1st International Solidarity Research Conference (ISRC)

The 1st International Solidarity Research Conference will take place on the 24. October 2025 at the FHNW School of Social Work in Olten, Switzerland. The conference will focus on the “Relational Solidarity and Interdisciplinary Perspectives”.

The notion of solidarity serves, among other things, to explain the cohesion of increasingly disaggregated societies as an imagined or actual basis of social ties, for example regarding collective identities or the welfare state structures of modern societies. Solidarity is conceptualized as a distinct form of moral commitment among individuals, involving the provision of direct or indirect support based on a sense of normative obligation, based on political, social, and cultural relations. Following a relational understanding of solidarity, differences in the power and privilege of various individuals, groups, and institutions, and to the significance of these differences, are important for understanding the complexity of practices of solidarity. At the 1st International Solidarity Research Conference, researchers from diverse disciplines will explore the broad field of “relational solidarity” in lectures and workshops, highlight new developments, present empirical evidence concerning current struggles for “relational solidarity” and seek answers to the question of whether there are new opportunities for a peaceful and mutually supportive future of the contemporary, in many ways globally connected societies.