Intersectional Solidarity and Labor Organizing: Toward Just and Collective Futures

This international workshop explores intersectional solidarity and labor organizing. It aims to bring together academics, labor organizers, and grassroots activists to share research, experiences, and strategies that examine the lived experiences and agency of workers—focusing on both everyday practices and how workers build collective,
intersectional power. The workshop engages with intersectional approaches that center class and labor, while recognizing their intersecting relations, particularly to race, gender, and migration. By creating a collaborative environment that brings together contributions from both the Global North and the Global South, we aim to challenge dominant, Eurocentric frameworks and highlight underrepresented geographies and experiences. We hope this workshop will serve as a space for dialogue, strategy-building, and collective reflection, fostering connections across borders and between scholarship and struggle. 

KEY THEMES
Intersectional Lived Experiences: Exploring how race, gender, migration, and class shape the everyday realities of workers.
Solidarity & Organizing: Forms of intersectional solidarity and labor organizing among workers.
Sectoral & Regional Case Studies: Focus on specific sectors or movements (e.g., platform workers, data workers, care workers, logistics, agriculture).
Mobilization Strategies: Grassroots organizing, union initiatives, coalition-building, and community-based strategies.
Theoretical Frameworks: Theoretical engagement with racial capitalism and social reproduction theory.
Methodology & Ethics: Methodological and ethical reflections on conducting research within these spaces.

Program

DAY 1: 19 October 2026

9:00-9:15:    Welcome and Opening Remarks - Sarrah Kassem

9:15-10:55: Panel 1: Racial Capitalism, Migration, and Grassroots Solidarity in Europe
Chair: Sarrah Kassem
Discussant: Lucia Amorosi
●    Gauri Saxena (Geneva Graduate Institute), The NHS as a Colonial Enterprise: Empire and International Medical Graduates (IMGs) in the Making of the British Welfare State
●    Camilla Macciani (University of Trento), Organizing against Agricultural Racial Capitalism: West African Migrant Farmworkers’ Resistance and Struggle in Foggia (Southern Italy)
●    Charline Sempere (CIRAD), Producing Between Exploitation and Resilience: The Case of Temporary Foreign Women Workers in Industrial Fruit and Vegetable Production in Provence, France
●    Davide Però (University of Padova), Intersectional Solidarity from Below: Precarious Migrant Workers and the Building of Collective Power

10:55–11:10: Coffee Break

11:10-12:50: Panel 2: Extraction, Waste, and the Green Transition Chair: Alba Arenales Lope
Discussant: Guglielmo Meardi
●    Online: Alfian Al-Ayubby Pelu (Independent Researcher), Beyond the Enclave: Intersectional Solidarity, Spatial Discipline, and Jumping Scale in Indonesia's Nickel Belt
●    Lucas Cifuentes (Independent Researcher), The Articulation of Solidarities: Labour, Territory, and the 2021 Albemarle Strike in Chile’s Lithium Mining
●    Riya Raphael (Lund University), Waste Pickers Mobilising: Materialities of Labour, Waste and Intersectional Inequalities
 

12:50- 14:20: Lunch Break

14:20-16:00: Panel 3: Intersectionality Inside the Union: Gender, Race, and Organizing Strategy
Chair: Alina Dambrosio Clementelli
Discussant: Camilla Macciani
●    Fatma Betul Kocaaslan-Dogan (The University of Manchester), Women Textile Workers in Turkey: An Intersectional Analysis of Labour Activism in the Global South
●    Lucia Amorosi (University of Trento), Intersectionality and Trade Unions
●    Suraj Telange (SOAS), Racial Capitalism and Resistance in the Amazon Warehouses in the USA: A Participant Observation of Intersectional Solidarity in CAUSE

16:00-16:15: Coffee Break

16:15-17:45: Roundtable: Solidarity & Organizing in Practice Chair: Sarrah Kassem
●    Kaoutar Charjane: ver.di Trade Union Secretary (Germany)
●    Konde Patrick: USB Trade Union Secretary (Italy)

17:45- 18:00: Concluding Remarks, Day 1

DAY 2: 20 October 2026

9:15-11:00: Panel 4: Practical Solidarity: Everyday Organizing Beyond the Strike
Chair: Gauri Saxena
Discussant: Alba Arenales Lope
●    Tiziano Bonini (University of Siena), Practical Solidarity in Platform Labour: An Empirically Grounded Typology (co-authored with Letícia Birchal Domingues, Ricardo Fabrino Mendonça, Emiliano Treré)
●    Daniela Pianezzi & Anna Carreri (University of Verona), The Politics of ‘Scraps’
●    Marco Antonelli & Donatella della Porta (Scuola Normale Superiore), Networking in Action: Intersectional Solidarity and Coalition-Building in Italian Dockworkers' Mobilizations for Palestine
11:00-11:15: Coffee Break

11:15-12:45: Working through Displacement: Trauma, Labor and Survival

A Conversation with Maheen Hyder

Maheen Hyder (MSW, RSW) is a Clinical Supervisor, Psychotherapist and Registered Social Worker working at the intersection of forced migration, complex trauma, and refugee mental health.

13:00-14:30: Lunch Break

14:30-16:00: Panel 5: AI Data Labor and Collective Voice in the Global South Chair: Nahuel Aranda
Discussant: Riya Raphael
●    Online: Kenzo Soares Seto (Majority World Initiative - Information Society Project), Intersectionality as Territory: Brazilian Tech Workers Contesting Algorithmic Bias Inside and Against Platforms
●    Online: Philip Mong’are Achoki (University of Essex), Organising in the Margins of the Algorithm: Collective Voice, Institutional Voids, and the Struggle for Worker Power among AI Data Labourers in Kenya

●    Online: Felipe Mano (Independent Researcher), Putting the Pieces Together: Data Workers, AI Global Chains, and Collective Organization in the Global South
●    Online: Irene Makau (The Oversight Lab), Algorithms for Profit, Workers Abandoned in Precarity: Lived Experiences and Collective Solidarities among Kenyan Platform Workers in Ride Hailing and Content Moderation Work
16:00-16:15: Coffee Break

16:15–17:45: Panel 6: Organizing, Undone? - Worker Power from Factory to Platform
Chair: Marco Antonelli
Discussant: Vincenzo Maccarone
●    Nahuel Aranda (National University of Córdoba), ‘They Imposed It in the End’: Collective Resistance, Labour Control, and the Limits of Worker Power in the Restructuring of an Argentina Factory (1990s–2000s)
●    Online: Ambika Tandon (University of Cambridge), Organising in the Platform Economy
●    Online: Digvijay Singh (Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee), ‘Repertoires of Contention’ in Digitally-Mediated Labour: Reasons for, Manifestations of, and Constraints to Collective Contention in India's Platform Economy
(co-authored with Anindya Jayanta Mishra)
●    Alina Dambrosio Clementelli (University of Milan), Situated Agency and Everyday Solidarities among Domestic Platform Workers: A Case Study Conducted in Berlin and Milan
17:45-18:00: Concluding Remarks
 

This workshop is supported by Sarrah Kassem’s Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship, Grant number: 101146425 (Horizon Europe, European Union).
This workshop is also co-funded by COSMOS

Image: Colin Lloyd - Unsplash