The pandemic, like other unfolding and coming ecological crises, profoundly reshapes the terrain upon which social movements operate and emerge. The aim of this gathering is dual: To provide the tools to better understand how the pandemic is shifting the terrain, and to provide the tools with which such transformations can be mapped in the future.
Date: 21.05.2021
Time: 17:00 - 19:00 Uhr
Title: Learning and Struggling in Pandemic Times - Online Discussion and Workshop
Event Type: Information Event
Event Category: Funded Projects
Organisor: MovE: Movements of Europe. Transnational social movements and fault lines of solidarity
Place: Online
The pandemic, like other unfolding and coming ecological crises, profoundly reshapes the terrain upon which social movements operate and emerge.
The aim of this event is dual: To provide the tools to better understand how the pandemic is shifting the terrain, and to provide the tools with which such transformations can be mapped in the future.
By bringing researchers, activists, and researcher-activists into dialogue, we will discuss different terrains of struggle over housing, reproductive rights, and ecology. Our aim is to facilitate an exchange of concepts, analyses, and tactics, and to build new connections that may encourage solidarity and transversal organizing in the future.
Three opening talks focus on current crucial struggles within housing, gender and care, and climate politics in Europe:
Bernd Belina (University of Frankfurt/Main) shows to what extent long-standing processes of privatisation and financialisation of the housing market affect affordable housing conditions as well as structures of property during the pandemic. Ongoing struggles for a right to housing are turning to struggles against social inequality on a new scale.
Jennifer Ramme (University of Frankfurt/Oder) reports on current feminist protests in Poland against the regressive, authoritarian gender and family policies there, which condense in restrictive abortion law and the current considerations to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention.
Tomislav Medak (Coventry University/Zagreb) speaks about pirate care in the pandemic, and the role of degrowth and municipalism in facing the multiple ecological crises.
The talks contribute to a better understanding of the different economic, social, cultural and spatial dynamics which reinforce social inequality and cleavages within the combined social and ecological crisis that becomes more evident in the pandemic. Building on this the subsequent discussion aims at outlining new forms of solidarity which emerge or become conceivable within these struggles.
