveal how heterogeneous infrastructural experiences are constantly contested within multiple entanglements of energy flows, gendered labour and care practices. In a second step, I provide three impulses for a relational perspective on energy. I argue for taking the intimate aspects of urban infrastructure as a starting point for feminist scholarship; for tracing a crisis of social reproduction along embodied energetic experiences; and for creating a collective vision of caring infrastructures.

Introduction to Everyday Internationalism: Socialist–South Connections and Mass Culture during the Cold War

AbstractThis Special Issue brings together scholars working in a variety of contexts to explore the concepts of solidarity and socialist internationalism as a mass phenomenon. While recent scholarship has begun to document linkages between the socialist and (post)colonial world during the Cold War, most of this work has eschewed a focus on the mass, social experience of internationalism, instead emphasizing the transformative role played by small groups of mobile elites. But if the direct experience of socialist internationalism was limited to a privileged few, how then was it experienced by the majority, for whom actual travel outside of their state was a distant possibility? This issue explores how socialist internationalism and its attendant practices of solidarity functioned within and between socialist societies. Where it does take border-transcending groups as its subject, it explores the socio-historical, everyday implications of this transnational story. For much of the Cold War, state and party-led practices of internationalism were a central component of everyday life, but little is known about these practices as they manifested on the ground. To shed light on this, this Special Issue explores how depictions of solidarity manifested in mass culture; how everyday practices emerged out of socialist internationalism and anti-imperialism; and how institutions that sought to bridge gaps between societies through solidarity emerged and then transformed or disappeared after 1989.

Political imaginaries of solidarity: the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) in Toronto

ABSTRACT This article discusses the impact of political imaginaries in facilitating or hindering sustained solidarity with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in Toronto, Canada. It conceives of the BDS movement as a space traversed by differentiated forces, actors, practices, and subjective dispositions that coalesce around a goal and constitute solidarity relations across time. In so doing, this article highlights the interplay of the multiple political imaginaries shaping the movement’s trajectory and analyses the ways these imaginaries facilitate or hinder the movement’s efforts to sustain solidarity. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2019, the article analyses activists’ political imaginaries as sites of contestation structured through what Mbembe terms ‘entangled temporalities.’ It argues that the plurality of political imaginaries animating solidarity practices among BDS activists in Toronto significantly contributed to the attenuation and scattering of the movement relative to its unity and synchronicity a decade earlier. Specifically, the article identifies the continuum between an anti-colonial Third World Internationalist imaginary and a pragmatic rights-based imaginary as central to the trajectory of the movement.

What affective rupture does. Disrupting affective citizenship in migrant solidarity

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to show how emotions and citizenship are inextricably intertwined in the analysis of migrant solidarity. It does so by highlighting the ‘disrupting’ dimensions of emotions as processes that redefine the very criteria by which one is included or excluded, close or distant, intimate or foreign, in every situation. The essay draws on ethnographic research with Italian citizens doing solidarity work for and with migrants in Florence and Turin. Solidarity practices and the emotions that constitute them are important for the production of lived citizenship, which happens on a daily basis. By discussing results that emerged through qualitative methods, the essay has the aim to investigate the role of affective ruptures in migrant solidarity networks, and how they may be emotional and reflexive turning points that transform the ethical-political attitudes.

Intimate liminality in Spain's berry industry

AbstractSpain's berry industry relies on the agricultural labour of both local and seasonal migrant workers. A significant part of this migrant workforce comprises Moroccan mothers who leave their children with relatives in order to perform this wage labour. The bilateral recruitment regime favours the employment of Moroccan women with children for this labour to ensure that workers return home at the end of the harvesting season. Drawing on multi‐site ethnographic research in Spain and Morocco, this study revealed the effects of this bilateral labour regime on the intimate lives of migrant workers. We argue that the geopolitical prescriptions of this labour migration regime, along with the working and living conditions of migrant workers in Huelva, result in experiences of intimate liminality. We examined these experiences by exploring: (1) how the role of female workers as mothers becomes liminal as transnational labour agreements marginalise and outsource care obligations, (2) how governmental neglect of migrant workers' occupational health exposes them to reproductive health risks and (3) how this neglect places them in a liminal space in terms of access to healthcare, and (4) how, despite their liminality, migrant workers contest precarious conditions through everyday solidarity practices. We advance a feminist approach to liminality, emphasising the importance of an embodied, intersectional, and multiscalar perspective.

Solidarity and reciprocity during the COVID-19 pandemic: a longitudinal qualitative interview study from Germany.

While solidarity practices were important in mitigating the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, their limits became evident as the pandemic progressed. Taking a longitudinal approach, this study analyses German residents' changing perceptions of solidarity practices during the COVID-19 pandemic and examines potential reasons for these changes. Adults living in Germany were interviewed in April 2020 (n = 46), October 2020 (n = 43) and October 2021 (n = 40) as part of the SolPan Research Commons, a large-scale, international, qualitative, longitudinal study uniquely situated in a major global public health crisis. Interviews were analysed using qualitative content analysis. While solidarity practices were prominently discussed and positively evaluated in April 2020, this initial enthusiasm waned in October 2020 and October 2021. Yet, participants still perceived solidarity as important for managing the pandemic and called for institutionalized forms of solidarity in October 2020 and October 2021. Reasons for these changing perceptions of solidarity included (i) increasing personal and societal costs to act in solidarity, (ii) COVID-19 policies hindering solidarity practices, and (iii) a perceived lack of reciprocity as participants felt that solidarity practices from the state were not matching their individual efforts. Maintaining solidarity contributes to maximizing public health during a pandemic. Institutionalized forms of solidarity to support those most in need contribute to perceived reciprocity among individuals, which might increase their motivation to act in solidarity. Thus, rather than calling for individual solidarity during times of crisis, authorities should consider implementing sustaining solidarity-based social support systems that go beyond immediate crisis management.

Solidarities on the move between the Horn of Africa and Italy: Somali migrants’ disconnection and networking practices in the 2010s

ABSTRACT Through the reconstruction of the de-activations and re-activations of solidarity in different phases of migration trajectories, this article analyses transnational migration from the Somali territories during the 2010s. Somali migrants who arrived in Italy between 2011 and 2017 provide the ethnographic basis for a historically situated, socio-cultural theory of transnational migration from below. The article addresses the moral, social, economic and political milieu within which the migrants defined their intention to travel to Europe and assembled their trajectories. The analysis focuses on the interaction between the all-pervasive presence of networks of smugglers and traffickers in the Horn of Africa and their capacity to respond to the practical necessities and aspirations of young individuals. The second object of analysis is the transformative and productive dimension of the journey. The migrants re-adapted their theory of practice of solidarity and social networking to very specific circumstances imposed on them during the journey. Finally, the paper addresses the creative readaptations of ideas and practices of solidarity in Italy, under the combined pressure of inherited moral codes, the emotional and socio-economic effects of the previous steps in the migrants’ trajectories, and everyday life in a securitised and precarious context.

Hyper-femininity as radical resistance: re-envisaging the starlet through a feminist practice of solidarity in It’s Sophie! (2018)

ABSTRACT This article challenges the often-derided role of the young and apparently naive ‘starlet’ figure in film and stage performance. My engagement with the concept of the starlet originates from Laura Mulvey’s influential psychoanalytical feminist essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1989 [1975]), which investigates women in classical Hollywood cinema as objects of a misogynistic gaze. My definition of the starlet builds on this work and identifies her as a conventionally yet unattainably glamorous and attractive young woman, who is groomed and policed by patriarchal structures. Mulvey explains how, within the patriarchy of the Hollywood studio system, the ‘determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly’ (1989: 16). This article analyzes how my performance practice seeks new ways of resisting and deconstructing the male gaze to produce innovative alternatives to heteronormative femininity. Specifically, I examine It’s Sophie! (2018), which presents a starlet who explodes the idea of a fixed masculinised archetype. The starlet personae in It’s Sophie! engage in subversive hyper-femininities through endurance-based posing that serves to explore their magnified sexuality and monstrous potential. This article presents wonderous and worrying states of unbridled femininity that directly challenge the masculinised gaze.