We live in an age where lives and livelihoods are constantly rendered precarious due to various crises in the form of war, political and economic instabilities, gender disparities, racial exploitation and climate change. Our times have therefore seen calls for solidarities oriented toward making a better world possible- a world built around principles of social justice and equality.‘Is a Better World Possible?’ will be a one-day hybrid and interdisciplinary conference exploring solidarity and its relationship with temporality. Originating from the French solidaire, ‘solidarity’ has signalled the solid bloc of resistance, forms of association and unity that developed among modernity’s dispossessed (Wilder 2022). Scholars have variously used solidarity to describe forms of autonomous self-organization and resistance in different historical contexts such as among slaves, peasants, sailors, and religious radicals between the 16th and 19th centuries (Linebaugh & Rediker 2003); slave revolts in colonial Jamaica (Holt 1992); and mobilisations of European workers following the French and Industrial revolutions (Thompson 1966; Sewell 1980).

While solidarity has been approached in different ways within academia in recent years, the temporality of solidarity remains an underexplored territory. Discussing the temporality of solidarity, Nowak (2020) argues that solidarity is simultaneously a historical condition, a contemporary action and a future aspiration.This conference aimsto excavate the many forms, meanings and approaches attached to the idea of solidarity, spanning historical manifestations such as anticolonial national liberation struggles to more contemporary movements such as ‘Black Lives Matter’ in the US, the feminist ‘Ni Una Menos’ movement across Latin America, and the ongoing Palestine solidarity and BDSmovement.Solidarity is as much about time as it is about space, fostering connections between people in different places and across different historical moments, while it grounds itself in present struggles it constantly anticipates futures. Even when pessimism and hopelessness about the future prevails in the neoliberal age, solidarity continues imagining a better world-“it calls for in order to call forth” (Wilder 2022).Thus, utilising the temporal aspect of solidarity as the conceptual basis, our conference asks the following questions:

1. How does solidarity and the practice of solidarity engage with what is often deemed as impossible futures?

2. What is the role of imagination in solidarity theory and practice?

3. What can contemporary social movements learn from the solidarity practices of social movements in the past?

4. What are the difficulties that practitioners of solidarity face in bringing forth the futures they wish to see?

We anticipate contributions that address theorisations of solidarity adopting gender, race, class or caste-based approaches; construction and manifestation of solidarity during specific social movements; transnational solidarity, especially with a comparative approach; solidarity as affect; the challenges of and past failures in constructing solidarity in a neoliberal world, among others. Adopting a feminist, antiracist and class-based understanding of oppression at the outset, the conference also hopes to table discussions on understanding some of the ‘newer’ kinds of systemic challenges such as vulnerability to climate change and think together about the various forms of solidarity that can address them. The conference attempts to problematize an oppression-based solidarity (Kelley 2019) and hollow rhetoric, especially on social media – think ‘All Lives Matter’ or Men’s Rights movements – and restore the emancipatory potential of the word as a progressive force that challenges oppressive social structures.

We anticipate theoretical and praxis-based submissions, which will bring together scholars, activists and artists, across the fields of history, political science, literature, philosophy, gender and cultural studies.

Select contributions will be considered for publication in an edited volume with the Warwick Series in the Humanities (with Routledge).