First Steps: Beginning a Journey Into Solidarity, Exhaustion, and Care

As I settle into the early months of this postdoctoral project, I find myself returning to a question that has shaped my thinking for some time now: what does it mean to sustain solidarity when the weight of the world feels unbearable?

The project I’m embarking on, Solidarity Under Exhaustion examines how Palestine solidarity movements in Belgium and Finland have transformed since October 2023. But more than documenting tactics or tracing organisational shifts, I’m interested in something quieter and perhaps more vital: how activists keep going when efficacy feels uncertain, when governments remain complicit, and when despair seeps into the everyday work of organising.

Where I’m Starting

These first months are dedicated to laying groundwork. I’m immersing myself in the scholarly conversations that inform this project—revisiting foundational work on transnational solidarity and social movements, deepening my engagement with social movement, affect studies, and exploring how disability justice scholars have reframed vulnerability as a source of collective strength. This reading isn’t merely preparatory; it’s an ongoing dialogue that will shape how I listen, what I notice, and the questions I bring into the field.

Alongside this, I’m engaging with activist networks in both countries, reaching out to organisers I’ve worked alongside and others whose paths I hope to cross. The data collection proper begins soon with interviews, participant observation at demonstrations and organising meetings, and the slower work of simply being present in the spaces where solidarity takes shape.

I’m also keeping an auto-ethnographic journal, documenting my own embedded engagement. This isn’t separate from the research. As someone who organises as well as studies, I’m interested in how that dual position generates particular kinds of knowledge—and particular kinds of exhaustion.

What I’m Listening For

When I sit down with activists in the coming months, I won’t be asking only about strategy or outcomes. I want to understand how people navigate grief. How friendships sustain political commitment. How a shared meal after a difficult meeting, or a moment of laughter amid despair, becomes part of the infrastructure that keeps movements alive.

There’s a tendency in social movement research to focus on what movements achieve: policy wins, public attention, measurable change. But what happens when those measures feel inadequate? What forms of agency emerge when the world doesn’t respond the way we hoped?

A Collaborative Approach

From the outset, this project is designed to give back. The activists I work with aren’t simply research subjects; they’re theorists of their own practice. Over the coming years, together with other participants, several resources will be developed: a toolkit for sustaining organising under exhaustion, an open-access volume gathering activist voices, workshops that create space for collective reflection.

I’m grateful to be based within the Geographies of Coloniality and Everyday Violence research group at Tampere University, and to be connected with organisations who have welcomed this collaboration.

Looking Ahead

This is slow work. The reading continues. The demos continue. The interviews will unfold over months. The analysis will take longer still. But I’m reminded that solidarity itself is slow work—built through presence, repetition, and the small acts of care that rarely make headlines.

More updates will follow as the research develops. For now, I’m beginning where all meaningful research begins: by reading, listening, staying present, and staying in the struggle.