Solidarity Unbound: Work and Labour in an Age of Intersecting Crises
Labour Studies Program, University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, Manitoba
June 3-5, 2026
Contact: [email protected]
Conference Fees
| Permanent or full-time faculty or Union staff | Students and other community members | |
| CAWLS members | $150 | $0 |
| Non-members | $300 | $60 |
Notes
Membership and Registration: Accepted presenters must be members of CAWLS and registered for the conference by May 1, 2026 or risk being removed from the program. Non-members are welcome to attend the conference.
Fort Garry Hotel and Conference Centre – Winnipeg
Group rate: $229 + taxes / night. Must book by May 3, 2026 to secure the conference rate
Registration
The conference organizing committee invites submissions for the 12th annual meeting of the Canadian Association for Work and Labour Studies (CAWLS) to be hosted by the Labour Studies Program at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.
The committee welcomes proposals on all topics that focus on the past, present and future of work and labour studies. Our goal is to create a conference program reflective of the broadest range of methodological, theoretical, and disciplinary themes and approaches. The committee welcomes proposals for single papers, thematic streams, multiple-paper panels, roundtables and workshops. The participation of researchers in union and community settings is strongly encouraged.
“An injury to one is an injury to all.” For over a century, this has been the guiding philosophy of the workers’ movement. Though labour organizations have often not matched words with actions, solidarity remains the foundational principle upon which organized labour rests. In our current moment, however, intersectioning crises in contemporary capitalism challenge us to again rethink, deepen and broaden our commitment to solidarity.
This year, the conference organizing committee encourages participants to engage with the theme of solidarity and interrogate anew how struggles for economic and social justice necessitate building alliances across boundaries.
In particular, this year’s conference will meet at the University of Manitoba, whose campuses and research spaces are located on Treaty One territory, the original lands of Anishinaabeg, Ininiwak, Anisininewuk, Dakota Oyate, Dene and Inuit, and on the National Homeland of the Red River Métis. Challenging settler colonialism is especially pressing in Manitoba, where 1 in 5 people identify as Indigenous. The organizing committee therefore encourages participants to think about the potential of uniting struggles for workers’ rights with Indigenous resistance and the fight against settler colonialism.
In the spirit of building solidarity, panel and paper submissions might consider the following questions:
- How has contemporary capitalism transformed the conditions for solidarity between workers?
- How has capital undercut, deformed or re-organized workers’ power and solidarity?
- How are current anti-immigrant, anti-trans, “anti-woke” and/or other reactionary campaigns affecting working-class solidarity?
- How can workers build power and solidarity at different scales?
- In what ways has capitalism opened new possibilities for building solidarity between workers, communities and peoples?
- How have struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of oppression deepened or reframed labour solidarity?
- How do struggles over the recognition of unpaid work and social reproduction push the labour movement to widen its conception of social solidarity?
- How can the labour movement build stronger ties of solidarity with Indigenous peoples and others fighting settler colonialism?
- How can anti-colonial struggles be understood as battles over the conditions and form of social reproduction?
- How might broadening our understanding of solidarity help us address the climate crisis and the need for a just transition?
Participants are not required to limit themselves to the above list of questions. Submissions may also address other areas of critical concern to workers, unions, activists and all those working to build a more just and fair world, such as:
- Imperialism, colonialism, and labour solidarity
- Youth and student labour activism
- Struggles over and critiques of the family, unpaid work, and social reproduction
- Anti-racist and intersectional struggles and their relation to labour
- Worker and union fights to secure pension, unemployment, disability, and other forms of economic security
- Technology, app-based work, and other forms of digitally-mediated labour
- Workplace health and safety and disability justice
CAWLS 2026 welcomes submissions from researchers in university, union, and community settings. All participants must be members in good standing at the time of the conference.
Panel, roundtable and workshop proposals are due December 15, 2025.
Individual paper submissions are due January 15, 2025.
Submissions and any other questions about the conference can be sent to [email protected]
Keynote Speaker: Cedric de Leon
“Articulating the Crisis, Renewing the United Front”
Cedric de Leon is Professor of Sociology and Labour Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has published six books. His newest, Freedom Train, with University of California Press, is on the role of independent Black labor organizations in desegregating American unions from 1917 to 1968. He writes on race, labour, and party politics and teaches courses in social theory, political sociology, organizing, U.S. labour history, as well as labour and artificial intelligence.
From 2018 to 2022, Cedric directed the UMass Amherst Labour Center, America’s premier worker-side graduate program in Labour Studies. He was the first person of color to do so. Prior to becoming an academic, Cedric was an elected leader and staff organizer in the U.S. labour movement. He was born and raised in the immigrant working-class community of St. Jamestown in Toronto.
Marxists tend to theorize overlapping crises as originating from the economy and radiating outward to touch off crises in the state, the party system, and ideology. One speaks of a “fiscal crisis of the state” or a “crisis of hegemony,” in which the people withdraw their consent to be ruled, and the state responds with violence to secure subaltern compliance by other means. Such theories do not fully contemplate the contemporary meaning of overlapping crises, which entails not only a crisis of neoliberalism and of liberal democracy as we might expect in Marxist circles, but also a crisis of the environment and a crisis of racial reckoning, among others. Simultaneously, those who have theorized resistance to contemporary capitalism have urged an alliance across multiple inequalities and struggles, whether understood as the “popular front” of old, “chains of equivalence” á la Laclau and Mouffe, “the multitude” of Hardt, Negri, and the World Social Forum, or the Black feminist concept of intersectionality. In this presentation, I see both the overlapping crises of our time and the unfolding resistance thereto as an outcome of articulation: a political economy sutured together by compromises with popular movements of workers, women, queer folk, and racialized people on the one hand, and the renewal of a united front consisting of those betrayed and displaced by the broken promises of the past on the other. I argue that intersectionality is not merely an ethic that the labor movement must live by so as not to repeat the exclusions that have historically undermined class solidarity. Rather, intersectionality is a necessary response to the peculiar articulation of neoliberal political economy and its breakdown.
