Webinar: Changing solidarities and collective action in times of pandemic
Date: Thursday, April 2, 2020
Time: 4 pm (Central European Summer Time & South Africa Standard Time), 10 am (New York Time), 11am (Brazilian Time), 7:30 pm (Indian Standard Time)
Duration: 1:15 h
Zoom Access: Registration link
About: The Covid-19 pandemic and the state of emergency it triggers is rapidly changing social life across the world and is bringing big challenges for the activists of progressive social movements. Protest events in public places, street protests, sit ins, or square occupations cannot take place. But also other forms of social movement solidarities, conviviality, cooperation and personal exchange cannot be lived and practiced at the moment. Isolation, social distancing and the rapidly growing economic crisis is also threatening basic resources of activists and the mental spirit and motivation one needs for creative collective actions.
At the same time we are already observing many new forms of solidarities and activism as well as a rapid push in online activities. E-petitions, digital activism or evening pots-and-pans demonstrations, but also neighborhood support structures and help for people in need (from the elderly to the homeless and the migrants) are emerging as alternatives to in-person protests in all world regions. Furthermore, the current crisis reveals the centrality of other axes of conflict that in recent years have already mobilized diverse social movements, especially feminists, ecologists, youth and peasant-indigenous ones: care, the commons, eco-social transitions or food sovereignty.
