Transnational Summer School 2025 - Love in Action: Building Solidarity Beyond Borders

"Love is an action, never simply a feeling." bell hooks’ powerful statement calls for love to be understood not as a mere emotional experience, but as a deliberate, transformative act grounded in action, accountability, and resistance to oppression. In this view, love becomes a radical tool to challenge systemic inequality, alienation, and exploitation, inspiring collective action for justice. It transcends personal affection, manifesting as a commitment to solidarity, mutual care, and shared humanity. By framing love as an active practice, hooks emphasizes its potential to heal divisions, unite people across borders, and dismantle unjust systems, fostering a more just, sustainable future through collective struggle.

This vision of love as both a practice and a catalyst for change is at the heart of the Summer School, organized by the School of Transnational Organizing. As part of this year's Wiener Festwochen, European Alternatives Berlin is hosting a four-day Transnational Summer School from June 12–15. The event will bring together activists, artists, educators, and community organizers from across Europe to explore how love, understood in this way, can drive resistance and help build powerful transnational networks of care and justice, particularly within the struggles for climate justice, migration rights, and labor.

Love is essential in these struggles because it fosters the deep connections and solidarity necessary to confront interconnected crises. In the fight for climate justice, love motivates collective action to protect vulnerable communities and the planet, pushing us to care for the Earth and each other. In migration struggles, it transcends borders, calling us to embrace the humanity of those displaced by violence, poverty, and environmental degradation, and to challenge the systems that exploit and dehumanize them. Similarly, in labor struggles, love drives the fight for workers' rights and dignity, inspiring a commitment to mutual care and respect within and across communities. In all these struggles, love is a force that empowers us to see beyond individual interests, building solidarity and collective action to dismantle the systems of oppression and exploitation that harm people and the planet.

We believe that solidarity crosses borders, and that change must be global. Through this Summer School, we aim to build strong transnational alliances, fostering connections that extend beyond national boundaries and into shared struggles for justice.

Amid growing isolation, this in-person gathering emphasizes the importance of physical spaces for meeting, sharing experiences, and building relationships. Coming together reaffirms the value of human connection in strengthening our collective struggles and strategies. Over four days, participants will engage in workshops, panels, reflection sessions, and community-building exercises focused on exchanging experiences, developing strategies, and sharing skills for organizing around climate justice, migration, and labor rights. The People’s Assembly, taking place on Sunday, June 15, will expand the conversation as our 60 participants are joined by 140 additional participants from Vienna, creating a space for shared reflection and action.

This Summer School will tackle a range of key topics, including undocumented people’s work struggles, Eastern European struggles, bodies under fascism, climate justice, the relationship between love and water, hydrofeminist perspectives, domestic work, agricultural labor, and the role of art in political struggles. The program will feature panels, interactive workshops,, providing further spaces for exchange and collective imagining. Cultural events and creative workshops will complement the educational activities, deepening our understanding of solidarity and the emotional power of activism.

The Summer School will showcase how love, care, and collective action can overcome alienation and build a future grounded in justice, solidarity, and mutual care. Join us at Funkhaus Vienna for four days of dialogue, resistance, and love in action.