CONFERENCE. 19 – 20 September, Seville University, Seville
Dr. Miguel Imas, Dr. Lucia Sell-Trujillo, Dr. Lucia Garcia-Lorenzo, Dr. Paul Donnelly,
The
European financial crisis and the subsequent introduction of austerity
programmes, following an imposed model of economic recovery from the IMF
and the European Central Bank, have caused social and emotional
meltdown in a large number of urban and rural communities. In
particular, communities at the periphery of Europe have suffered the
most, with some experiencing over 50% unemployment, along with the
destruction of social and housing benefits, as well as a deterioration
in their overall quality of life. At the same time, people have come to
show an incredible resilience, résistance and creativity in response to
these austerity measures, (re-)creating spontaneous, improvised and
highly challenging ways of organising – from occupation of factories in
Greece to buildings in Spain, from artistic interventions to alternative
currencies – to express, reflect and critically question the current
socio-economic system. All of these practices reflect a desire to act
and enact new forms of collective participation and co-collaboration
based on solidarity and other community integrative acts that can
transcend the current discourses of austerity under the umbrella of
economic neoliberalism.
This seminar, organised by the
University of Seville and Kingston University, attempts to engage with
these emerging organising activities, giving a space for an intellectual
debate on these discourses and practices to challenge the current
theoretical representations on how people (re-)organise, (re-) create
their spaces, and enact new ways of interacting.
