Knowledge is our Sweet Power: the Programme

Kicking off this co-study and skillshare programme in good company! This is where all participants and facilitators of the 2026 Colearning Circle come together to get to know one another, and think through our respective contexts and challenges in a spirit of mutual support. We’ll present the idea of this programme and colearning, with particular focus on how this can enable us to build situated knowledges and strategies, rooted in our own places and contexts. Join us to make a collective map of things to learn and face up to in 2026, and get kickin’ in a beautiful and diverse crowd! Open to all registered Co-learning Circle participants, facilitated by Common Ecologies.

Pirate Care is a transnational research project and a network of activists, scholars and practitioners who stand against the criminalization of solidarity & for a common care infrastructure. It reflects and brings together those care initiatives which are taking risks by operating in the narrow grey zones left open between different knowledges, institutions and laws – inviting all to participate in a exploration of the mutual implications of care and technology that dare questioning the ideology of private property, work and metrics. We kick our 2026 programme off with our allies from Pirate Care, to learn from their approach to skilling up and caring up, and get inspired as we start our collective journey through this programme.

There’ll be a 30% discount on print copies of the Pirate Care book (Pluto, 2024)!

We need just transition strategies and policies that pay attention to care work and its centrality to satisfying human needs while also reproducing society and protecting the biophysical environment. For those of us able to hold down academic positions in times of increasing precarity, or activists working with academics, it matters to make our knowledge production useful for broader processes of transformation, get our foot in the door and propose counterplans and counterfacts. But how do we do this, and when is it effective? In this session, with Stefania Barca, we think through the ‘Just Transition and Care Work’ UN report – a key new document on just transition strategies and policies that pay attention to care work.

How do we overcome tangible and very real life violences and contradictions that communities face before, during and after a transition of economic model is taking place? How do we resist the ‘green’ capitalism that keeps power structures and extractivist models intact across territories? The energy sector is currently a key site of transition, and we need to cut fossil fuel dependencies while at the same time refuse and counter neocolonial ‘green’ energy projects. In this session we will learn with a member of Resist Glencore, a global network that stands in solidarity with communities that face violence at the hands of the giant coal company Glencore, and a facilitator at the Festival for Just and Popuar Transitions in the Carribean. We will learn about the strategies and organisational efforts of indigenous, afro, fisherfolk, peasant communities and mining unions in the great Caribbean region (Colombia and Colombo-Venezuelan borderlands) and beyond, for phasing out from fossil fuel dependencies whilst generating capacities and tanslocal solidarities for just and popular socioecological transitions.

La Laboratoria has been facilitating co-research and exchange processes between feminist movements for over 5 years now, across Spain and the Americas in particular. Their productions of knowledge and accompaniment, and the way they articulate militancy with thinking and writing, are striking and inspiring examples of militant research and cross-border and cross-sector organisation. In this session, we sit down to learn about how they do things. How does La Laboratoria work with knowledge? How do they link co-research to situated process and strategically produce knowledge? How can we build networks of exchange, mutual support and learning that produce collective strength, concepts and tools at the same time? What are the specific conditions for doing this across Spain and Latin America? Join us to learn with Marta Malo of La Laboratoria.

Get to know the domestic workers collective Territorio Domestico and their work on Biosyndicalisms. What is biosyndicalism, and why does it matter that care workers coin new visions and terms for organising? How do we think syndicalism, as self-organization of labour that strives to build better conditions, from the vantage point of domestic, more or less informal, precarious, migrant work? Territorio Domestico shows us what it means to fight, organize and create better conditions around life – implying a lot more than just better pay. In this event, we launch our translation of their Biosindicalismos desde los Territorios Domésticos (La Laboratoria, 2024) book into English (translated by Maggie Schmitt for Common Ecologies), and hear about how domestic workers struggles fed into the successful campaign Regularizacion Ya! for the recent regularization of half a million undocumented migrants in Spain. Things to celebrate!

How do we politicize and reshape agriculture in view to social and ecological justice, and what kinds of knowledges do we need for this? Join us to learn from the Coltivare Gaia and Scuola Contadina projects of the Mondeggi Bene Comune occupied farmlands near Florence, IT. Their twin conceptual-strategic and practical-organizational programmes educate a new generation of farmer activists and build regional power, from knowledges that are both social and more-than-social as they center multispecies relations. In this session we learn why peasant markets were a key starting point for setting up these programmes, and how we may build a context to hold and sustain agroecology education. We’ll also talk about why international solidarity matters for regional power, based on the example of Mondeggi’s farmer exchange with Palestine.

As myths of progress and modernisation collapse in the relentless polycrisis of our time, how do we strengthen other plots—in community, practice and struggle? How do we come together as movements for earthcare? Join us in this session with Manu of Common Ecologies, who will discuss some core ideas of her new book The Plot is on Fire with a special ally of Common Ecologies. How do we look towards new plots, politics and imaginaries when it comes to thinking about the relationship between earth and care and technology? What new technopolitics do we need alongside our struggles for earthcare, and what ways of thinking care and counterplanning?

There’ll be a 30% discount on print copies of The Plot is on Fire (Pluto, 2026)! Those coming for the live event in Vienna (Bikes&Rails) can buy a copy there

In this session we will share some practical and conceptual ideas on how to bridge affectedness literacy with abolitionist praxis through the afro-riparian philosophy of sentipensamiento. For it we need to be/come sensible (sensitize ourselves), to be/able to make our worlds legible (literacy), and then build leverage across our realities and capacities. Something that might enable the creation of alliances, solidarity practices across different experiences of affectedness (i.e. anti-racist & anti-patriarchal struggles, border regime abolition, etc). In this session we come back to reflections we had at our autumn gathering on the politics of affectedness
and the necessity to sentipensar our struggles. We’ll think about the (i)legibility of certain realities, the (in)visibilization of certain struggles, and the (un)awareness of possibilities (already there!) to dismantle systems of oppression. Open to all registered Co-learning Circle participants, facilitated by Common Ecologies.

How are migrant agricultural workers dealing with the current wave of persecution in the US? Join us to learn and follow up with Rosemary Rojas of the Borderlands Farmworkers project in El Paso, who we spoke to for Earthcare fieldcast in 2021, and who is also a feminist activist with La Via Campesina. We’ll speak about the situation at the border, how migrants and agricultural workers deal with ICE, build alliances and support each other across agricultural communities and other communities. Hearing from people who are intensely affected by the rise in fascist politics, we want to understand how they resist, stay strong and look out for each other, what this means for us all and how we may support each other from near as much as far in these times.

Unions are often focussed on narrow workplace related demands. But more and more unions are waking up to the urgency of addressing the planetary crisis and the threats of fossil facism. The future of trade unions lies in bargaining for more than wages and conditions, in bargaining for the common good and organizing around the wider needs of the class. What strategic role does ecosocial worker’ education play in this shift? And how can the ecosocial political education of workers help organizing efforts and inform future workers’ and more-than-workers struggles? Join us to hear Daniel Gutiérrez from ver.di talk about worker-to-worker strategies and radical ecosocial visioning from below.

What is the role of scientists in struggles against toxicity and pollution? In this session, the environmental historian and radical researcher Stefania Barca tells the story of the militant scientists who helped document the causes of desease after industrial accidents, or to warn against the diseases that would come from them, long before the authorities took them seriously. On this basis, we discuss the role of scientists in socio-ecological struggles at a time where planetary disaster, defunding, and science-denial is forcing scientists and researchers to exist the lab and the ivory tower.

There’ll be a 30% discount on print copies of the Workers of the Earth book (Pluto, 2024)!

Since 2014, the IDRA (Barcelona Urban Research Institute) has produced research that makes

an impact on institutional levels. Strategically producing policy research and proposals for municipal, regional and European administrations, in sync with social movements, they work out transition models based in public-commons partnerships to enforce economic democracy and socio-ecological justice. Join us to learn from the way they build synergies across diverse actors, and develop strategies for producing, framing and activating research for radical socio-ecological change. We’ll talk particularly about their public-commons management model for the Mercabarna wholesale market in the context of food system crisis and rising prices.

Capitalism has created a world of bullshit abundance, where we have too much of what we don’t need and too little of what we do. Through this system’s pursuit of profits, we have been put on a collision course with social and ecological limits that can no longer be ignored. Join us for a conversation with the authors of Radical Abundance (Pluto Press, 2025) and members of the Abundance thinktank, about visions and models for a world of human and non-human flourishing, democratically planned production and collective reproduction, based in some key examples of communal planning and resistance.

There’ll be a 30% discount on print copies of the Radical Abundance book (Pluto, 2025)!

An abc of how to prepare for a legal battle, collect evidence and build support – and how to protect yourself against prosecution at a time of rising repression. Join us for this crash course conversation about strategic litigation, with activist and litigation scholar Federico Alagna. We’ll get an introduction to this legal approach and how/when it may be useful to activists and communities, thinking from a strategic as well as tactical viewpoint. We’ll talk about how this has worked out in the face of repression around the solidarity with Palestine, in Italy and beyond, during the ongoing genocide, but also we will be drawing some lessons from pro-migrant legal mobilization as well. This session requires no legal knowledge whatsoever, and it open to anyone!

When and how can the law and lawyers be of use for building better worlds, or at least fending off worse ones? In this session, Camille Barbagallo from the European Legal Support Centre will present and discuss the framework of Movement Lawyering, reflecting on the limits as well as potentials of using the law in this time, and what’s necessary to win using the law as a tactic. Spoiler alert: this is not just about lawyers! ELSC’s mandate is to defend the Palestine Solidarity movement in Europe and Camille will touch upon the battles and challenges in Britain, but also discuss some of ELSC’s work in other European countries. You do not need legal knowledge to make sense of this session!

In this cohort session we’ll map ways on building power, based on our own contexts and initiatives, and think our own approaches through in relation to all the strategies and tactics we learned from in the 2026 season. We’ll draw conclusions and look to further challenges, as well as to the Common Ecologies autumn gathering where the cohort will have an opportunity to continue meeting and thinking. Open to all registered Co-Learning Circle participants, facilitated by Common Ecologies.

Serbia has been at the forefront of anti-extractivist and anti-authoritarian struggle in recent years. As the country slipped deeper into corruption and autocracy, masses of people from the countryside to the cities, led by students and rural communities alike, have been rising up and protesting, blockading and striking. Rural resistance against a big planned Rio Tinto lithium mine won an important victory, and other corrupt developments plans too are powerfully contested. What is the role of journalism and investigative research been in fighting corrupt and toxic development plans and political manoeuvres? What forms of popular journalism and co-research proven fruitful in this time of uprising and collective creativity? Join us think and follow up with journalist and environmental activist Iskra Krstić (Polekol and Kontekst) as well as militant anti-extractivist researcher Ana Vilenica. This is a warmup session for our likely autumn gathering in Serbia!