Solidarity from below? Prefigurative (radical) democratic practices
by Constanze Berndt and Theresa Lempp: More information
Workshop with discussion
- Language: German
- Duration: 1.5 hours
- In person
What’s it about?
Commoning movements develop resistant practices of cooperatively and non-market-based shaping and sharing of material and immaterial resources, with the aim of creating a life-affirming and just social, solidarity-based and environmental economy (Helfrich/Bollier 2020). In their current forms, they represent, amongst other things, a response to multiple crises, the dismantling of the welfare state’s care systems, growing inequalities in wealth and distribution, and new forms of alienation and isolation (Federici 2020; Redecker 2020).
In our project, we examine re-appropriative and (radical) democratic practices in the fields of social ecology, socio-culture, health, housing, migration and care. Two questions are central to this: Through which social, economic and ecological actions, methods and strategies are alternatives to the hegemonic social consensus being created, and what ambivalences emerge? And how does ‘social work’ take shape within these processes?
Building on theoretical reflections on radical solidarity, we aim to examine, within the source material, the negotiations surrounding and understandings of solidarity, and to reconstruct, by way of example, the initiatives’ movements between inclusion and exclusion, affirmation and resistance, institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation. Together with the participants, we wish to discuss the extent to which reference to shared concerns and resources can support solidarity as a structural and prefigurative practice (Sörensen 2023).
Aim of the session
Together with the participants, we wish to reconstruct different understandings of solidarity in the empirical material, as well as to discuss the ambivalences of ‘commoning’ practices and opportunities for cooperation with social work.