Antiracist and Anticolonial Solidarities

Session conveners:
Ali Ali, Åbo Akademi & University of Helsinki, ali.x.ali@abo.fi
Ameera Masoud-Jaakonaho, University of Helsinki, ameera.masoud-jaakonaho@helsinki.fi

Session description

This panel examines mundane relations and embodied/actual experiences of activism and community-building in academic and political knowledge making, as well as struggles over the meanings of antiracism and anticolonialism. In the panel, we ask: How do community engagements and material relations across the boundaries of race, class, gender and generations figure and matter in the political and academic sphere of antiracism and anticolonialism?

We aim to strengthen the theoretical and empiricalunderstanding of antiracist, feminist and queer mobilizations and solidarities across social divisions. Our research engages with people’s first-hand lived experiences, narratives of (anti)racism and (anti)colonialism, and relations in activism and community life. This entails how people mobilizing across racial, classed, gendered and national boundaries give new meanings and create knowledge and imaginaries that not only problematize state-administrative and racist approaches to race and nationality, but inform how the past (colonial, racial, patriarchal) figures in the present and how to envision this past and its aftermath in the present, towards more reparative forms of social relations.

The panel builds on themes elaborated in the research project Becomings: Temporalities, Solidarities and Social Class in Antiracism (RCoF, 2025-2028). It aims to bring theoretical and empirical insights from the politics of temporality and becoming, to generate and circulate knowledge on the creation of new political openings, community-building and antiracist struggles. The panel further seeks to challenge neoliberal and state-centered models of academic production.

The session will bring together four papers that explore antiracist and anticolonial solidarities and mobilizations. The first paper of the panel builds on theorizations of racial time to reflect on solidarity, rest, and community care as generative and reparative antiracist practices. The second paper examines how “pasts in the present” reshape activists’ understandings of antiracism and solidarity in relation to broader regional and social formations, opening possibilities for common struggles across temporalities and localities. The third paper takes relations of love and romance as scenes where politics of race, nationality and gender unfold intensely, and solidarities arise and fall through: in body and immediacy. The fourth paper explores the student solidarity with Palestine that unfolded after October 7, 2023, analysing forms of repression that students encounter within and beyond academia.

The session will be conducted primarily in English and will focus on the project’s themes outlined in this proposal, while also welcoming participants with an interest in these topics.