Intersections of Conviviality: Voices from Communities
Edited by Marina Gržinić, Jovita Pristovšek, Asma Aiad, Anahita Neghabat
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, forthcoming in 2025
Intersections of Conviviality: Voices from Communities explores the nuanced dynamics that shape conviviality and examines the different ways in which individuals within communities navigate the challenges of the neoliberal, racializing European landscape by forming alliances that transcend identity, geographical, and cultural boundaries. The book seeks to make the voices of these communities heard and provides a platform for their stories, struggles, collective experiences, hopes, and visions for the future.
The book Intersections of Conviviality is based on the results of the 5-year art-based research project Conviviality as Potentiality: From Amnesia to Pandemic towards Convivial Epistemologies (FWF-PEEK AR 679, 2021–25), conducted at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. It started in May 2021 with Prof. Dr. Marina Gržinić and her research team, Dr. Sophie Uitz and Dr. Jovita Pristovšek. As an artistic and theoretical research project, it builds on the results of our previous project Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality (FWF-PEEK AR 439; 2018–21). Both research projects in the time frame of 7 years were led by Marina Gržinić.
Intersections of Conviviality: Voices from Communities therefore offers a very renewed reflection on different communities that are largely marginalized, Black and POC communities, Muslim communities, and trans*, building their context around identities such as migration, LGBTQI+ etc., and thinking out loud about institutional and structural racism, inequalities and also empowerment.
It exposes the richness and diversity of conviviality within European communities against the backdrop of racializing neoliberalism and racial capitalism. We believe that within the complex web of modern society, there are actions and networks of shared resilience and collaboration that need to be made visible and mapped. Through personal narratives, academic analysis, artistic expression, or practical examples, the book creates a map of the stories and narratives that celebrate the potential of conviviality to thrive despite structural-economic-institutional discrimination, silencing, extractivism, exploitation, dispossession and marginalization.
Intersections of Conviviality: Voices from Communities highlights examples where communities have resisted the homogenizing effects of neoliberal policies, discrimination and racism in all its forms, demonstrating their resilience and capacity for collective action. The book presents innovative approaches to addressing societal challenges through community-led initiatives, grassroots movements and alternative forms of organizing.
Ultimately, this book is about the vision of a convivial future.