Workshop with Michael Marder and Alexis Shotwell

Call for Papers: Metabolize, Prefigure, Articulate! Practicing Solidarity in the Face of Ecological Crisis. Workshop with Michael Marder and Alexis Shotwell

Center for Environmental and Technology Ethics – Prague (CETE-P)
Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences

20 May 2026

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? 

This one-day workshop is aimed at junior scholars: graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and early career academics, who would like to present their work and receive constructive feedback from Alexis Shotwell and Michael Marder. We encourage junior scholars, particularly from underrepresented groups, to submit their proposals and share their work in a supportive setting. 

To present, please submit a title and abstract (max. 250 words) of your paper (15 min) to Cécile Rosat (rosat@flu.cas.cz) by 16 March 2026. You will receive a notification by 23 March. If your institution is not able to support your travel to the workshop, please write this in your application and specify an approximate travel cost. We have a (limited) budget that we can use to support precarious scholars.