MATTER journal of new materialist research Universitat de Barcelona ARTICLE ISSUE 10 Matters of Solidarity Relationality, Not Universality: A Dialogue on Solidarity Across Movements, Borders and Species Relacionalidad, no universalidad: un diálogo en torno la solidaridad a través de movimientos, fronteras y especies Relacionalitat, no universalitat: un diàleg en torn de la solidaritat entre moviments, fronteres i espècies Nóra Ugron (0000-0002-7224-0228) Doctoral Researcher in Gender Studies, University of Turku, Finland Maria Martelli (0000-0001-7234-1603) Independent Activist Researcher Veda Popovici (0000-0001-5767-6966) Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, DIST, Polytechnic University of Turin, ERC Project, Inhabiting Radical Housing – Core Team Member, Beyond Inhabitation Lab, Italy Date of submission: August 2023 Accepted in: January 2025 Published in: February 2025 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1344/jnmr.v10i.49358 Recommended citation: Ugron, Nóra, Martelli, Maria and Popovici, Veda (2024). Relationality, Not Universality: A Dialogue on Solidarity Across Movements, Borders and Species. Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research. Issue 10. University of Barcelona. [Accessed: dd/mm/yy]. https://doi.org/10.1344/jnmr.v10i.49358 The texts published in this journal are – unless otherwise indicated – covered by the Creative Commons Spain Attribution 4.0 International licence. The full text of the licence can be consulted here:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 1 2025, Ugron, Martelli and Popovici Relationality, Not Universality Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, 10 (2025) www.revistes.ub.edu/matter / ISSN: 2604-7551(1) Relationality, Not Universality: A Dialogue on Solidarity Across Movements, Borders and Species Abstract This paper is an unfolding dialogue filled with questions and half-answers between three activists and engaged researchers from Eastern Europe, looking into the connections between different social movements, building internationalist solidarity and the possibility of (total) liberation. We think through issues such as the hegemony of what counts as politically relevant in a globalized world, the overrepresentation of Man following Sylvia Wynter, pain and grief in the face of current (social and ecological) crises and joining the fights for human and animal liberation. Drawing from feminist, queer, antispeciesist and Indigenous theories, as well as from our personal experiences, this exchange sinuously follows the question: What is to be done to always already facilitate the process of blooming into queer, decolonial and antispeciesist worlds? Keywords Solidarity; Relationality; Internationalism; Antispeciesism; Decolonial thought; Queerness Resumen Este artículo es un diálogo abierto repleto de preguntas y algunas medio-respuestas entre tres activistxs e investigadorxs comprometidxs de Europa del este. Esta conversación está motivada por la creación de conexiones entre diferentes movimientos sociales, la promoción de la solidaridad internacional y sobre cómo generar posibilidades de liberación (totales). Reflexionamos a través y desde cuestiones como la hegemonía de lo que se confiere relevante en un panorama globalizado, el exceso de representación de “la figura del Hombre” en palabras de Sylvia Wynter, el dolor y el duelo acontecidos por las crisis actuales, tanto sociales como económicas, así como por la unión a luchas de liberación animal y humanas. A través de teorías queer, antiespecistas e Indígenas, así como nuestras experiencias personales, esta conversación gira en torno a la siguiente pregunta: ¿Qué es lo que hay que hacer para seguir cultivando el florecimiento de mundos queer, decoloniales y antiespecistas? Palabras clave Solidaridad; Relacionalidad; Internacionalismo; Antiespecismo; Pensamiento decolonial; Queer Resum Aquest article és un diàleg obert replet de preguntes i algunes medio-respostes entre tres activistes i investigadores compromeses d'Europa de l'est. Aquesta conversa està motivada per la creació de connexions entre diferents moviments socials, la promoció de la solidaritat internacional i sobre com generar possibilitats d'alliberament (totals). Reflexionem a través i des de qüestions com l'hegemonia del que es confereix relevant en un panorama globalitzat, l'excés de representació de “la figura de l'Home” en paraules de Sylvia Wynter, el dolor i el dol esdevinguts per les crisis actuals, tant socials com econòmiques, així com per la unió a lluites d'alliberament animal i humanes. A través de teories queer, antiespecistess i Indígenes, així com les nostres experiències personals, aquesta conversa 2 2025, Ugron, Martelli and Popovici Relationality, Not Universality Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, 10 (2025) www.revistes.ub.edu/matter / ISSN: 2604-7551(1) gira entorn de la següent pregunta: Què és el que cal fer per a continuar conreant la florida de mons queer, decolonials i antiespecistes? Paraules clau Solidaritat; Relacionalitat; Internasionalisme; Antiespecisme; Pensament decolonial; Queer 3 2025, Ugron, Martelli and Popovici Relationality, Not Universality Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, 10 (2025) www.revistes.ub.edu/matter / ISSN: 2604-7551(1) Authors’ note: We wrote this conversation throughout May–September 2023, before the escalating attack in Palestine deployed by israeli forces in October 2023. We currently express our utmost solidarity with the Palestinian people, against the genocide unfolding in the last year. We consider our text a humble contribution to practices of grief and togetherness in times of unthinkable violence. Nóra: I woke up today, on 5th May 2023, feeling overly exhausted and kind of anxious as well. Is this because of the lunar eclipse in Scorpio? Is this because I’m currently staying a couple of months in Turku, in the territory that is now called finland1 – mesmerizing, but cold to the heart, far away from the so-called romania, the country in which I was born and where I am based most of the time? Is this because usually every hour of my existence is permeated with stresses about the future – about my individual life, what will I do, where will I live, will there be people to love, and in tight connection to our collective futures? Where can we live in communion, how can we still love each other? Is this because this lingering ghost-like thought of the future – or a future from the million different futures possible and not-so-possible – is in constant imminent danger of being consumed by toxic, extractive capitalism? In my intimate life I have been on a long journey of healing from trauma, which is always connected to the political and to the people around me, who themselves are in intense healing processes of learning to connect with trust and care. This is like a mycelium of mushrooms growing underground to make a strong foundation on which we can flourish from year to year, along with a continuous possibility of overgrowing heterosexist racial-colonial capitalism. This 1 To unsettle the violent and hegemonic conventions of nation-states and their borders, we chose to write all so-called nation-states and citizenships considered “legitimate” with lower case. thought comes to me, because I just read today a short article by adrienne maree brown, in which they share four questions around which humans could inform radical organizing learning from mushrooms – these are: 1. What’s happening underneath the surface? 2. How can we make the world digestible? 3. How can we strengthen our connections? 4. What do we do with the pain? (brown, 2023). Mushrooms grew around my love and loss as well, of which I have spoken in my poetry before (Ugron, 2022). The questions stay with me as I walk down the street to have lunch with an ex-lover, current friend. My gut-wrenching anxiety, my sadness and grief for change never taking place is getting inscribed on the body, as it happens with all our bodies. Our queer bodies are being altered by the invisible toxic burden of heterosexist racial-colonial capitalism. No amount of political, artistic or intellectual work I do, feels ever enough. I can barely do any more work right now and I yearn for not having to do any more work ever again. Sometimes, I can barely wake up and eat breakfast on time. Our worlds are torn down before they can ever fully bloom by the only World that is allowed to be. So, what is to be done in order to truly survive, not only to drag a carcass of yourself around the street between never ending tasks to do? What is to be done to transform the intoxicated matter of our worlds? What is to be done to always already facilitate the process of blooming into queer, decolonial and antispeciesist worlds? How do you feel today and what matters come to matter (cf. Haraway, 2016) around emotion? Maria: I have been wanting to answer this question many times, always postponing it, because I felt my answer would not “lead us further”, one step closer to a vision/sensation of 4 2025, Ugron, Martelli and Popovici liberation from which we can speak. I cling to hope (pessimist hope, as I call it) as a motto, against “better judgment”, against the news’ roll of constant disasters, floods, epidemics, and war. Hope, in the sense that even if we might never get there – to a place/time in which we can all, beyond species, rest and flourish – we should still try. But in the meantime, we must live here/now, wherever that is, breathe polluted air and feed ourselves largely from an industrialized system that is destroying the planet. I, of course, am happy to be guided by mushrooms and non-human others in our searches. I don’t think we could do it otherwise. Without recognizing otherness, without letting ourselves be changed, it would be very hard to be in another place than where we are. I’m currently reading two books which I think can aid us in our thinking process, and which continue the questions you (the conglomerate that is Nóra + adrienne maree brown + mushrooms + unknown others) have raised. The first one, Cosa può un compost, by transfeminist scholar Antonia Anna Ferrante, gives us a “node” from which to build on: not identity or its representation, but relations; not abstract questions, but care as practice (Ferrante, 2022). Ferrante writes besides the emphasis on practice, in a queer feminist perspective, [care] is the tipping point for de-essentializing identities and putting them within a web of meaning given by the relation rather than the fixity of representation (2022, p. 77). Ferrante writes thinking with the Harawayan concept of compost, from within the lived experiences of an environmental feminist activist from the south of italy, in deep conversation with other visionaries such as science-fiction writer and world-builder Ursula K. Le Guin. Within the compost, matters inter-act. The work of worms (and others) in composting transforms “waste”. Composting does fermentation together, breaking down individual barriers. I propose the process of composting along the questions of mushrooms to guide us – just as you, Nóra, proposed the conversational style in our private emails. Besides, composting can be really slow. I don’t like being slow, I internalized too much that I must be/do a thousand things, if possible. But practicing slowness might be important, especially in thinking-feeling-together, and even more so in an academic context that demands knowledge production on a tight schedule (as if we are producing tomato salads! but might I say tomatoes take a long time to grow too, and a lot of care, and doing agriculture “fast” and “efficiently” has wrecked innumerable lands, beings and relations). The idea that I gather here from the second book, Cospirazione Animale (Reggio, 2022) and which will complicate this exchange is that of contradiction, conflict and difficulty to be in solidarity between movements. In it, Marco Reggio, antispeciesist activist from italy, theoretically examines actual happenings from within the movements and groups he has been part of. One chapter looks at a particular anti-vivisection campaign against the building of a new academic facility which has been confronted with the backlash of a distressed mother, whose disabled daughter might benefit from animal experimentation.2 That moment signifies the meeting of two (somewhat) conflicting interests and movements: that of the non-human animals and their liberation; and that of disabled humans and their liberation. In theory, the link between animal and disability liberation has been wonderfully explored by artist and activist Sunaura Taylor from the territory now called the united states of america, in her book, Beasts of Burden,3 in which she sharply 3 Albeit years later. Beasts of Burden was originally published in 2017 and the campaign we hereby mention happened in 2008. It was published in translation in italy in 2021, coordinated by Marco Reggio and feminoska, 2 In the chapter Reggio briefly explains that, while a scientific argument against vivisection can be made (animal experimentation being inefficient in advancing human medicine), it is not the argument that political antispeciesists choose to raise. 5 2025, Ugron, Martelli and Popovici shows how both non-human animals and disabled humans are judged (dismissed and discriminated against) according to their perceived abilities (Taylor, 2017). In practice, italian movements did not have, at that time, a good grasp of disability studies. Their response to the mother simply pointed out how she was being instrumentalized (a common practice of forming patient-researcher groups to put protesting in a bad light) for researchers’ interests (Reggio, 2022). Things would unfold differently now, after the connection between speciesism and ableism is more clearly made, at least in militant circles. This also involves, in part, a labour of discourse and knowledge production that I also try to do in romania (Martelli, 2021). Ultimately, I’m really interested in how to bridge seemingly conflicting interests, how to make space for contestation from those generally invisibilized/silenced, and how to act from the margins, in solidarity, when resources are so few and odds are stacked against us? The criticism of respectability politics, for example, has shown how we must resist assimilation even though it can bring benefits to the few who manage to fit in. But these fights are not just about discourse and visibility – they are material, making claims over bodies. How can we all flourish? How do we organize across differences? Veda: Recently, I’ve found myself consistently thinking and discussing about organizing across differences from an internationalist perspective. How to connect our struggles, building bridges across nation-state borders with a vision for revolutionary change that truly works transnationally and not merely locally? With an open heart and a desperate soul, I questioned the extent to which this can be achieved in the current followed by a dissemination campaign which included readings and a Facebook page. conditions of social movements in Europe. Comrades that feel like soul-siblings tell me of similar dilemmas and through conversation, one idea emerges: there is a current crisis of internationalism. Social movements across Europe have taken positions about the war in ukraine and, in doing so, they have, to some degree, revealed the limitations of internationalism today (Lyubchenko, 2022). It’s spring, 2023, and I have, in the past weeks, attended radical anti-capitalist transnational activist meetings which seem to have the tendency to simply not discuss the war. Opening a space for this, I’ve tried to speak from a place of vulnerability, of pain: “war has changed everything for movements in Central and Eastern Europe. How come this is not reflected in transnational agendas and strategies? As a comrade, I come to you to ask you, why can’t you feel my pain?” A colleague explained to me that a certain collective call to action we worked on had to be drastically changed: from its initial draft that centered on the consequences of war to a more watered-down version, in which war is just another evil brought on by capitalism. My colleague explained that the initial draft, although based on the input of collectives from Western and Eastern countries, was not to the liking of other groups from Western countries who stated that “the war simply did not speak to our movements”. Upon hearing this, I felt a deep chill piercing my chest. I find myself back in the same place of having to fight for the historical political experience of Eastern Europe, having to labor into convincing Western comrades that what we feel is historically and politically relevant, too, and not a derivative experience.4 I’m not even angry anymore, I stay with the sensation in my body, a horrifying chill nesting in my ribcage, an 4 Decolonial thought applied to Central and Eastern Europe is an increasingly relevant critical framework. See for example the recent publication Decoloniality in Eastern Europe: A Lexicon of Reorientation (Vilenica, 2023). 6 2025, Ugron, Martelli and Popovici insurmountable distance gasping between me and my colleague who’s staring back at me with worry. I let my body live my truth as I know that the same body will guide me/us towards a way out. My mind is fixating on this simple thought: it could have been romania or moldova and not ukraine – in the end, it’s just a matter of arbitrary historical conditions. But why does war change everything? Why this war? Cascades of reasons swarm my mind: acceleration of the housing crisis, consolidation of Fortress Europe, increased military spending, heightened repression on critical positions, legitimation of fascist ideologies, radicalized anti-communism, resurgence of cold war narratives, the return of the repressive state, extreme gentrifications of Eastern and Caucasus cities, global reordering of the circulation of gas and electricity, financial crisis, social collapse. Out of this storm, one question comes up: do you know how it feels to look your comrade in the eye and ask them what will you do, would you take up arms or would you flee? It is that moment of deep unsettling truth that changes everything. Together, for the past year and a half we’ve come to know a new pain: the pain of losing possibly everything in the face of war. So then, internationalism in times of war. There is the international solidarity effort of leaving your local context and fleeing to the war zone to join the international divisions: just as in Rojava and syria, so now in ukraine. There is the international solidarity effort of forging routes of safe passage for people fleeing and deserting. There is the international solidarity effort of fundraising for financial support for survival in war zones. However, internationalism has and still can mean so much more: a transnational coordination of strategy and action that centers the experience of pain and loss and arrives at a new historical moment of anti-war, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggle. Nóra: I feel what you both say, dear Maria and Veda. You raised two main questions above: 1. how to create common struggles in solidarity across differences like that of species, ability, class and race, 2. how to decolonize internationalism through lifting the historical-political realities, struggles and losses of the regions that are still oppressed, exploited and marginalized, in our case, Eastern Europe? These two questions are very much unfolding from each other, and I see an important node, which is the materiality of the conditions and struggles you have described. Each of our lived “realities” differs materially and even though solidarity is a concept and practice that is rooted in bridging the gaps between our materialities, sometimes it doesn’t work. For example, in the mentioned anti-vivisection campaign in italy or the tendency of Western movements not wanting to reflect on experiences of war in ukraine. Basically, all three of us are here discussing solidarity because we wish to find better ways to practice solidarity – and what could be better always depends, of course, on who is speaking. Limits in our feeling for other perspectives are inevitable, as there is no unifying, uniform and universal all-encompassing perspective or solution. But then there is the question: how to practice being open to recognizing different mycelial connections amongst different beings and contexts? And how to account for what has been recognized but also what has been staying hidden so far? There is this worldview, which has been part of many Indigenous knowledges for centuries (cf. Wilson, 2001; Kimmerer, 2015; Simpson, 2017), and lately has been relearnt by feminist new materialist and/or posthumanist (Braidotti, 2013; Barad, 2019; Haraway, 2008, 2016), as well as antispeciesist, anti-racist, anti-ableist and queer-anarchist (Goodfellow, 2021; Taylor, 2017), endeavours in which the basic principle of existence is relational, the 7 2025, Ugron, Martelli and Popovici unit of life is not the individual, as Western humanist tradition has imagined, but the relations between beings and environments.5 When someone looks at the intersections of struggles such as those for total liberation or disability justice and sees conflicts of interests, the perspective is from different and separate units of existence, not from relational nodes. When someone claims that experiences of war, grief and loss in ukraine are not reflecting their struggles in Western Europe, like you, Veda, just mentioned, they are ignoring the mycelia of connections on both material and geopolitical levels between different materialities. Therefore, to practice better solidarity, complex processes of learning, unlearning and relearning need to be taken seriously. 5 At the “PhD Workshop: Indigenous methodologies and creative practices” held at Tampere University, finland between 25-26 November 2022, Sámi scholar and duodjár Liisa-Rávná Finbog pointed out how in the rationalist and colonial Western scientific tradition Indigenous peoples’ wisdom is anthropologically described and studied, but rarely regarded as (equal) knowledge. Many Western thinkers even today take inspiration from various Indigenous practices and then get recognized for their own “individual” scientific work, while the Indigenous practices remain mentioned on a level of practices, in a descriptive, oftentimes generalizing way, not as knowledge producers who deserve separate acknowledgement. See the description of the workshop on Finbog’s blog: https://liisaravna.blog/2022/10/03/indig enous-methodologies-and-creative-practices/ (access: 28.09.2023). I myself got my training in a Western academic model so I first familiarized myself with the writings of, just to name some that were very influential in my previous studies and work, Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. However, after attending the workshop led by Finbog, as well as reading Opaskwayak Cree scholar Shawn Wilson, Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robin Wall Kimmerer of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, I must observe that the focus on relationality crucial in feminist new materialist and posthumanist thinking, has already been there in many Indigenous knowledges, but it was never or rarely counted as knowledge to think-with, rather than a wisdom to colonially describe and analyze. But then, once again, how to un/re/learn?6 I feel I must say, it is much easier to enunciate than to materialize these processes outside of the realm of words. I don’t intend to invoke a strict Western humanist divide between mind/body, speech/action, when saying this. But I also do believe that the steps to write this text, to create knowledge and to start practicing it in every-day life, on local communal levels and transnationally, are very different and one must not forget it. Of course, there is no hierarchical order, as practicing knowledge and rebuilding connections and worlds are interlocked. How to un/re/learn? In a totalizing way, I don’t know, so it is extremely important to state: no one singular entity can ever definitely know! But how to start to un/re/learn coming from this so-called Eastern European region, specifically romania, for me starts always already with how we formulate our questions here. Namely, to be more attentive to the very material context we are entangled in; to the connections we are nurturing/poisoning across borders, species, ability or race; to how we and others feel; to the materiality of feeling, pain and loss; to personal, collective and regional implications in the feeling, pain and loss of others – or shortly put, as Maria also said, to be attentive to others. There is no separate self and separate others, we are each one’s anothers. One could maybe even say that a better practice of transnational cross-species solidarity always starts with question marks and with one another. When one involved in a collective struggle expresses a need and the response is 6 I am using un/re/learning with a slash inspired by the agential realist thinking practices of Karen Barad (2010, 2019), who states: Given the troubling of dichotomies – that is, the act of cutting into two in the making of binaries – in agential realism, I regularly use a slash to signify the limit of the limit: the intra-active “cutting together-apart” between terms on either side of the slash. So for example, “dis/continuity” is to be understood as a short-hand for the reworking of the usual dichotomous or discontinuous distinction between ‘continuity’ and “discontinuity” (Barad, 2019, p. 90). 8 2025, Ugron, Martelli and Popovici negative – as Veda quoted “that is not reflecting our views”, meaning the hegemonic Western views – that is not solidarity. It is difficult to say what solidarity is, but it is easy to experience what it is not. Starting with definitive answers is not solidarity. Not asking questions of another is not solidarity. To finish my reply with a further enfolding question that goes back to where I started writing months ago: what to do with the future? We are on the edge of losing so much, some of us more than others, some of us faster than others, but the whole planet is changing violently. Fire and water are consuming lives across species. Wars are making the whole process even worse and faster, and more wars are coming. Not to sound alarmist, but… (there is always a “but”), in a few years so much of what we know so far could literally turn into ash and dust. There is even a greater need to practice un/re/learning to build other worlds… Maria: To continue with – again – relationality. Thank you, Nóra, for underlining its importance, as I feel it is key to going further together (further not as in progress, but as in further away from anthropocentric war-mongering capitalism, as Veda highlights). When we say we are all in relation, when we understand there is no “separate” self, what do we really mean? The work we should do is to really look at how relationships articulate across differences and power. Not in the sense of drawing a simple line between who is privileged and who is oppressed – it’s already established, I think, that such a line is not easy to draw, and that within our intersections we often find ourselves to be both, albeit some of us are marginalized and silenced more deeply than others. By already speaking of us I try to extend a form of solidarity to many who might not feel it so – who might never read this exchange, or get anything of value out of its existence. So, once again – what does acknowledging relationality mean for the practice of cross-movement solidarity? What does it do in the face of conflict? How can seeing/analyzing our profound ties to each other, material and discursive, help us build radical queer-feminist responses to capital? For one, I think it puts into perspective that any form of “disentanglement” from each other still keeps some ties. We can form smaller, more radical groups to look for ideas/practices that cannot be realised in big movements. And we can do a lot from within such parallel structures and/or anarchist collectives. But we are still entangled with the rest – both individually and collectively. And from here, both conflict and strength arise. There are cases in which positions across movements seem irreconcilable, and then, remembering relationality can help. The fact that we’re stuck together, and the understanding that our liberation is enmeshed, can make us look for solutions. But we must also be careful to recognize that it will not be easy to see at times – it will seem more graspable for some groups to get what they want if they do not take into account everyone. Which leads me to challenge two of the binaries we are encountering in our discussion – individual/collective and words/actions. From an individual point of view, the future is too much to carry. The war(s), the rising fascism, the impossible costs of living, the animal-industrial complex, the climate and ecological crisis, the violence. There is only so much one person can do in a day. When we think about what we can do in our own lives, it feels crushing, always too little. But when we think of the many collectives we are in, and the many networks we can lend a helping hand towards, then it is not so bad anymore. As people we might only have a few hours a day/week for political work and organizing, but as groups we have tens, hundreds. One of my questions is then: how do we extend/strengthen these networks so as to 9 2025, Ugron, Martelli and Popovici nurture change, to sustain protest, and to prefigure other ways of living? The same false binary happens with words and actions. Writing words is an action, to be sure, but one whose value is highly contentious. For some, it carries “too much” weight, it has the power to “change everything”, almost lending a prophetic “aura” to the writer; for others, it means nothing and does worse than nothing, being a form of ego-stroking (I am of course exaggerating the two views). The thing with the written word is that, if it works, it stays there. It doesn’t disappear and keeps taking up space. It might seem like it’s “heavier” than, for example, a simple, direct action of making fresh water accessible (to all who might need it, beyond species) in the summer months, or a spontaneous, 10-minute protest in front of an institution. But we rarely know which action ends up having more “impact” and… what is impact, even. Must we think of enacting solidarity in quantitative terms? Of course we would say no, but then we all know there is a difference between working day-to-day in community building; being there when housing evictions happen; bottle-feeding newly born, discarded non-humans or writing an article once in a while. I see that here, as well, the node of resolve is relationality. Solidarity is about being with each other, for each other, as deeply as we can – and then learning to go even deeper. It’s not an individual endeavour, it’s something we can only learn to do, and do, collectively. In the fight for our future, in the struggle against war, and in the drive to be seen in our differences (in power, coloniality, species, abilities, racializations, genders and so on) we are together. And what we can do is to learn how to be together otherwise, challenging that which pits us against each other. Veda: The Western Enlightenment model of relating when encountering otherness is to name, define, standardise. It is a model of control and ultimate erasure in which the self – shaped after the subjectivity of the white cis-heteronormative Western man – needs to constantly define, dominate and erase otherness. It does so through capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, anthropocentrism, rationalism and more. This self can only start accepting otherness if the latter ever so slightly transforms into looking like the Self, like him. The more similar it appears, the closer to the top it is positioned in a hierarchy of distribution of resources and epistemic legitimation. When looking at the historical struggles of marginal, subaltern and oppressed multitudes for access to resources, we can read their movements as complex negotiations of keeping or giving up otherness. Some of these multitudes, in their process of articulating their struggle in a concrete field of contention, may strategically put forward an aspect of their otherness, say for example sexuality, and minimize another, such as racialization. The result of such negotiations may then look like victories for normative LGBT politics but are defeats for queer anti-racist intersectional politics. In the end, a material subjectivity may choose to become complicit in privilege for a certain aspect of their identity so that they gain access to resources. This is, in the end, the whole gist of respectability politics. And it is the same principle of semblance with the Self that we find – in a quite literal way – when the anthropomorphization of non-human animals consistent with the “pet” industry – that passes as love and care – strips them of their individual and species-specific personhood. So, this model of relating based on control needs to keep the top subjectivity as whole as much as possible and otherness as diluted as much as possible as it climbs its way on the hierarchy of the distribution of resources and epistemic legitimation. Deconstructing this 10 2025, Ugron, Martelli and Popovici well delimited self is key – as both of you point out – to any radical politics. However, it is not enough. We also need to address how this model’s patterns of relating are replicated in our practices and imaginaries of political organising. How, for example, in a social movement, the relevance of a demand is weighted on account of how much it is palatable to the government or on how many of the normative subjectivities’ interests it can evoke. Normative LGBT movements will not ask for housing for all and more specifically for trans or Roma queer youth, but they will fight for gay marriage as this is something easily recognizable for the government. I dream of going back to that conversation with my colleague and them telling me “I’m sorry, Veda, the war doesn’t seem important enough.” And I could tell them: “Why? Let’s figure out together why.” And tell them that when refusing to see the pain, the loss, the terror of war as relevant enough they are reinforcing the hegemony of Western social movements for what counts as politically relevant enough (Popovici, 2020b). And as long as this hegemony reigns, we will always fail at internationalist solidarity. Or, to put it in other words, it is against this hegemony of what counts as politically relevant enough, that we must build internationalist solidarity. While stepping out of the 20th century model of internationalist solidarity as based on a universalizing understanding of oppression, we may enter a new model of togetherness across borders based on – building up on your contributions – relationality, not universality. However, relationality may seem too abstract. When things feel too abstract for me, I try to surface affects and emotions, to ground my political vision in matters of the gut and heart. I go back to that horrifying chill nesting in my ribcage that I felt as my comrade took distance from me. I see relationality in the times of being on the edge of losing so much, as consisting of recognizing pain and grief. I could continue my question to the colleague: “Why is war not important enough? Just believe me when I tell you it is important, it is politically relevant enough, be my peer in having the same epistemological legitimacy. Trust my pain, grief and loss.” Let us bind in new solidarities based on loss. In the current escalation of endings, we are enmeshed with each other in loss. To this I would add a more materialist note. Radical solidarity, internationalism, cross-species togetherness needs infrastructure. It needs a material basis, resources and their circulation so that in the face of loss, current or future, we may still find wholeness. Nóra: The Western Enlightenment model of relating, as you say, Veda, and that otherness is “accepted” only insofar as it assimilates into this model, is to me what Sylvia Wynter calls the overrepresentation of Man (Wynter, 2003; Wynter & McKittrick, 2015). Wynter analyzes how the Western bourgeois’s model of being human, identified as Man or homo oeconomicus over the last 500 years has become the only way of being human in the world. Man or homo oeconomicus is a secular, liberal and capitalist-colonial way of being in the world, which Wynter scrutinized as a version of being human, but after the Enlightenment and in our contemporary globalized world it is presented as the only version, even as a “natural”, purely “biological” trajectory. For Wynter being human has a storytelling aspect, human is both bios and mythoi, something which is negated in the Western model. After all, if homo oeconomicus would reveal itself to be nothing but a story, one could come up with other stories to unsettle the overrepresentation of Man. 11 2025, Ugron, Martelli and Popovici I needed to describe this shortly, because for me discovering Wynter (on the suggestions of Veda, so thank you), was a moment when I found a way to connect a critique of anthropocentric Western humanism and a critique of racial-colonial capitalism. Discourses about the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene, for me, do not account for a joint critique of both. In literature about the Anthropocene, the Human becomes a geological actor and is the source of irreversible change on the planet. Accounts of the Capitalocene notice that not all humans are responsible in the same way, and instead capitalist extraction is named as the source of these changes (cf. Haraway, 2016; Karkulehto et al., 2022). What was missing for me and what I found in Wynter is the observation that the capitalist extractive way of being human is overrepresented as The HuMan. Period. Therefore, when one says that the Human is the cause of the Anthropocene, an erasure has been done, as it is not noticed which Human, what version of the Human and who are those actual humans who fit into this image, concretely. Or if Capital is the cause, again, it is invisible why exactly certain categories sustain extraction besides their own interests, based on what story. I agree with Veda that respectability politics in social movements, as well as a presupposed universalism of Western models for activism are both related to the overrepresentation of Man. How to unsettle this? – is the question Wynter poses as well. Wynter looks for a new version of being human: instead of being a descriptive noun as in the case of Man=Human, being human is a verb, it’s praxis (Wynter & McKittrick, 2015). How to understand and read being human as praxis, and most importantly, how to practice it in the here and now, coming from Eastern Europe, being active in transnational movements? Maria, you remind us that if we notice that we are stuck together and that our liberation is enmeshed, we can look for solutions – with a critical eye always questioning who is this we. Veda, you propose a form of cross-border togetherness based on relationality, not universality. Maybe the condition of being stuck together and internationalism based on relationality are both practices that take us closer to what Wynter proposes as being human as praxis. Related to what both of you proposed and my analysis of Wynter, there is one crucial question that lingers in my mind: how to make all of what has been said here, or what is being said in movements we are part of, how we engage with each other or with theorists from faraway places, really matter? All answers end in more questions, again. Anyway, on a materialist tone I would like to hear more about the infrastructure needed for cross-species, cross-border radical togetherness and solidarity, if any of you would like to address this issue in your replies. I know Veda, you also proposed before the concept of solidarity in illegality (Popovici, 2020a) and Maria you engage with animal sanctuaries (Vegan Sociology, 2020), and I see both of these topics related to the movement infrastructures needed to build togetherness based on relationality. While carrying out this conversation with you, I tried to focus also on an emotional aspect of being and writing, and with this I want to go back a bit to the beginning, to the four questions proposed by adrienne maree brown to learn from/with mushrooms. We touched upon all four in our answers, especially from a communal and movement perspective. But I still don’t know the answer to the last question in a very personal context: What to do with the pain? I must write this, as I would be lying if I only wrote about theory and communal practice, while I struggle to get out of bed and sit alone with my feelings that sometimes wish to tear me apart. Both academia and activism burn me out, while I try and fail and try again to heal from various childhood and earlier personal trauma, while racial-colonial capitalism is constantly retraumatizing – and here in some aspects I am still much more 12 2025, Ugron, Martelli and Popovici privileged than others, while the climate crisis is also affecting us as climate trauma (Woodbury, 2019). Only personally I am aware of a few of the recent troubling deaths in so many nearer or further away places, in wars, at the walled and razor-wired killer borders of Fortress Europe, or in the seas around it, premature deaths of people suffering from environmental injustice and lack of health care based on racialization, class and/or geopolitical location, racialized and queer people murdered everywhere, pregnant people left to die with dead babies in their bellies, nonhuman animal comrades murdered daily in the animal industrial complex, and some even massacred in sanctuaries when there is a risk of swine flu that would affect the profit of neighbouring farms… I must stop listing more deaths as an alarmist tone won’t help us find solutions. But what to do with the pain then? brown’s question haunts me as I am trying to situate myself within it and recognize the pain of others. I believe in the face of all of these crises and deaths, it is important to find ways to both acknowledge and commemorate the deaths and suffering of others, as well as our own sufferings and emotions. The secular Western humanist and the colonial-capitalist world have killed most of the communal rituals, and only highly institutionalized forms remain, replaced by a consumer and entertainment culture. Yesterday, September 21st, I attended a webinar with my colleague, Olga Cielemęcka, in which she talked about the wall on the polish-belorussian border and its implications for both human and nonhuman lives.7 Olga presented a performance from the forest in which people were singing to mourn all the killings that have been taking place in the Białowieża forest now and historically. This is one artistic example, but I am interested in personal and communal everyday rituals of mourning that each of us and our 7 See the description of the event at the Posthumanities Hub: https://posthumanitieshub.net/2023/09/21/verdant -borders-and-steel-walls-eco-ontologies-of-border-politic s-ph-webinar-21st-september/ (access: 28.09.2023). communities could incorporate and start practicing to tend to the pains around us.8 Veda, we have just discussed mourning in a private conversation, as well as with you, Maria, this is a topic we often touch upon in our talks. What do you think, how to do this?9 Maria: What to do with grief? We stay with it. I’m not saying this is what we should do, but it is what happens anyway. Grief stays with us. We can acknowledge it, and live along it, as best as we can. Then there are two other things that easily come to my mind. The first thing to do with grief is to create with it, to put it into being, to name it and to see it, to recognize death, to ritualize the deep ache in our chest. I’m thinking of your 9 One must be attentive, however, on how different groups’ grief might be perceived, used or incorporated by racial-colonial capitalism. Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson demonstrates how Indigenous grief has been used against Indigenous communities by the canadian settler-colonial state. While they grieve, says Simpson, the state performs false pity (Simpson, 2017): Canada has become very good at responding to our pain by deploying the politics of grief: a set of tools the state uses to avoid structural changes and accountability by focusing on individual trauma rather than collective, community, or nation-based loses, by truncating historical injustices from the current structure and the ongoing functioning of settler colonialism, by avoiding discussions about substantive changes involving land and dispossession in favor of superficial status quo ones, and by turning to “lifestyle choices” and victim blaming to further position the state as benevolent and caring (Simpson, 2017, p. 239). While there are so many reasons to grieve for so many communities, there is a risk of co-optation and even abusing one’s pain to uphold the status quo. And yet, I hear brown's question once again: what to do with the pain? How to account for each other’s pains with deep listening, solidarity and in a way that both unsettles hegemonic oppressive ways of meaning making as well as resists co-optation and a perpetuation of extraction? And then how to build that new form of togetherness rooted in relationality, attentive of our pains? How to practice internationalist solidarity in these ways? 8 There has been quite substantial literature about mourning in various activist contexts, see for example an anthology Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief edited by Cindy Milstein (2017), or in fiction the Grievers by adrienne maree brown (2021), as well as regarding the climate crisis, see Haraway (2016). 13 2025, Ugron, Martelli and Popovici poetry volume, Nóra, which is a way to pour loss into words – the loss of love, of non-human lives, of entire ecosystems (Ugron, 2022). I’m thinking of the superb, heart-breaking photographs of dead non-human animals surrounded by leaves and flower arrangements that anthropologist Amanda Stronza shares online − ways to make visible deaths which are completely ignored.10 One problem with death, pain and grief is that they are quickly put aside, because we don’t know how to deal with them. That is also because we live in a culture that is pro-life in an almost transhumanist sense, wishing to forego aging and prolong youth for anyone who can afford it – in the image of the HuMan, of course. This society makes it so that the lives of some are supported directly by the suffering of others – I’m thinking of migrant and low-wage human workers, as well as of non-human animals caught in labs and the industrial death machine. That’s why, with the Queer Vegan Community, we imagined a ritual for the near future – a day in December when pigs are no longer slaughtered to be consumed for a Christian celebration, but their killing is stopped, yet remembered. We called it “Days of Remembrance of the Pigs Killed for Human Profit and Craving” [Zilele de Comemorare a Porcilor Uciși pentru Profiturile și Poftele Umane] and suggested red vases to be put on window sills with flowers, and small gifts to be brought to sanctuary spaces (Comunitatea Vegană Queer, 2022). I’m also reminded of a video-essay I participated in making, in which there is an attempt to create a mourning ceremony for pigs “culled” due to the African Swine Fever (just wondering, 2021) – which brings me to the second idea. Grief can be mobilizing. One of the emotions to come out of loss – after denial – is anger. Rage-grief can be a force to be reckoned with. Anger-pain is what 10 You can see these photographs on her Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/amandastronza/ (access: 28.09.23). antispeciesist activists in italy – and elsewhere – are dealing with now, after the pigs in the Cuori Liberi sanctuary have been violently exterminated by the authorities, as you Nóra mentioned, due to an outbreak of ASF from the nearby farms (Luciano, 2023). After days in which activists held the gates of the sanctuary, successfully keeping the police out, on the 20th of September the authorities barged in, throwing humans to the ground and beating them, taking the pigs and slaughtering them without letting the sanctuary veterinary be involved, or even properly following epidemic measures.11 Beyond being agonizing, this action sets a terrible precedent for what all antispeciesists hoped animal sanctuaries can be: spaces of safety and liberation. This is even more terrifying given that in italy, in spring of 2023, sanctuaries were officially categorized by the Health Ministry as refuges, and animals were removed from their “livestock” status (Iervolino, 2023). This was a momentous victory for which activists fought for years, because the lack of legal categorization brought problems of many kinds, and sanctuaries which hosted farmed animals were basically seen as failed, unproductive farms. What happened at Cuori Liberi shows that even such a hard-won victory means nothing for a state that is aligned with capital, that will do anything to protect incredibly harmful industries and corporations. Even for anarchist antispeciesists, who are obviously critical of state power, the force the authorities used against non-violent protesters to barge into someone’s “private” home and kill their companion species was frightening. An anonymous activist who was present on that day called it a political trauma – an embodied understanding that liberal democracy won’t 11 In the aftermath of this event, an Instagram live discussion between four activists shared some details and thoughts on the matter: https://www.instagram.com/p /CxgdCDfL5WK/ (access: 27-.09.2023). After the writing of this conversation, I also wrote more on the matter in the animated essay “Escape, Resistance and Solidarity - Farmed Animal Sanctuaries as the Heart of the Movement” (just wondering, 2024). 14 2025, Ugron, Martelli and Popovici guarantee you any so-called rights if you put yourself against capital (Puppy Riot, 2023). “This mourning will stay with us, from now on, in all the fights to come” wrote Puppy Riot. So italian activists are mobilizing, their rage-grief stronger than ever. Just today (on the 23th of September) they wanted to propose a vigil in front of the sanctuary, but decided against it because authorities are accusing them of being vectors of disease – even though just by looking at the pictures you can see all the activists were dressed in protective suits, while the authorities were not (Cospirazione Animale, 2023).12 Ultimately, it’s a familiar story: the state uses all its force to protect its hegemonic interests. We know it. Yet I am disheartened to hear that, for example, solidarity with this cause has yet to be shown in other militant circles – as transfeminist activist feminoska mentioned in an online discussion, she did not see one word about the event in her queer, leftist, feminist groups.13 Why? There is a lot of resistance to let go of one’s privilege − in the above case, anthroprivilege (Springer, 2022). Yet, it has been done before, and it can be done again, in the present and future. It is the work that we must do − consider our positions and work through and across them. For example, the feminist protest to take place internationally for access to safe abortions, on the 28th of September 2023, is articulated, in romania, based on two recent events which provoked rage-grief.14 One is the death of a young woman who was refused a 14 See the description of the Facebook event for the protest: https://www.facebook.com/events/80698527424 3419/?ref=newsfeed (access: 27.09.2023). 13 The live discussion can be watched here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CxgdCDfL5WK/ (access: 27.09.2023). Besides feminoska, in their above-mentioned article, Puppy Riot also mentioned the disappointment in the silence and absence of activists from other movements: “We sang Bella Ciao, maybe with a bitter desire of continuity with the stories of human resistance celebrated and recognized by a left that is still too anthropocentric.” 12 This information is gathered from the Cospirazione Animale Instagram profile, coordinated by Marco Reggio, author of the homonymous book. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cxhx8KjA7xO/ (access: 27.09.2023). life-saving abortion, another is the unacceptable conditions in which a disabled, poor, young Roma woman had to give birth.15 Feminist writer and activist Laura Sandu wrote that A more solidarity-based feminist discourse for reproductive justice will therefore focus not only on the issue of individual choice, specific to the liberal feminist problematization of abortion on demand, but also on global reproductive health demands arising from the experiences of racialized and/or precarized women, specific to an anti-racist and anti-capitalist feminism (2023, n.p.). The prolonged activism of Roma feminists (just two examples from the E-Romnja association being the construction of sisterhood-solidarity networks for Roma women16 and the production of intersectional studies and reports)17 made it possible to have the upcoming protest articulated in an antiracist manner, for access to reproductive justice, rather than being limited to the topic of abortion. By organizing across movements, intersectional demands – such as safe abortions, ending sterilisation without consent, access to contraception, family planning, gynecological and pregnancy monitoring tests and analyses and hormone replacement therapy – were formulated. 17 Such as those developed within the project “IntersectVoices in Europe – combating discrimination against Roma women”, one mention being “Challenging intersectionality: Roma women’s voices and experiences” by Carmen Gheorghe and Cristina Mocanu (2021). https://e-romnja.ro/project/intersect-voices-in-europa/#de arflip-df_1604/1/ (access: 27.09.2023). 16 This practice is explored at the end of Anca Nica’s article “Dajphen. Solidaritate, suroritate, maternitate”, Cutra, 2022. More information about the project itself can be found out at the link https://dajphen.ro/home/ (access: 27.09.2023). 15 Beyond the mention of these two cases from the organizers of the protests, they are further contextualized in Laura Sandu’s article “Vrem spitale publice, nu elicoptere și catedrale! Câteva direcții solidare în discursul feminist pentru justiție reproductivă”, https://cutra.ro/vrem -spitale-publice-nu-elicoptere-si-catedrale/ (access: 27.09.2023). 15 2025, Ugron, Martelli and Popovici I want to end with a few mobilizing questions for the readers – questions that people can take with them in their own lives and collectives. To do that, I will mention an inspiring moment that I witnessed recently. I was listening to a discussion on degrowth and intersectionality at Trifoi Fest,18 which began by stating the difficulty of connecting these two complex concepts. The speakers were coming from different backgrounds, existing at various intersections of race(alization), gender, neurodivergence, class and education. Anca Nica, a Roma activist, was making an important point regarding the acknowledgement of intersectionality: that we must really try to recognize, as fully as we can, both our oppressions and privileges. And with this, know when to shut up or speak out. I think these answers to what you, Veda, were also saying regarding Western European activists and the russian war on ukraine. Knowing when to stay silent or when to make noise is a practice we should constantly learn. In the beginning of the war, I was so overwhelmed I wanted to write something about it, but I could not find the right words. It is good to be attentive to our words, always, but especially when we are speaking about things that are not happening to us. I want to say that by the end of the discussion, things that seemed hard to think together were suddenly apparent in their entanglements, for example, the fact that productive/economic degrowth needs to have an intersectional lens, and the fact that beyond-family care work is/will be part and parcel of what makes our lives possible. I see that discussion as an important, albeit small step in connecting 18 Trifoi Fest [Clover Fest] is an experimental festival aiming to be circular, local, organic, vegan, ecological and resilient, holding a space for anti-capitalist and degrowth ideas as well as zero-waste practices. The discussion was moderated by vegan activist and youtuber Alexandra Corbu with speakers: Anca Nica, Romani antiracist activist; Oana Ungureanu, vegan, queer, mad activist; Cristina Mitroi, queer mad Romani activist and Diana Bobis, degrowth researcher and sustainability advocate. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =VVPwCfZctY4 (access: 27.09.2023). sustainability19 and environmental activisms to anti-racist, queer, mad and animal activisms. My questions for the readers are these: 1. What can you bring back to the (multispecies) commons? That’s part of the work of questioning power, echoing Angela Balzano’s call (2021): how to desire differently, in ways that do not hurt the other?20 2. What can you bring in? What are the skills, knowledges, economic or time resources that you have and can bring to the many struggles? What is the organizational capacity of your group(s), how to pay attention to different dis/abilities, what can the group do as it is, and who can it connect with to be stronger? 3. Who are your communities? Again, which “we” are you part of? This is a very specific question for each of us to reflect upon – who can you fight alongside, which movements can you be a bridge of connection for, and which are the struggles you do not yet see, but that could use your (individual and collective) support? Veda: I feel these three questions are an ideal ending to our conversation. Navigating relationality, collectivity and the commons is crucial for the historical moment we’re living in when old understandings of “we” are not fitting 20 Balzano develops this argument in her book Per farla finita con la famiglia. Dall’aborto alle parentele postumane, which is currently not translated. A review of the book in English can be found here: https://posthum.ro/recenzii/ma ria-martelli-multispecies-tunes-to-making-kin-not-reprodu cing-capitalism/ (access: 27.09.2023). 19 By this I do not mean sustainable development, but rather visions of sustainability such as those proposed by Indigenous principles and thinkers. One example is the Honorable Harvest, whose “guidelines” we can find in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 2013 book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants and about which I previously wrote here: https://www.justwondering.io/indigenous-knowledg es-and-the-teachings-of-plants/ (access: 27.09.2023). 16 2025, Ugron, Martelli and Popovici anymore and new visions of togetherness are still in the making. Navigating all this through grief, loss and isolating desperation is even more challenging. Thank you, Maria and Nóra, for taking this journey together. Your insights always give me grounding and bring me closer to the world I long for. Nóra: Thank you, dear Veda and Maria, for this 5-month textual-mycelial journey into our un/common struggles and practices. Maria, thank you for the questions, they will stay with me as well. They reminded me of Margaret Killjoy’s short text It’s Time to Build Resilient Communities (2023), which works with a similar interrogative structure addressed to the reader and focused on building resilient communities in the face of various crises. For the romanian or hungarian speaking public I would like to suggest reading a short essay on good practices in activist contexts written and published by the Dysnomia queer-feminist reading circle from Bucharest in the second issue of the homonymous zine (2019; 2020). And to go back once again to adrienne maree brown, their book Emergent Strategy. Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017) is one that always presents me with new questions to think-with while doing transformative work in communities. I want to thank Veda especially for staying with us in this conversation even though I know the emotional hardships you are going through right now. For me talking to you always means a lot. 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Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument. The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337. Wynter, Sylvia and McKittrick, Kate (2015). Unparalleled Catastrophe for our Species? Or, To Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations. In McKittrick, Kate (Ed.), Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (pp. 9–89). Duke University Press. 19 2025, Ugron, Martelli and Popovici Authors information Nóra Ugron (0000-0002-7224-0228) e-mail: norugr@utu.fi Nóra Ugron (she/they) is a poet, queer-feminist anarchist, anti-speciesist activist and a member of several radical left collectives in Romania and transnationally. They are a member of the queer–feminist literary circle Cenaclul X. She is the network coordinator at ELMO – Eastern European Left Media Outlet and a contributing editor at LeftEast. She has been involved in radical housing justice organising in the Social Housing NOW! movement in Cluj-Napoca. Their debut poetry collection in Romanian, Orlando Postuman, was published at Fractalia in 2022. Orlando Postuman was shortlisted for two debut poetry prizes and has recently been published as an audiobook at Magga Books. Nóra's poems have recently been translated to Croatian. Nóra is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Turku, Finland starting in January 2022. She has an MA in Hungarian linguistic and literary studies from the Department of Hungarian Literary Studies, Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania; and a BA in Hungarian Literature and Language (major) and Finnish Literature and Language (minor) from the Faculty of Lettres, Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania. Maria Martelli (0000-0001-7234-1603) e-mail: maria.martelli@yahoo.com Maria Martelli writes and researches mixing antispeciesist and queer-feminist theories. They graduated from the Master of Advanced Sociological Research at the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, Babeș-Bolyai University with a critical thesis on anthropocentrism in education for sustainable development. Currently she works on an independent activist-research on the liberatory potential of animal sanctuaries, urban coexistence and multispecies imaginaries. They were an editor at the Student Journal of Vegan Sociology, and are currently part of the artistic antispeciesist project just wondering…, of the Queer Vegan Community (CVQ) and of the autonomous literary group Cenaclul X. Veda Popovici (0000-0001-5767-6966) e-mail: veda.popovici@gmail.com Veda Popovici is an organizer and theorist dedicated to anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian values based in Bucharest, Romania. Their political work has developed together with anarchist and feminist initiatives such as the Gazette of Political Art, Pink Block community, Macaz cooperative. After finishing their PhD on nationalist and far-right intellectual genealogy in Romania, Veda has taught classes on decolonial thought, counter-nationalism and feminism at the National University of Arts (Bucharest) and the University of California, Santa Cruz, department of Feminist theory. Dedicated to radical housing organizing, Veda has cofounded the Common Front for Housing Rights (Bucharest), the national federation The Block for Housing and has been the facilitator of the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and the City. Veda is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Inhabiting Radical Housing ERC-funded project, hosted by the Polytechnic of Turin and a Core Team Member of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab. 20 2025, Ugron, Martelli and Popovici