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Paper short abstract:

Exploring two different expressions of solidarity of Jewish women living in the West Bank, I claim that these two modes of solidarity with Palestinians are very much the result of negotiating solidarity and resistance while confronting state power.

Paper long abstract:

Very few Israeli left-wing Jews live in Palestine. The narratives informing my paper reveal the experience of left-wing Jewish Israeli women living in Palestinian localities in the West Bank for political reasons. This paper shows that the West Bank, with its subdivisions of different degrees of sovereignty, is a borderland and points to the ambiguous nature of the Green Line, which has an illusionary image of impermeability while being amorphous, membranous, and mobile.

These characteristics of the Green Line also reflect some of the challenges of living in the West Bank as a Borderland. The paper demonstrates the challenges the Jewish left-wing activist women living in the borderland encounter and the strategies they employ to maintain their political activity and thick solidarity with Palestinians. The paper shows how the intensity of life in the borderland under state surveillance and the type of sovereignty determine the possibility and the form of expressions of political solidarity. Exploring two different expressions of solidarity, termed "In-between the gaps" solidarity and "In your face to the system" solidarity, I claim that these two modes of solidarity are very much the result of negotiating solidarity and resistance while confronting state power.

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Paper short abstract:

The everyday life of volunteers from European grassroots pro-refugee solidarity initiatives is fuelled by moments of moral crises and hesitations, which contribute to shaping and redefining solidarity and challenging European universalist ideals of "the good".

Paper long abstract:

Grassroots pro-refugee European Solidarity initiatives, which emerged and have persisted since 2015, are fuelled by moments of moral vulnerability. As such, they offer a unique vantage point for investigating and problematizing the manifestations of what scholars of the autonomy of migration have termed "the crisis of Europe and its borders," in opposition to the media's dominant depiction of 2015 as a "migration crisis." Volunteers' acts of solidarity inherit but also challenge the dominant and culturally situated discourse on which goods should be sought and which bads must be fought, thereby putting dominant morality into question. In practice, European volunteers often confront the limits of 'the good' and tinker with its multiple and contextual nature, moving beyond European universalism. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2021 in Parisian solidarity networks for refugees, this paper demonstrates how various interpretations of 'the good' can coexist and come into conflict in the everyday dealings of these organizations, leading to significant changes and the subtle redefinition of 'the good' or the hierarchy of such goods. This often results in a departure from the European and universalist ideal of liberal equality. The paper thereby highlights the creativity and imagination of the volunteers and how they challenge the culturally dominant ways of doing good by paying attention to how new conceptions of good can emerge during moments of crisis with varying intensity and visibility. As such, it illustrates the tight links between moral vulnerability and the (un)doing of solidarity.

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Paper short abstract:

Solidarity is essential in the construction of children speaking up as either noise or voice in ethnographic encounters. We draw on the participant observation of dialogic workshops with children to reflect on how sound is constructed as either ‘noise’ or ‘voice’ by children and adult researchers.

Paper long abstract:

Ethnographic research is one modality of conducting child-friendly research, as it allows for a highly contextualized immersion into the everyday lives of children. Noise has been studied as a form of resistance practiced by children in school settings. We want to expand this reflection with a focus on how sound becomes either ‘noise’ or ‘voice’ in the ethnographic encounter. We draw on participatory research with 11- 13-year-old children in six different schools in Romania. Participants engaged in drawing, photovoice, forum theater, and AI-enhanced storytelling about solidarity. All workshops were documented with field notes by adult women researchers. The noise appeared from the perspective of the adult ethnographers as ‘tiring’ and ‘bothersome’, yet it was also part of a co-created dialogic space that pointed to the desire of students to speak up. As such, ‘noise’ and ‘voice’ can be juxtaposed in the epistemic solidarity practices. While ‘noise’ may lead to the dis-engagement of adult researchers with participants and a subsequent form of de-solidarization, it also points to spontaneous emergence and fracture of solidarity practices between children - as they speak up, listen to, interrupt each other, and urge each other to listen. ‘Voice’ on the other hand, emerges when children are listened to, both by the adult researcher and their peers. Finally, music as a form of something worth being listened to according to children points to what transforms a sound into something that is not noise, namely collectively attributed relevance.

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Paper short abstract:

The social crisis and the psychomotrician students solidarity practices constitute an axis of transformation of the professional field, while it legitimizes itself by making a novel contribution to the interventions and policies that are developed in contexts of deprivation

Paper long abstract:

The training of professionals in Argentina has followed a model centered on the liberal practice: individuals in a private consultancy room serving people who knows them and can afford them. Psychomotricity, a recent profession, followed this model. However, when the training took place in a public university in 2000, the focus of its training concentrated not only on the projection to work in a "liberal" way, but rather on a practice centered on the social complexity that afflict children and families since then.

Based on an applied anthropology project carried out with psychomotricity students in a foster care program lead by an NGO and on broader qualitative research on university extension programs, I question how students make sense to their responsibility as future psychomotrician in a context of deepening social crises, linked to situations of family deprivation, gender violence, the abandonment of children at birth, etc. Students learning and helping those situations, interrogate the relation between solidarity and social crisis via the transformation of a professional ethos. Students asume that they are being trained for a "real" exercise of the discipline in a society where inequality and the complexity of social issues are evident and problematic, especially for those who have the possibility of studying for free at the public university. The social crisis and the solidarity practices linked constitute an axis of transformation of the professional field, while it legitimizes itself by making a novel contribution to the interventions and policies that are developed in contexts of deprivation.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on un/doing solidarities with ethnography through the lens of participatory co-research. The research focused on how solidarities are imagined and practiced in negotiations of migrant deservingness in the context of dispersal housing for people in the UK asylum system.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reflects on doing and undoing solidarities with ethnography through the lens of participatory co-research conducted on- and off-line during the COVID-19 pandemic, as part of the Migrants and Solidarities project. The research focused on how solidarities are imagined, practiced, and (re)constituted in negotiations of migrant deservingness in the context of dispersal housing for people in the UK asylum system; it took place against a background of overlapping crisis discourses, protracted public sector austerity, and increasingly hostile policies vis-à-vis people seeking asylum. The original project design relied on a relatively conventional ethnographic approach, which had to be abandoned as COVID took hold. In response, and inspired by calls to decolonise ethnography, we adopted a participatory approach, working with a group of six co-researchers who had personal experience of the asylum system. Through our ethnographic practice, we sought to create a space of conviviality and recognition, countering the precarity of people in the asylum system and challenging entrenched inequalities within both conventional anthropological practice and society at large. We found that solidarities, a key concept in the research project, were also enacted in and through the research process as co-researchers shared their stories and group members supported one another. The paper examines the intersections, tensions, and challenges we encountered and worked through during the fieldwork period and beyond, including those of procedural, institutional ethics vs ethics in practice. The paper concludes with reflections on Hage’s call for a politics of co-hoping in times of crisis.

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This article sheds light onto the Food Self-Provisioning (FSP) practice at the so-called dachas in Eastern Estonia and explores the potential of countering further polarisation in politically sensitive context through collaborative organisation of the transdisciplinary transfer events (2022, 2023).

Paper long abstract:

This contribution explores the potential of social sustainability within the Food Self-Provisioning (FSP) practice at the so-called dachas — a Russian term for a plot of land with a seasonal allotment house for food production. Using the Sputnik dacha garden association in Eastern Estonia near the town of Sillamäe as our case study, we organised a series of transdisciplinary transfer events which culminated in the “Gardeners' Day” to facilitate alliances between the ‘deprived’ (the FSP gardeners on the ground) and the ‘discontented’ (food activists and scholars) (Brenner et al., 2012).

This interdisciplinary contribution is based on informal conversations and participant observation during the collaborative transfer events (2022, 2023), feedback surveys and ten short post-event interviews (2023). „Gardeners' Day“ opened up the opportunity to the local community and visitors, including artists and scholars to explore the mimetic function of dacha gardens. At the same time, the organizational phase of this transdisciplinary project also enabled us to reflect upon our own positionality and general challenges of such collaborations happening on equal footing with the local community. While exposing the urgent need to bridge different target groups to counter further societal polarisation (e.g. rural-urban, ethnicity), our empirical data demonstrates further findings: i) the necessity of revaluing and revisibilizing the FSP as a culturally intriguing phenomenon and socio-ecologically beneficial practice; ii) the importance of space, perceived agency, enhanced self-efficacy and pride; iii) the need for further alliances and cooperation with different stakeholders; iv) the importance of diverse creative formats for participatory and collaborative processes.

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The paper explores practices of solidarity in defiance of hostile migration politics in Morocco. It focuses on the moral, political, and social ambiguities that solidarity entails amongst leaders and activists from migrant associations who discuss their commitment as a form of "sacrifice" .

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on long-term ethnographic engagement with the governance and lived experiences of ‘illegal’ migration in Morocco, the paper explores practices of solidarity which have risen in response to hostile migration politics. The paper focuses on the moral, political, and social ambiguities that solidarity entails amongst migrant people in Morocco.

Amidst efforts to selectively deter, monitor and control the mobility of (racialized) people deemed undesirable, transnational bordering regimes seek to stifle solidarity practices that provide various forms of support to migrant people. State and non-state actors violently target individual and organisations which challenge bordering efforts through practices of solidarity, thereby contributing to an overall climate of fear. Whilst public discourses over migration issues have often focused on the targeting of (Western) actors (e.g. sea rescues), the intimidation of solidarity actors also includes citizens and NGOs south of the Mediterranean Sea, including migrant people themselves.

Drawing on the imaginaries deployed by migrants to articulate their life journeys and make sense of violent migration policies, the paper examines the experiences of migrant leaders from Western and Central Africa in Morocco. It discusses how leaders and other active members of associations set up by migrants narrativize their commitment and efforts to counter the violence of bordering measures as a “sacrifice”. While pursuing their own life goals and migratory journeys, they need to navigate expectations from other migrant people, fraught relationships with civil society organisations, and intense surveillance, repression, and co-optation attempts by Moroccan authorities regulating the mobility of migrants in and out of Morocco.

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Paper short abstract:

Through ethnographic research, the paper explores the ethical dimensions, challenges and opportunities of volunteering and researching within grassroots organisations supporting migrants in Athens and Thessaloniki, focusing on access, legitimacy and the related transformative opportunities.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, grassroots movements and organisations have assumed a pivotal role in confronting the exclusionary migration policies of the EU. This study focuses specifically on the Greek context - a crucial entry point into Europe and a significant nexus along the Balkan Routes - where a dynamic network of individuals and organisations from below actively engages in supporting those trying to reach Europe. Through ethnographic research conducted in the cities of Athens and Thessaloniki, while participating in pro-migrant initiatives, the paper explores the ethical dimensions, challenges, and opportunities inherent in simultaneous volunteering and researching within grassroots organisations. Specifically, the analysis highlights the researcher's dual role as a volunteer-researcher and its impact on both the field and solidarity practices. Examining informality, vulnerability and precariousness, the paper illustrates how volunteering can serve as a means to access the site, give legitimacy and foster reciprocity. It also provides valuable insights into ethical considerations, challenges, and transformative opportunities in the intertwining of volunteering and research, while also delving into methodological considerations, best practices, researcher positionality and the ethical dimensions of highly participatory, engagement-driven research in transit and border areas at Europe's periphery. The aim is to deepen our understanding of the intricate interplay between academic inquiry and active engagement in grassroots initiatives, offering a comprehensive perspective on the multifaceted landscape of solidarity practices in response to the evolving challenges of migration in the EU.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the limits and potentials of building bottom-up solidarity in a Neapolitan squatted social center, in the scope of contentious urban politics. Mutual support and solidarity contrast against the compounding crisis in the city, in the wake of austerity politics in early 2010s.

Paper long abstract:

The flourishing of state-recognized “urban commons” in Naples is exactly due to — and not despite of — the city’s long history of economic deprivation and inequality, made staggering with austerity measures after the 2008 crisis. In this context of supposed underdevelopment and economic dependency, the vitality of leftist social movements and organizations is undeniable, underlining the transformative potential of solidarity-based, grassroots political organizing.

This paper explores the politics of solidarity pursued by Ex-OPG “Je so’ Pazzo”, a Neapolitan squatted social center formally recognized by the city as an “urban common” in 2016. In a nutshell, the political project in question emphasizes mutualism and horizontality, widespread care and unity in plurality, explicitly denouncing the illegitimate production of inequality by neoliberal forms of governance, producers of socialized dispossession. Therefore, this research investigates how the social and political space of the “commons” metabolizes social vulnerability into political radicalization: how does it relate to crisis discourses? What social impact does it have on the city and its population? And perhaps most importantly, what are its challenges moving forward, in the face of a proto-fascist Italian government and the prolonged crisis of European institutional politics?

My aim with this analysis is to bring to light an ethnographically sustained case of a (somewhat) successful narrative of social change, achieved within collective political claims and a constellate conception of power and possibility. It is relevant in that it reveals an open course of action, fleshing out “on the ground” the meanings and limits of bottom-up solidarity.