Call for papers, actions and workshops

The Great Transition
Building a Shared World with the Living: Horizons for Postcapitalism

Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Québec, Canada
27–30 May 2027

The Collectif La Grande transition invites everyone who wants to build a world free of hierarchy among living beings, a world of social and environmental justice, feminist, anti-racist and decolonial, to propose activities for the 2027 edition of its international conference. The Great Transition offers four days of encounter and exchange bringing together members of research communities and of activist, community, cultural, union and political organizations from Québec, from Indigenous communities, from various Canadian provinces and from several countries.

History is speeding up. The gains wrested from past struggles are melting away like snow in the sun. Like many others, we are sometimes gripped by a sense of paralysis before the scale of the disaster and the suffering under way. Wildfires, droughts and floods are multiplying. Inequality is widening. The authoritarian right and the far right sit at the head of many states, diverting attention from the causes of the various crises by designating scapegoats: racialized people, migrants, members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, the left, “wokes”, intersectional feminists… The Israeli and Trumpist governments, their allies and the states complicit in the genocide and ecocide under way in Palestine are opening the door to the remilitarization of the West and to the normalization of armed conflict and genocide around the world.

These attacks target peoples on colonized lands, impoverished and precarious people, women, racialized people, and exploited workers. This is why spaces of convergence such as The Great Transition have become indispensable: to organize, and to fight back together.

How do we build an ecological, economic and political transition that breaks radically with the interlocking forms of oppression and domination? And how do we halt the meteoric rise of the far right by organizing that transition along feminist, antifascist and antimilitarist lines?

Capitalism cannot reproduce itself without seizing hold of living environments: it lives on what it consumes, and consumes more than it gives life. It is not merely an economic system; it is a way of organizing the relations between humans and the rest of the living world. Faced with the deathly horizon taking shape before us, we propose a common thread for 2027: building a shared world with the living. Turning our attention toward the power that runs through territories, peoples, species and ecosystems, and that persists in spite of the logics of capital.

Speaking of the living rather than of nature is not a passing fashion. “Nature” is often imagined as an external backdrop or a stock of resources to be exploited; the living, by contrast, places humans back within a relationship of interdependence with ecosystems and territories, and undoes the divide between nature and culture. The term insists on relations, on connections, and on the fragility of the environments we inhabit. It ties the ecological crisis to our concrete lives, to our bodies, to our ways of inhabiting the world, which all too often amount to crushing it.

Placing the living at the centre of The Great Transition means recognizing that the present crisis is as much a crisis of relations as a crisis of institutions: a rupture in our ties to the Earth, to the many forms of life that make up the world, and to one another.

To want to preserve the living is to want to preserve what makes life on Earth beautiful, something we will not find by building private cities or by moving to another planet. It means giving up the belief that natural resources are infinite and can be exploited to the bone, just as it means giving up the belief that we can go on exploiting the labour of others. It means refusing to rank the elements of ecosystems. It means laying bare the cosmogonies our social order rests on, or at least the order that issued from the colonial and racist myth of “Discovery”, an order that produces nothing but exploitation and predation.

Thinking with the living therefore connects directly to decolonial, feminist and anticapitalist struggles. The domination of women and the exploitation of the living proceed from one and the same logic, the logic that turned the Earth into a resource and bodies into objects to be controlled. Building a shared world with the living means calling into question the power relations that have subordinated both women and nature.

The world is burning, but experiments are already prefiguring the world to be built. Building a shared world with the living means recognizing the richness of these experiments and drawing from them the creative energy of great mobilizations. We look forward to seeing you in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal in May 2027.

How to contribute

We invite you to propose workshops, activities and papers on the tactics, strategies, assessments of past and recent experiences, and alternative models that help us build a shared world with the living in a postcapitalist era. We encourage formats that depart from the conventional panel: hands-on workshops, experience-sharing sessions, strategy discussions, debates, movement histories, brainstorming sessions, artistic and cultural performances, activist actions.

Activities that give the floor to several people will be favoured, though individual proposals will also be considered. We are especially glad to receive proposals from people belonging to marginalized social groups. Proposals whose composition reflects no diversity may be turned down. We also encourage activities that introduce a non-specialist audience to a topic, in the spirit of popular education.

We will pay particular attention to proposals that draw on activist and artistic practice to imagine and debate alternatives, and that set the living against the regime of death that capitalism offers.

The event will be held mainly in French and English. We can’t wait to read your boldest ideas!

Submission deadline: 2 November 2026

To submit an activity (250 words maximum): edito.lagrandetransition.net/en

For any questions, write to us at info@lagrandetransition.net

Sample themes

Proposals may fall under any one of the following broad streams, or cut across several of them. This list is indicative: it is meant to open up the discussion, not to fence it in.

Building a shared world with the living

How can we overturn our relationship to the world and think from a standpoint of equality with all living beings? How do Indigenous cosmogonies and land-protection practices nourish a postcapitalism attentive to interdependence? How does care connect with decolonial, feminist and anticapitalist struggles?

The living as a political horizon for the left
Decolonial ecology, ecofeminism and ecosocialism: convergences and tensions
Indigenous land-protection practices and the defence of the living
Climate justice: who pays, who decides, who repairs?
Forces of reproduction, human and more-than-human, at the heart of the ecological crisis
Labour and the living: the exploitation of living labour, environmental health, a just transition for workers
Buen vivir, eco-republicanism, degrowth: grammars of interdependence
Feminist antispeciesism and the critique of species hierarchy
Situated knowledges, citizen science and stories of the land
Artistic and sensory expressions of our relationship to the living; care as a political horizon
Points of no return and ecological ruptures: a critique of the discourse of “adaptation”
Cosmopolitics and the plurality of worlds

Transforming economies and planning democratically

Beyond strategies of resistance, which experiments prefigure an economy reintegrated into living processes and freed from capital accumulation? How can we counter the capitalist planning of the transition with a genuine project of democratic planning? How can we build a stance of antagonism toward capital from within the state and its institutions?

Planning for the living: what forms of planning organized from territories and peoples, in an intersectional perspective?
Postcapitalist models: democratic socialism, participatory economics, degrowth, the commons
Cooperatives, non-market housing, socialization of the means of production and of care work
Struggles against the rising cost of living; collective responses to poverty and exclusion
Housing, homelessness and gentrification; decommodifying old age and collective living arrangements
New-entrant farming and food sovereignty against export agribusiness
Organizing degrowth: where to begin, with whom, on what terms?
Institutions of economic coordination: which bodies, which scales, which mandates?
Subordinating markets, money and finance: levers, experiments, blind spots
Socializing strategic sectors (energy, transport, food, care) and transforming property relations
Participatory budgeting and municipalism: what the local scale makes possible, and what it does not
Non-sexist sharing of work and the socialization of domestic and care labour

Rethinking democracy and our relationship to the state

What strategies can take us from a bureaucratic, disciplinary state to a state, or a system of institutions, permeable to popular demands, one that enables self-management in communities and workplaces? How can we democratize our movements and parties so that they foster self-organization and direct democracy?

Democracy, territorial governance and the rights of nature
The left’s relationship to the state: capture, bypass, transform?
The parliamentary left: The parliamentary left: the Mamdani’s experience, La France insoumise, Avi Lewis’s project; critiques of party institutionalization; critiques of party institutionalization

Toward a pluralist society: rethinking laïcité and human rights after the CAQ years
Foundation funding: promises and pitfalls
The commons and the right to the city as levers of popular power rooted in territories
Radical, participatory and socialist democracy: open debates
Institutional reforms and their blind spots: electoral systems, sortition, binding mandates, recall of elected officials
Workplace self-management and internal democracy in movements and parties
Austerity, the restructuring of capital, and the capacity for popular initiative
Renewing antiracism in the face of the identitarian right

Fighting fascism and organizing antifascism

How can we organize from the grassroots against the fascization of the places where we live and work? What lessons can be drawn from authoritarian regimes experienced from within, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nicaragua, Colombia, Chile and so many others, and from the growing criminalization of resistance?

Ecocide and the criminalization of land defenders
Antifascist strategies rooted in everyday life: what intersectional class struggles against the exploiters’ divide and rule?
Migrant struggles for rights and the challenge they pose to neoliberal and authoritarian regimes
The criminalization of resistance (England, France, countries of the Global South) and collective responses
Militarization, artificial intelligence and the return of conscription in several countries
Defunding the police and opposing repression
The discourse, funding and social base of the radical right
State violence, surveillance and identity politics
Building popular majorities against war and authoritarianism
Geopolitical rivalries in a multipolar world: where are the weak links of empire?
Unions, schools and workplaces as terrains of antifascism

Supporting the right to self-determination against imperialism and colonialism

How can we rebuild an anti-war and anticolonial movement that supports unfinished struggles for decolonization? How can Québec’s national liberation struggle, and support for Indigenous struggles and for Francophones outside Québec, be articulated with the Canadian working and popular classes?

Solidarity with Palestine: taking stock of the encampments, the BDS movement, opposition to the ongoing genocide and ecocide, anti-apartheid mobilization
Debates on forms of resistance and international solidarity
Indigenous struggles for sovereignty; resistance to the 2025 forestry regime reform and what comes next
International solidarity and resistance to the predatory practices of Canadian capitalism, mining in particular
Beyond the politics of recognition: land back and Indigenous constitutionalisms
The militarization of borders, migration regimes and the global hierarchization of labour
Orientalism, Islamophobia and the contemporary manufacture of the enemy
Marginalized systems of thought and practice in the making of a postcolonial, postcapitalist world

Reconfiguring the lefts and co-constituting our struggles

If our oppressions are interdependent, so are our liberations. What remains of the great mobilizations led by the social and political left, and how can contemporary projects connect to them? How can we analyze the links between systems of oppression, marginalization and environmental destruction in order to build greater solidarity across our struggles? How can we create alliances and convergences and run campaigns together? How can we build a social bloc capable of defending the living?

Taking stock of the major cycles of mobilization: Idle No More, the alter-globalization movement, the World Social Forums, the World March of Women, #MeToo, solidarity with Gaza
The left’s electoral experiences: victories, dead ends, forms of organization
The cycle of international feminist strikes and the power it revealed
Feminism for the 99% as a horizon of convergence
Feminist, queer, decolonial, antiracist and anticapitalist alternatives to the present system
Relations among social movements: convergences, broad common fronts, links between Montréal and the regions and with the rest of Turtle Island (so-called North America), international solidarities
Struggles for the rights of trans and non-binary people: assessments and prospects for convergence
The entanglement of social relations (sex and gender, race, class, ableism, ageism…) in social movements
Penal abolitionism and the over-incarceration of racialized communities
Defending life as a principle of revolutionary transformation of everyday life
Artistic and literary creation; an exhibition stream; blending theory, practice and art
Which alternative media for our struggles and for popular education?
Protecting ourselves individually and collectively from digital surveillance

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