Short Abstract

Exploring solidarity beyond its essentialisation as mutual aid between like-minded peers, this panel examines the messy work of forging collective action in challenging sites or of collaborating across differences in power and positionality, and the affective dimensions of these practices.

Long Abstract

This panel examines the lived realities of solidarity in unexpected or challenging sites. We propose to move beyond idealisations of solidarity as a pre-political ethical imperative to help sympathetic others or as a seamless form of global cooperation between states, as this obscures the difficult, material work of forging collective action. While many anthropological studies focus on the fractures of collective action—documenting failures, non-mobilisation, or co-option—this panel deliberately pivots to foreground hopeful sites where individuals, groups, or communities act in solidarity “despite everything.” We seek to explore what makes solidarity possible across significant differences in positionality, power, and political interests. What drives such “counterintuitive solidarity”?

Central to the panel is an interrogation of the affective dimensions of collective action. How do concrete experiences of care and neglect intersect with moral discourses of solidarity? We strive to trace the interplay between sympathy, indifference, affection, and antipathy, investigating the blurred lines between solidarity and charity, and between care and paternalism. By examining these empirically grounded moments of collective action, we aim to situate solidarity not as a simple universalist ideal, but as a complex, messy, and contested practice deeply embedded in local formations of activism and collective action. We invite ethnographic papers that explore acts of coming together across differences in contexts marked by power asymmetries, such as migrant organising across citizenship lines, or transnational activism in geopolitical conflicts. We also welcome theoretically oriented papers about the conditions of possibility for what we term “counterintuitive solidarity.”

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