5th International Conference on Social Solidarity and the Commons

4 to 6 November

Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (Iscte)

This year’s theme is “Hacking Our Common Future: Transnational cooperation between community-led initiatives in a fragmented world“. The full Call for Contribution description with 9 thematic fields is here. Submit and follow the guidelines here.

The deadline for submissions is 31 May, and registration will open on 16 June.

Hacking our Common Future is an invitation to engage collectively in the unfinished work of recomposing economies, institutions, and ways of life – across borders and differences – through experimentation, cooperation, and shared responsibility for the worlds we are already inhabiting and transforming. Building on the 5th edition’s focus on Collapse and Regeneration, this conference shifts attention to what comes next: the active, collective, and experimental shaping of common futures under conditions of uncertainty, contradiction, and re-colonization, driven by predatory claims over natural resources, as well as securitarian discourses justifying territorial expansion and appropriation.

This conference provides a unique opportunity to exchange on transnational cooperation between community-led initiatives (CLIs) promoting grassroots resistance against such re-colonization, as well as on the structural and institutional conditions for the development of grassroots-led emancipatory alternatives.

We welcome proposals from researchers, policymakers, artists, practitioners and activists (e.g. NGOs, non-profit organisations, networks, activist movements). Submissions may be based on academic or action research, grassroots economic or cooperative initiatives, digital and platform-based experiments, artistic, cultural, or pedagogical practices, public policy experiences, or hybrid and experimental formats that challenge conventional academic boundaries. For this edition, SSE is accepting paper abstracts, session panels, book presentations, and experience reports or workshops by practitioners or activists on topics relevant to the seven conference themes.

We particularly encourage contributions that treat practice as a form of knowledge production, and theory as something emerging from collective, situated experience and knowledge. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary contributions are particularly encouraged when they engage with emerging paradigm theories that seek to move beyond the epistemic limits of modernist, extractivist, patriarchal and development-centric frameworks.

Relevant frameworks may include, but not limited to, metamodernism, post-development theory and post-extractivist perspectives, degrowth/postgrowth, cosmo-localism, feminist/queer political economy and ecology, post/critical posthumanism, pluriversal and relational ontologies, decolonial/postcolonial thought and afro-futurism. Such approaches challenge linear narratives of progress, universalist solutions, technocratic governance and axes of identity politics, instead foregrounding situated knowledge, ethical ambiguity, oscillation between hope and critique, the co-existence of multiple rationalities and how new political subjectivities emerge from grassroots experimentation. We welcome contributions that mobilize these paradigms to analyse how CLIs negotiate paradox, uncertainty, care, conflict and power asymmetries while experimenting with alternative economic, cultural, and institutional arrangements across territories and scales.

>>> See the Full Call for Contributions at https://ssecommons.cei.iscte-iul.pt/call-for-contributions/ <<<