Cultures of Solidarity in Global Social Movements: Past and Present

We live in a moment when colonialism and imperialism resurge in new forms, and when neoliberal global capitalism increasingly colludes with state authoritarianism. The spread of illiberal politics, digital surveillance, and militarised borders has rendered ever more lives precarious and ungrievable. Against this backdrop, rethinking solidarity, as an ethical, political, and imaginative practice, has become a matter of urgent importance. To ask how we stand with others is also to ask what kind of world we wish to inhabit together.

Hosted at IASH under the Susan Manning Workshop Programme, this workshop revisits the question of solidarity through multiple disciplinary and methodological lenses, with particular attention to its cultural and aesthetic dimensions. By bringing into conversation cases from a variety of regions, the workshop explores how distinct histories and struggles can speak to one another through the forms, strategies, and commitments by which solidarity is expressed and enacted. While the workshop does not claim to represent all global social movements, it takes an initial step toward mapping the tensions, contradictions, and creative possibilities that define them. In doing so, it seeks to build an open and sustained dialogue on how solidarity might still be imagined and practiced in a world increasingly shaped by precarity, repression, and the collective search for freedom and hope.

The event will feature scholarly presentations followed by open-ended discussion (9:00 am – 12:30 pm) chaired by Cat Wayland (University of Reading), and will conclude with a screening of The Encampments (2025), directed by Kei Pritsker and Michael T. Workman (1:30 pm – 3:30 pm). It welcomes scholars, students, artists and cultural practitioners, and members of the public interested in the intersections of culture, activism, and global justice.

Lunch and coffee will be provided.

Speakers:

Bharti Arora is an AIAS-AUFF Fellow (2024-26) at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Delhi, India. She earned her PhD (English, 2017) from Jamia Millia Islamia, India. She was the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow (2021) at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her areas of research include Gender Studies, Women’s Fiction, Indian Literatures, Social Movements, Decolonial Studies, and Nation. Her articles have appeared in journals like Indian Journal of Gender Studies, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, South Asian Review, and South Asian Studies. She is the author of Writing Gender, Writing Nation: Women’s Fiction in Post-independence India (Routledge 2019).

Elaine Kelly is Professor of music and politics at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. She has written extensively on intersections between music, culture, and politics in the German Democratic Republic and post-Wende East Germany. Her most recent work, funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, explores the global contexts of socialist solidarity, and will appear in her forthcoming book Music and Anti-Imperialist Solidarity: East Germany and the Third World.

Anna Bernard is Professor of Comparative and World Literature at King’s College London. She is the author of Decolonizing Literature (2023) and Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration, and Israel/Palestine (2013). She is currently working on a book called International Solidarity and Culture in Late Cold War Britain.

Jared Holley is a Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh. His recent publications address questions of solidarity from anticolonial, antiracist, and anti- imperialist traditions of thought. He joined IASH in January as a Sabbatical Fellow researching and writing a book on Anticolonial Solidarity, which aims to chart the limits and possible connections between Western understandings of solidarity and other traditions of praxis.

Yawen Li is a lecturer in Comparative Literature at King’s College London and a former IASH Postdoctoral Fellow. She is the author of The Melancholy of Kinship in Post-Reform China and Postcolonial Literature (2026) and is working on her second book project Cultural Afterlives of Anticolonial Internationalism in Contemporary China.

This is a free event, which means we overbook to allow for no-shows and to avoid empty seats. While we generally do not have to turn people away, this does mean we cannot guarantee everyone a place. Admission is on a first come, first served basis.

Accessibility:

This event will take place at IASH, 2 Hope Park Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9NW. Please see a map here: https://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/location

The Seminar Room is on the first floor, and unfortunately IASH does not have a lift. If you have mobility issues and would like to discuss access, please contact [email protected] as soon as possible.

Image credit: Eleftherios ELIS / AFP

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities