24-26 Oct 2025, Barcelona/ES
How to organize in a time of polycrisis? At this year’s Autumn Gathering in Barcelona, we’ll explore how strategies shaped around a “politics of affectedness” can guide us.
The compounded climate and ecological crisis is becoming more concrete every day. While it affects all of us differently, we’re all starting to “feel it” in our everyday lives: rising food and energy costs, rent increases, water scarcity, deadly heat, psychological stress, physical illness, displacement, conflict, and wars. Disaster, decline, and the wars and profiteering they give rise to, are forcing us to look for new horizons for movement organising, one based on the politics of affectedness.
Affectedness, in some languages and dictionaries, refers to a paternalistic notion of “faking feelings,” or “showing an attitude or mode of behavior that is not natural or genuinely felt.” We affirm expressions of affectedness in the face of gender-, class-, and race-based prescriptions of how we should express ourselves we we’re “feeling it”: against such prescriptions, we affirm the importance of expressing our emotions, discontent, empathy, and enthusiasm. A politics of affectedness is a politics of emotion, but also of needs, and care, vulnerability, and solidarity. Plugging our forms of affectedness into one another is a great chance to build collective strength and power.
We’re organising this encounter, realising that, not unlike the global crisis of 2008 and the crisis of social reproduction that followed (austerity, unemployment, debt), we’re now facing an even larger constellation of crises. Where the crisis of 2008 threatened our ways of living, the current one is a threat to life itself, manifested in a planetary crisis of socio-ecological reproduction (planetary boundaries, spectres of fascism, technopetropatriarchal extractivist overdrive, genocide, and war). Facing this polycrisis, we ask ourselves: Where do we stand, and how can we build power?
Our intention for this gathering is to map out the current moment and to understand the necessities and opportunities for organizing a politics of the affected. We do this by looking at three dimensions of crisis: the cost of living and socio-ecological reproduction; care and psycho-soma-tech struggle; and conflict and displacement.
Can a politics of affectedness be the starting point of collective care, social struggles, and international solidarity? How do we build a collective capacity to act and the power to transform the world? What alliances, articulations, translations, and forms of attention do we need to seek?
To us, this is about understanding and connecting to vulnerabilities and injustices in the present, as well as building strategic foresight into deepening crises of socio-ecological reproduction, with the broadest possible alliance of actors and movements we can meaningfully build.
With local and international allies, we will explore how socio-ecological struggles are no longer about predictions and warnings, but about accelerating affectedness. We’ll be articulating these perspectives through sessions based on our strand work: Earthcare, Ecosocial Education, and Ecosyndicalism, as well as open spaces for learning, liaising, socializing, and dreaming.
We’re looking forward to seeing you there!
