The contemporary moment is defined by profound threats to collective life: from intensifying genocidal projects in Palestine, Sudan, and the Congo, to a resurgent fascism and militarism across the globe, to the undermining of Black and Indigenous life in shifting practices of racial and colonial domination, to capitalism’s broader threat to the ecological conditions of life as such. At the same time, new movements, new forms of struggle, and new modes of thought have emerged to answer these challenges. How can socialism – a theory and practice oriented toward the liberation of collective life from the stultifying, atomizing, and murderous tendencies of capital – answer these intensifying threats to collective life?

This year’s conference is therefore situated in and amid the contradictions of collective life, of intellectual life and political action in the context of scorched earth, genocidal politics. At the same time, we cannot decontextualize this conference from the broader politics of today; the urgency of the moment and its challenge to intellectual life was highlighted by universities’ attempts to repress protests against Israel’s genocidal war in Palestine. What does it mean to have a conference negotiating the future of socialist thought and action in a setting undergirded by the funding of genocide and repression of critique? As such, the conference calls for contributions that ask how stretching our analyses – emphasizing new strategies, new tactics, and new frameworks – can answer this call.