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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research on volunteer programs in Swiss alpine farming, this paper explores how fragile, affective forms of solidarity emerge in everyday encounters between urban volunteers and mountain farmers, despite asymmetries, ambivalence, and the absence of collective consensus.

Paper long abstract

Mountain farmers in Switzerland face difficult conditions due to terrain constraints, climate change, labour shortages, overwork, and economic pressures. Both longstanding and more recent initiatives supported by civil society and public institutions provide volunteer labour – mostly from urban backgrounds – to assist farmers in their daily work.

This paper draws on a four-year ethnographic project in four non-monetary aid programs supporting mountain farmers in the Swiss Alps, bringing together distinct social worlds and positionalities. While volunteers and farmers rarely share political horizons, their repeated interactions generate localized forms of collective action grounded in agricultural work. We interrogate what makes such solidarity possible across these differences, where neither common cause nor explicit political commitment serves as the basis for coming together – what we conceptualise as counterintuitive solidarity.

Foregrounding the affective dimensions of these exchanges, the paper traces how care manifests through bodily exhaustion in shared labour, how sympathy becomes entangled with moral hierarchies around “proper” farming practices, and how gratitude coexists with subtle forms of dependence. These encounters also involve miscommunication, unmet expectations, and moments of tensions despite intentions of mutual support. Rather than forming a cohesive collective or social movement, they generate what we describe as solidarity without consensus: fragmented, situational, and often ambivalent commitments that nonetheless sustain mutual engagement.

By focusing on these non-ideal, everyday solidaristic practices “despite everything”, the paper contributes to rethinking solidarity not as a universal moral ideal, but as a relational, affective, and situated practice through which urban-rural relations in Switzerland are renegotiated.