Workshop with Michael Marder and Alexis Shotwell

20 MAY 2026, 10.15am – 5:30pm

Institute of  Czech Literature of the CAS, seminar room on the ground floor (dolní sál), Na Florenci 3, Prague 1

Organisers: Iwona Janicka and Cécile Rosat

Solidarity is a core value for many collective political projects; rather than aiming for some probably impossible ideal of potent individual freedom, practicing solidarity always involves imperfect work across difference. Even so, there can be a tendency to conceive of solidarity as a kind of exchange relation, something that we extend to others to the degree that they offer it back to us. Such an approach restricts our understanding of solidarity as a human thing. By the same token, solidarities based on already-existing social relations restrict us to working with others who are already politically positioned alongside us, and limit the scope of our imagination to a bounded horizon of what we can predict. Ecological and climate crises make an approach to solidarity based on any ideal of bounded rational actors coming together to achieve predictable goals useless at best. We do better to reach for practices of solidarity that can act with nonhuman others and that can continue working with a world that—if we’re lucky—will continue to be an ongoing and unpredictable unfolding.

In this workshop we begin from models of thinking that decentre both the bounded individual and visions of the future already predicted by our present context. Tech billionaires may want us to accept that the world is ending and that all humans rich enough should retreat to protected enclaves or Mars; microbes, anarchists, and plants disagree. In this seminar, we invite thinking on metabolic processes, practices of prefiguring in the present the world we aim to live in the future, articulating political practices and experiences as models for responding to ecological crisis. If we give up purity politics (Alexis Shotwell) and embrace practices of articulation, while navigating “dump phenomenology” (Michael Marder), what might we create together? 

Programme

10.15 – 10.30 Welcome from the organizers (Iwona Janicka, Cécile Rosat)

10.30 – 12.00 Metabolize!

Lukáš Senft (Institute of Sociology, CAS): “Ecosolidarity in Herbalism: Care and Environmental Violence in Everyday Human–Plant Encounters”

Kateřina Kolářová (Charles University Prague): “Living with Porous Bodies in Compromised Environment”

Gabriela Kozakiewicz (University of Warsaw): “Plants Rule! More-than-Human Politics in Sue Burke's Semiosis Trilogy”

12.00 – 13.00 Lunch

13.00 – 14.30 Prefigure!

Lesley Page Jamieson (University of Pardubice): “Caring in Hostile Environments: What Activists Can Learn from Nurses”

Klára Soukupová (Charles University): “From Resources to Comrades: Re-Thinking Human-Animal Labour Relations”

Martin Vrba (Erasmus University of Rotterdam): “Can Geo-Polis Emerge from the (Eco)Solidarity of the Shaken?”

14.30 – 14.50 Coffee break

14.50 – 16.20 Articulate! I

Isabel Jacobs (Institute of Sociology, CAS): “Nets of Life: Symbiogenesis and the Politics of Evolutionary Solidarity”

Andrea Garofalo (Sapienza University of Rome): “Reclaiming Epistemic Agency. Territorial Heritage and Urban Self-Governance beyond the Smart City Mode”

Cécile Rosat (CETE-P): “The Feeling of Relational Responsibility and Narratives”

16.20 – 16.30 Short break

16.30 – 17.30 Articulate! II

Özge Kelekçi (Middle East Technical University (METU), Turkey) and Burcu Yangın (Yildiz Technical University):
“Solidarity in the Buffer Zone: Hegemonic Differentiation Fields and Non-Circulable Forms of Life”

Maja Rup (University of Warsaw): “Impurity of Renewable Energy Sources. Analysis of Polish Wind Farms in the Baltic Sea”

17.30 End