Antiracist and Anticolonial Solidarities

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.

Relations of love and romance are scenes where politics of race, nationality and gender unfold intensely: in body and immediacy. While romantic love and partnership might be thought of as a shelter from overwhelming geopolitics, they might end up the site where these geopolitics and history of colonialism and patriarchy are articulated and embodied in most sharpness and embodiedness, exacting the urgency to be addressed. Referring to my fieldwork at a queer support group for exiles in Finland and interviews with members in that group [people who came to Finland to seek asylum and love], I will foreground people’s lived experience in (or relation to) dating, romance, love, as embodiment of politics in Finland, och as acts of tackling these politics. Meanwhile participants (racialized exiles) seek sanctuary from the austere and alienating geopolitics and state laws and bureaucracies in romantic/intimate endeavors and adventures, romance/love becomes the reality show of politics and the site to articulate the person’s understanding of politics and histories of race, as well as their acts of inhabiting, addressing and redressing these politics.  

There remains limited research that examines rest as an analytical framework for understanding antiracism in the Finnish context. In antiracist work, rest is frequently treated as secondary to urgency, productivity, and the constant demand to respond to racism. However, the politics of rest have long been central to Black feminist thought, where rest is understood not simply as personal self-care, but as a collective and political practice of resisting racial capitalism, white supremacy, and the expectation of endless labour.  

This paper brings together the concepts of racial time and rest to examine how antiracist solidarities in Finland is shaped, and how rest becomes both necessary and contested within struggles for racial justice among racialized communities and activists. At the same time, the aim is to highlight antiracist practices of solidarity, rest and community care as reparative and generative. Reparative in their capacity to heal the temporal wounds of racial capitalism, and generative in their creation of new rhythms, solidarities, and futures that resist narratives of racism. The presentation draws on empirical material collected in Finland in 2025-2026. 

How is trust configured when a single paradigm dominates a national discipline’s account of racism? I answer through two heterodox forebears of critical social theory. Veblen supplies the premise that modern institutions inherit predatory habits beneath emulation and conspicuous display; Schopenhauer supplies the alternative, compassion as co-suffering, a ground of solidarity requiring no claim to national distinction. This path not taken matters now, when exceptionalism is decreasingly tenable. For over a decade, Icelandic anthropology has organised its account of racism around an innocence paradigm (Loftsdóttir 2013, 2019), treating racism as a problem of national self-image. The result, I argue, is a science of white self-image in which critique becomes honorific display, performed vicariously for the nation, whose reputational yield is branding. The paradigm fails at three levels. Ontologically, it reads racial order at the level of appearances alone, explicating neither Keskinen’s racial Nordicisation (2022) nor the accumulation dimensions theorised as racial capitalism (Robinson). Epistemologically, it institutionalises white ignorance (Mills) as pecuniary trained incapacity (Veblen), a non-knowing produced by the training that certifies such critique as expertise and recuperated by nation branding. Phenomenologically, exceptionalism survives as predatory habit: critique operates as a non-performative (Ahmed 2012), while archive selection, the nation’s speech about itself, conserves habits of thought “never in full accord with the requirements of the present” (Veblen 1899). I triangulate a close reading of the paradigm’s most accomplished application, a ten-year audit of the University of Iceland’s anthropology MA (2016–2024), and archival evidence from sexual-racial governance to entanglements with National Socialist thought. Racial capitalism affords a more integral analysis: depth-realist in ontology, institutional and archival in its empirics, able to name what the paradigm cannot, from data-centre buildout to Arctic geopolitics and racialised labour disposability. Pluralising the discipline’s analytics is trust-building work, a precondition for antiracist and anticolonial solidarity.

Keywords: Nordic exceptionalism; colonial innocence; anthropology; Iceland; Arctic geopolitics; racial capitalism

In this presentation, we explore time as a contested terrain of antiracist interventions in Finland, examining how the past is actively engaged with and used as a reference and resource for contemporary antiracist struggles. The past is approached as an avenue through which antiracist activists reconfigure temporal conditions and connect present conditions with historical legacies of racial violence and antiracist resistance. Examining such temporal dimensions of political imagination and practice is central to grappling with how memories and histories of “the past” may influence activist understandings of antiracism and solidarity in relation to broader global formations of racial capitalism.  In so doing, we foreground political imagination of lived histories as a source for mapping responsibilities and reciprocities in the present and unsettling state-centered liberal frameworks of antiracism.  

Rooted in Marxist, decolonial and Black theorising on time, this presentation challenges the epistemic devaluation of the past and its demarcation from the present in orthodox Western imaginaries on time.  Instead, it foregrounds activist narratives that break with linear, progressivist notions of time, emphasizing how the past persists and demands political engagement in the now. The presentation draws on empirical material collected in Finland in 2025-2026, consisting of interviews, texts and visual materials.

How did the denial of land ownership shape formerly enslaved people’s trust in state institutions and their sense of belonging after emancipation? This paper examines Black struggles for land in the post-Civil War United States as a historical case for rethinking the relationship between institutional trust, racialized exclusion, and collective solidarity. It asks how a broken promise of material recognition shaped not only Black mistrust of the state but also new forms of community-building beyond state recognition. For formerly enslaved people, land was more than an economic resource: it represented the material basis of autonomy, citizenship, and recognition as members of the republic. The paper traces how expectations of land redistribution, crystallized in Sherman’s Special Field Orders No. 15 and federal Reconstruction policies, were undermined by the restoration of confiscated lands to former enslavers, the retreat of Reconstruction, and the emergence of sharecropping and the crop-lien system. Methodologically, it combines intellectual history with the frameworks of institutional trust, recognition theory, and Black Geographies, drawing on Freedmen’s Bureau records, freedpeople’s petitions, and Congressional debates over land policy. The paper argues that the reversal of land redistribution transformed an expectation of state recognition into a durable basis for Black mistrust. Yet this mistrust was not simply a withdrawal from collective life. It also fostered alternative infrastructures of trust, solidarity, and belonging, including mutual aid societies, benevolent associations, land cooperatives, and other forms of Black collective organization. These practices demonstrate how racialized exclusions of the past could generate new forms of community-building and collective self-determination whose legacies extended beyond Reconstruction. By foregrounding land as a material infrastructure of belonging, the paper contributes to the session’s interest in racialized histories, community-building, solidarity, and the ways in which past exclusions continue to shape possibilities for reparative social relations in the present.

Keywords: black land ownership; reconstruction; institutional trust; solidarity; Black Geographies