Conference CFP

Call for conference presentations: Local Resistance, Global Crisis: developing communities of solidarity and Left Politics for the 21^st Century
Friday June 13^th and Saturday 14^th 2014, Renehan Hall, South Campus, National University of Maynooth

Keynote Speakers will include:
David Featherstone, Department of Geography, Glasgow. Author of Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (2012) and, Resistance, Space and Political Identities: the Making of Counter-Global Networks (2008).
Costis Hadjimichalis, Department of Geography, Harokopio University, Athens. His research and publications have included uneven geographical development, socio-spatial justice and solidarity.

Conference themes
The global financial crisis and austerity has been met with significant protest and opposition from new social movements, radical Left political parties and single issue campaigns. However, the response has been uneven and divided across and within different countries and there remain many challenges in relation to developing strategies, alternatives and politics that can progress this opposition. 
This is a conference aimed at academics, community activists, trade unions, political activists, and NGOs, who are engaged in such campaigns and movements, for example in housing, austerity, unemployment, precariousness, regeneration, community campaigns, debt, natural resources, migrants’ rights, amongst others. The conference will provide a space to promote solidarity amongst diverse agendas, groups, organisations and politics to facilitate greater alliances and cooperation amongst those engaged in campaigns and politics to promote social and spatial justice, radical equality, democracy, and human rights. We welcome papers and presentations from practice or theoretical reflections fitting the themes including, but not limited to:

• Spaces of solidarity
• How can we progress solidarity, alliances and cooperation between us to support and enhance our individual campaigns and movements?
• How can we progress solidarity, alliances and cooperation between us to  influence the national, European and global policy and politics?
• The right to the city: local struggles, global solidarities seeking social and spatial justice
• New Left Political Parties: what potential for a socialism for the 21^st Century?
• What role can new Left and radical Left political parties play in progressing a radical egalitarian, socialist politics?
• Social Movements & civil society: Where is the Irish resistance?
• Partnership with the state as a strategy to achieve social justice; Can such strategies be pursued without silencing or excluding more critical voices and disruptive protests?
• Reflections and contributions from critical urban and social theory on resistance and solidarity
• Lessons from communities and social movements engaging in campaigns and struggles in relation to community activism, housing, debt, natural resources, workers rights, migrants rights,  at a local, national and global scale
• Facilitated open discussion: possibilities and strategies for solidarity, community resistance and Left politics

Email title and short abstract (250 words) indicating which theme it fits under and whether it is a presentation or a poster to rory.hearne@nuim.ie before April 15^th.
Register your interest email: rory.hearne@nuim.ie
We are working to keep registration costs as low as possible at this stage

Supported by:
The Department of Geography NUIM , NIRSA, Network on Politics, Power and Society NUIM

Dr. Rory Hearne