Communities of Resistance: Social Relations, Solidarity, and Collective Life

This session explores communities of resistance as social formations shaped by everyday relations, shared practices, and collective meanings. Rather than focusing primarily on protest or overt opposition, it examines how communities of resistance are produced and sustained through processes of participation, recognition, mutual support, and symbolic belonging. In this sense, resistance is understood primarily as a mode of making and maintaining social bonds under changing conditions of uncertainty, exclusion, and fragmentation.

We invite papers that analyze how communities form around experiences of vulnerability, shared care, common routines, and collective identity. We are especially interested in contributions that examine the relational dimensions of resistance: how solidarity is created, how trust is negotiated, how differences are managed, and how communities sustain themselves over time. Of particular relevance are studies of grassroots initiatives, volunteer networks, mutual aid practices, neighborhood groups, migrant support networks, and other forms of collective life that generate social cohesion in everyday settings.

The session also welcomes research on the emotional and symbolic dimensions of community, including the role of recognition, attachment, hope, and shared experience in holding communities together. At the same time, it encourages reflection on the tensions and limits of community life: inequalities, exclusions, informal hierarchies, and the fragile conditions under which solidarity may be maintained or undermined.

By foregrounding the sociological study of community, relation, and solidarity, this session aims to deepen understanding of how resistance is embedded in the ordinary and often fragile practices through which people create meaningful forms of collective life.