Overview
The Bulgarian feminist organisation LevFem and the Transnational Social Strike Platform invite you to a meeting in Sofia between 8 and 11 September 2022.
What is about?
The world we live in is dominated and crossed by transnational processes: from financial flows to global supply chains, from migrants’ movements to feminist struggles, from the COVID-19 pandemic to escalating climate emergency. Now the war in Ukraine exacerbated existing conditions and created a new framework in which and against which we need to further organize. Besides its weight of economic and physical violence and destruction, the intersection of all these multiple crises have ushered in a whole set of transformations in production and social reproduction. Economic sacrifices due to upscaled military spending have been imposed on workers, who also bear the costs of unaffordable costs for energy, food and rents.The refugee wave from Ukraine has been used by governments to reinforce racist hierarchies and establish new ones, while the war intensifies patriarchal violence. The militarization of industries has gone against even the softest of ‘green’ policies vis-a-vis world-threatening climate change. All this amounts to a reshuffling of the political coordinates we are used to: we face the challenge of deepening and strengthening our collective capacity to organize transnationally against the background of this tumultuous scenario. Thus, now more than ever the distinction between local and transnational struggles is blurred: the local is enmeshed in transnational processes and war policies and these processes encounter and affect local conditions. In this context of accumulating and intertwining conflicts and scattered struggles, the transnational meeting aims to create a space for dialogue and common organizing between feminists, workers, migrants, trade unionists, organisations and collectives from Bulgaria, Eastern Europe and beyond.
Who will be there?
We expect representatives of such organizations from Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Turkey, Italy, Germany, UK, France, Spain, and other contexts. It will also be a moment in which people involved in different ongoing transnational processes and networks can join forces: the network Essential Autonomous Struggles Transnational (EAST); the Transnational Migrant Coordination (TMC), the newly born Permanent Assembly against the War and the media network Eastern European Left Media Outlet (ELMO).The aim of the meeting is to find common grounds for our fights, develop a common vision of these turbulent times and share goals and discourses for transnational struggles to come.
Agenda
THURSDAY, Sep 8th
- 5pm-7pm: Welcome, registration and collective meal
FRIDAY, Sep 9th
- 9:30 - 10:45 Opening
- Coffee break
- 11.00 - 13.00: Essential, migrant and feminized labor: the Bulgarian case (held in Bulgarian with English translation)
- 13:00 - 14:00 Lunch
- 14:00 - 16:00 Two parallel workshops
- Coffee break
- 16.30 - 18.30 Assembly on Social Reproduction Struggles in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond organized by E.A.S.T.
SATURDAY, Sep 10th:
- 10:00 - 12:00 Two parallel workshops
- 13:30 - 15:30 Two parallel workshops
- 16:30 - 18:30 Permanent Assembly against the War: the Challenges of a Transnational Politics of Peace
SUNDAY, Sep 11th:
- 10:00 - 13:00 Concluding Assembly: Transnational Organizing, Strategies and Future Initiatives
The working languages of the meeting are Bulgarian and English. Accommodation and/or transport to Sofia for participants coming from outside of the capital or for international participants may be partially or fully covered.
For questions please contact us at collective@levfem.org and info@transnational-strike.info