In this paper, I discuss the possibilities of transnational worker solidarity, with a focus on the potential of digital communication that became normalized during the Corona pandemic. I draw on Sally Scholz’s distinction between different types of solidarity and argue that historical forms of worker solidarity were often a combination of social and political forms of solidarity, in concrete local settings responding to concrete local problems. I also draw on economic and psychological considerations for explaining how these constellations helped bring about solidaristic action. I then provide arguments for why, despite various reasons for pessimism, transnational worker solidarity is, today, needed maybe more than ever. New digital technologies and the social habits that are developing around them have the potential to give a new impulse to transnational worker solidarity, because they can create levels of connectedness and trust that are closer to those experienced by certain historical worker communities, for whom social and political solidarity overlapped. But these opportunities can often not be grasped because of legal obstacles. Therefore, I conclude by postulating that workers should have a right to “know their colleagues” along value chains, allowing those who work together to connect in ways that potentially lead to solidaristic action.

This chapter focuses on the choices that families made about birthing practitioners and where women would deliver. From the eighteenth century, man-midwives dominated the delivery of babies in England. Historians’ accounts have suggested that this incursion was a transformative moment in which men wrestled control of childbirth from women. This chapter shows that because men were so involved in shaping the experience of making babies throughout the seventeenth century, the arrival of men-midwives was not the surprising development represented by other historians. Although birthing chambers in the seventeenth century were almost always female-only, the medical and material preparations for delivery were not at all homosocial. Women gave birth amidst objects that had been procured by female and male family members. The location of the birthing chamber was also often a family one: in the woman’s father’s or father-in-law’s home. Male midwives therefore had a much easier job convincing families to choose them over female practitioners than previous histories have imagined.

Researchers and policy makers are in basic agreement that refugees admitted to the European Union constitute a net cost and fiscal burden for the receiving societies. As is often claimed, there is a trade-off between refugee migration and the fiscal sustainability of the welfare state. This chapter argues that the consensual cost-perspective on migration is built on a flawed economic conception of the orthodox ‘sound finance’ paradigm. By shifting perspective to examine migration through the macroeconomic lens offered by Modern Monetary Theory, the chapter demonstrates sound finance’s detrimental impact on migration policy and research. Most importantly, however, this undertaking offers the tools with which both migration research and migration policy could be modernized and put on a realistic footing. As will be shown, this also has fundamental consequences for our conception of human rights and solidarity.

This chapter examines the social and material preparations that households made for an impending birth. Family members were fascinated by the look and size of women’s bellies, so much so that women’s stomachs were often highlighted in portraits and they featured prominently in correspondence. Married women’s ‘big bellies’ were celebrated because they displayed the fruitfulness of the family, whereas unmarried women sought to conceal their pregnant state. The process of buying and borrowing things for childbirth including linen, baby clothes and birthing stools have often been represented as hallmarks of a celebratory and extravagant female culture that excluded male family members. This chapter finds instead that male family members were key players in this material culture. Added to this, correspondence shows that men were active in imagining the appearance and nature of unborn children in ways that embedded them within their family-to-be. This material and emotional investment was, however, entirely dependent on marital fidelity by wives. Men’s domestic and fiscal honour was intertwined with the performance of women’s bodies.

A conversation curated from an online event, Decolonising the Arts in Latin America: Anti-Racist Irruptions in the Art World. Artists from different parts of Latin America talk about their work from a decolonial and anti-racist perspective. Participants include Miriam Álvarez, director of the Mapuche theatre company El Katango; Alejandra Ejido, director of the Afro-Argentine company Teatro en Sepia; Ashanti Dinah Orozco, Afro-Colombian poet and Afro-feminist activist; Rafael Palacios, founder and director of the Afro-contemporary dance company Sankofa Danzafro; and Arissana Pataxó and Denilson Baniwa, Brazilian Indigenous visual artists.

The conversation draws on two texts by members of the art collective Identidad Marrón, which both explore how racialised subalterns can decolonise the art world and specifically museums. The first is a statement by visual artist Abril Caríssimo; the second is a text by Flora Alvarado y América López, titled ‘Malonear los museos’, reflecting on their experience of curating an exhibition titled Qué necesitan aprender los museos? (What Do Museums Need to Learn?) for the public Palais de Glace museum, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The rise of right-wing populism has provoked a variety of responses. This chapter engages with one such response: Chantal Mouffe’s ‘left populism’. Mouffe’s call for an anti-essentialist, agonistic politics that can shift away from the ‘common sense’ of neoliberalism and reactionary nationalism which underpins right-wing populism is welcome. And yet our concern is that it risks being trapped by its reification of the nation-state. It may also miss the international dimensions of right-wing populism, including how forms of relation between states and corporations figure in its rise and stabilisation. We explore an approach which does not locate politics primarily as a fight over control of the identity and institutions of the state, but which begins in transnational resistance and collective action. We take up Featherstone’s account of transnational solidarity to frame a study of resistance to the Adani conglomerate. In our argument, this can be understood as an example of collective action not reliant on pre-existing (national) identities. Drawing on Featherstone’s account of solidarity as a lens invites us to consider whether transnational practices which decentre the state may offer resources to tackle the international aspects of populism’s rise, and the company-state nexus central to right-wing populism.

The chapter analyses how racialised differences have been represented in artistic practice in Colombia, and the relationship between negatively racialised artists and the art world. The first two sections cover from the colonial period to the first half of the twentieth century and address the representation and participation of Black and Indigenous people, using examples from visual arts, literature, music and dance. White and mixed-race artists tended to represent racialised subalterns in primitivist and paternalist ways, although some displayed socialist sympathies in depictions of social inequality, without racism coming into clear view. By the 1930s and 40s, Black artists were critiquing social inequalities and explicitly identifying racism. We then analyse the increasing politicisation of Black art practice, which was linked to international currents such as Négritude and Black Power. Also important was the Black social movement in the country, which began in the 1960s and gathered strength with Colombia’s 1991 constitutional multiculturalist reform. The fourth section explores the work of the Colombian artists – mostly but not exclusively Black – who collaborated with us in CARLA to show how their diverse art practices have addressed racism in increasingly direct ways.

This chapter examines prominent solidarity conceptions used in legal discourses in the context of unfair economic arrangements, typically associated with neo-liberalism. It finds that prominent solidarity conceptions are from a legal theory perspective either circular, redundant, or too aspirational. The conceptual shortcomings of solidarity are echoed in standard policy proposals to counter and unwind neo-liberal economic arrangements. Those proposals typically involve imposing new legal duties on dominant economic actors and states, making their effectiveness depend on adopting new national, regional and international laws, on compliance by dominant economic actors, and on enforcement by legal authorities. The proposals imply that the normative resources for change lie outside existing law. This chapter explores an alternative understanding of law based on existing positive law: law as a public service. Dominant economic actors rely on law as a public service. They need legal authorities, especially judges, to declare their neo-liberal economic arrangements legally valid and enforceable. Positive law already offers judges the normative resources to refuse the help of the law whenever neo-liberal economic arrangements structurally lack minimal reciprocity and fairness. Rather than waiting for a global social solidarity movement, judges of Western civil and commercial courts can already make a difference.

This chapter reflects on possibilities for anti-racism in artistic practice. Drawing on the work of the diverse artists we have collaborated with in the project Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America (CARLA), I focus on two types of intervention that I believe help us to think about various ways of doing anti-racism through art. The two types are challenging stereotypes and working with communities, and I explore how various artworks engage with these modes of artistic action and how they create emotional traction and affective intensity. The aim of the exercise is to be productive and helpful in the struggle against racism by providing some tools that artists and organisations can use to think strategically about anti-racism as a practice and reflect on the opportunities and risks that attach to different interventions.

Is solidarity possible in societies characterized by the exchange of data, under conditions of digitalization and AI? If not, why not? To answer these questions, I inquire into the emergence of solidarity in two historical cases. The first maps German coal and steel workers’ resistance to exploitation during the industrial revolution in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The second case explores resistance and community formation by the Maroon, a group of fugitive plantation slaves in eighteenth-century Suriname. I analyse these cases with the help of four heuristic elements: (1) communal living of labourers entailed by the industrialization of a new technology (steam powered industry and slavery-powered plantation agriculture), (2) under-regulation of ensuing labour relations, (3) the emergence of resistant proto-law amongst labourers and (4) the response of repressive-appeasing law by owners and the state. I extract two necessary attributes of solidarity: the sharing of a physical place by labourers forming a community in solidarity, and the location of that place on the inside of a politics of exploitation. I conclude that cybernetics, digitalization and AI undercut the preconditions for solidarity, as they eradicate the sharing of a physical place on the inside of exploitation politics.

This chapter asks how newborns were cared for and charts the formulaic regimen of encouraging babies to cry, watching them change colour, cutting their navel cord, searching their bodies for impediment, bathing them, swaddling them, putting them down to sleep and, finally, suckling them. Medical guides imagined that it would be mothers that did this care, but middling and elite families often hired nurses to manage this laborious regimen. These individuals were often already servants or recommended by family or friends. In the period, servants and others residing within the household were called ‘family’. In this way, making babies was a family project, albeit one in which family members did not have equal stakes and one in which mothers’ and other women’s procreative work was often subsumed within everyday expectations of domestic labour. Although nurses and others who carried out infant care were sought carefully, details about their lives and perspectives are often hard to find in family paperwork, which was often more interested in what procreative experiences said about the family and its name, rather than valuing others’ work.