Kiri

Sense of belonging and neighborhood solidarity: Insights from the LOCUS Project
Sjoukje Botman, Pieter Cools & Wietse Woensdregt
Introduction
Across Europe, increasing inequality, demographic changes, polarization, and socio-economic uncertainty are reshaping the conditions for living together. This forces social work educators to rethink how they equip students with the necessary professional competencies and research skills to tackle the social challenges of the 21st century.
Within the Erasmus+ project called LOCUS1 students investigate needs and experiences of residents in diverse and stigmatized urban neighborhoods. At the beginning of each project year, local social workers and lecturers decided on the research questions and methods. At the end of the assignment students discussed their findings with residents and professionals during community meetings. Doing so we introduce students to doing research in a real-life setting, while making their research relevant and accessible for local professionals and residents.
Over the years the project became increasingly focused on exploring feelings of belonging and expressions of solidarity as situated, place-based practices, aiming to grasp how residents negotiate inclusion and recognition through local infrastructures and everyday interactions. Drawing on our experiences during the LOCUS project, this paper connects ‘sense of belonging’ and ‘solidarity practices’ at the neighborhood level as crucial drivers for the practical realization of social rights from below in changing societies. In this sense, belonging can be understood as the lived expression of solidarity and social rights. When people feel that they matter, their voices are heard, and they can shape their surroundings, solidarity has taken root.
In this paper we will develop two main arguments. First, social work practice and research have a role in identifying, fostering feelings of belonging and practices of solidarity in the here and now of diverse urban neighborhoods. Secondly, involving social work students in collaborative community research (Van Eewijk, 2011) provides a unique opportunity to stimulate an inquisitive attitude and crucial professional competencies through contact with residents and work field partners.
Rethinking Solidarity in Diversity
In his influential book ‘Solidarity in Europe: The History of an Idea’ Stjernø (2004: 25) defines solidarity as “the sharing and redistribution of resources based on a sense of shared destiny and loyalty”. As such, practices of solidarity are intrinsically linked to experiences of shared identity. Modern history shows that:
“identity and solidarity have most often grown out of a common feeling of belonging to group, class or nation, through historical processes with common experiences, struggle and reciprocal acceptance, where obstacles such as different languages and religions have been overcome” (Stjernø, 2011: 172).
Feelings of belonging and practices of solidarity can take various forms, ranging from ad hoc interpersonal practices of people helping each other to highly technical and institutional practices of redistribution through financial contributions, replacement incomes, and welfare services. As the modern welfare states developed in Europe over the past century, the concept of solidarity became increasingly organized at the level of the nation state. This formalized solidarity is underpinned by systems of education that reproduce ideas of a shared ethnocultural identity and values that support a system in which those who work contribute to indirectly support those who cannot (or can no longer) maintain their social status through income from labor (Garland, 2016).
This has led to a formidable expansion in both formal and substantial social rights throughout the second half of the 20th century (Dean, 2024). However, over the past decades European welfare systems appear to be under substantial discursive and financial pressure (Hemerijck, 2013; Deeming, 2017), forcing us to rethink how solidarity is organized both formally and informally. Importantly, we will not argue that local and informal forms of solidarity should replace the welfare state. On the contrary, we are interested in how new forms of solidarity can complement and help to adapt formalized solidarity mechanisms in challenging times.
Drawing on an extensive literature review, Oosterlynck and colleagues (2016) identify four sources of solidarity: interdependence, shared norms and values, struggle and encounter. Table 1 provides for a definition and overview of key authors for each of these concepts.
Table 1: four sources of solidarity

Source: Oosterlynck et al., 2016: 766.
Oosterlynck and colleagues argue that while these four sources are still relevant to understand feelings of belonging and practices of solidarity today, the spatial and temporal framing of solidarity in modern welfare states are increasingly at odds with our increasingly diverse societies. They claim:
“that our understanding of solidarities grounded in the spatial boundedness of territorial states and the intergenerational continuity of supposedly culturally homogeneous nations should be complemented and enriched with an in depth knowledge of solidarities developing in an entirely different spatiotemporal register, namely that of the everyday places and practices in which people engage across ethnic and cultural boundaries” (Oosterlynck et al., 2016: 764).
In other words, as our nationally anchored and intergenerationally oriented systems of solidarity seem to be under pressure due to neoliberal restructuring and demographic changes such as an ageing and ento-cultural diversification, we should look for new forms of solidarity in the here and now of everyday life. Such practices of solidarity that emerge when residents support each other because they all care about the safety of their children, oppose new real estate developments, work in the same community garden or see neighbours struggling.
Solidarity in diversity is not based on sameness but on relation. It emerges when people engage in schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces—what Amin (2004) calls “politics of propinquity.” These are not abstract ideals but situated practices: sharing responsibilities, negotiating difference, and creating spaces of mutual recognition. Solidarity becomes tangible when people act together in and for places they feel they belong to and because they experience interdependence, shared values, joint struggle and/or because they got acquainted through daily encounters.
It is through these practices that the foundations of collective life are renewed. Public infrastructure, community social work and other organizations help to strengthen and channel the sense of neighborhood belonging into new solidarity practices (cf. Dirksmeier, 2025). Cities, famously described by Lofland (1971) as ‘a world of strangers’ provide a fitting context to look for new practices of solidarity in diversity and ways to foster them.
Sense of belonging and realizing Rights from below
This relational understanding of solidarity opens a crucial role for social work in fostering belonging. At the profession’s core is the dual task of supporting individuals while challenging structural injustice.2 Social workers must both “keep things together” and remain critically engaged with the policies and power dynamics shaping people’s lives. This echoes Jane Addams’s early insight that effective support requires engagement with systems of inequality and understanding of how people give meaning to their lives through daily practices (Knight, 2010).
Authors like Ife (2012) and Dean (2024) show how social work aims to translate abstract principles of dignity, participation and justice into lived realities. It is through relationships—between professionals, citizens, and institutions—and the negotiation of which social needs warrant shared responsibility that rights become real. Solidarity here functions as the ethical and emotional bridge between personal care and collective justice. It transforms compassion into co-responsibility and connects the private and political dimensions of human and social rights. In this view, promoting belonging through participatory, community‑based practice is an essential goal of social work.
With our reference to Jane Addams, it becomes clear that the LOCUS project situates itself in the rich community oriented social work tradition. This tradition has always tried to link feelings of belonging to solidarity and the realization of rights, both via concrete practices and advocating for supralocal reform.

Community oriented social work manifests itself differently across Europe and in some countries, like Estonia, it hardly exists as an institutionalized social work practice. Nonetheless, the LOCUS project strengthened our conviction of its relevance for education and practice. We learned that in cities like Tallinn, other actors are doing de facto community social work through projects like community repair shops and urban gardens. Their daily efforts give “flesh” to solidarity, embodying it in relationships, dialogue and collective problem-solving
The historical examples of Jane Addams and the Settlement movement inspired the LOCUS project in at least two ways. Firstly, they point towards the importance of creating a kind of epistemic community of academic and civic partners who want to work and learn together to pursue their shared goal of a more just and inclusive city. Secondly, they encourage us to adopt a broad methodological approach, inspired by ethnography, and to combine an investigative attitude with the ambition to co-create social interventions that improve people’s lives and opportunities (cf. Shaw, 2011).
Learning from LOCUS what students need to learn
From its inception, LOCUS aimed to prepare future social workers for the urban challenges of the 21st century by sending them to the streets to observe the use of public space and ask questions to residents. After their fieldwork students must feed the findings back to the communities and share their experiences with international peers. As such, they learn social science by doing it and develop important conversation and outreach skills. Throughout the project lecturers collaborate with local professionals to determine suitable research areas, research questions and methods and organize local community meetings.
At the start, the empirical focus was on resident needs and lived experiences. When discussing the research results with our work field partners (mainly community oriented social workers), it became clear that they were particularly interested in how residents experience their neighborhood identity, which meeting places and public infrastructure they use, if they feel connected to other groups and whether they have access to informal support systems.
In terms of research methods and outputs, the input from our work field partners pushed us towards more participatory and practice-oriented approaches. They advocated for active involvement of residents and making research outputs relevant to them. In their view, research should create opportunities for residents to define themselves and engage in concrete actions in which their collective identities take shape.
Because of this learning process, we decided that a new Erasmus+ project will focus more on feelings and practices of belonging in these neighborhoods. In terms of methods and community engagement we will ensure an active role for resident volunteers in the student research. The research outputs and community meetings will focus more on social experiments related to neighborhood identity, sense of belonging and small-scale solidarity.Through these practices, belonging transforms from an individual feeling into a collective right— the right to belong in place. It reframes citizenship as participation rather than legal status, emphasizing that everyone should have the means to contribute to the social and spatial life of their community (cf. Biesta, 2011).
Social workers operate at the frontier of these processes. They often work with those who inhabit the margins of belonging such as migrants, youth, and people experiencing poverty. Their task is not only to provide services but to rebuild social fabrics: to create infrastructures of care and encounter where mutual recognition becomes possible and citizens can actively engage to foster belonging through solidarity.
In our view learning and reflexivity are central capacities for this kind of community based social work. In uncertain times, social workers must “learn to learn”, cultivating curiosity, emotional intelligence, and the ability to act amid uncertainty and ambiguity. It allows professionals to act critically and collaboratively within the dynamic field of social relations and policy. In the LOCUS context, this translates into three key dimensions:
1. Relational practice: Building trust and recognition across differences;
2. Reflective practice: Embracing uncertainty and learning from it;
3. Political practice: Linking local experiences to systemic advocacy.
Ultimately, solidarity, as Bauman (2013) suggested, will always “search for flesh.” Social work supports this process through daily acts of commitment and creativity. In our view, this starts from a curious and inquisitive attitude and the ability to gain authentic information about what people need and want through observations, dialogue, listening and co-organizing activities. Each encounter, however modest, can become an experiment in democratic coexistence. After three years of doing LOCUS, we are convinced that this is the real potential of sending students on the streets of urban neighborhoods to engage in community research together with residents and professional community workers.
4. Conclusion: Belonging as Hope in Practice
Belonging […]is thus at the heart of solidarity and social cohesion in society. Place attachment touches on people’s identity and the place they assign to themselves in society (Dirksmeier, 2025:12)

This article argued that solidarity, social work, social rights, and belonging are not separate concepts but mutually constitutive dimensions of a shared project: the effort to live together with dignity in diverse societies. Drawing on Oosterlynck et al.’s (2016) notion of solidarity in diversity and the LOCUS project’s focus on place-based belonging, it re-imagined social work as a profession of solidarity that translates human and social rights into everyday relationships.
As our European welfare regimes and its underlying solidarity mechanism are under increasing demographic, financial and discursive pressure, the rich tradition of community social work offers an avenue of hope to find new practices of solidarity in the here and now of diverse and economically challenged urban neighborhoods.
Solidarity, in this light, is an ongoing practice of belonging—a way of learning, connecting and acting that re-creates the social fabric each day. Through their relational and rights-based work, social workers embody this practice. They hold things together not by denying difference but by making space for it, turning diversity and what people share into resources for collective resilience.
After years of transdisciplinary collaboration and international exchange, the LOCUS project offers both a framework and a living example of this process.3 By focusing on the places and practices where belonging is negotiated, it reveals that solidarity is not disappearing. It is changing shape. It is being rebuilt, patiently, in the hands of those who still believe that connection and belonging are possible. We encourage you to engage your students in this ongoing search for belonging and solidarity.

Prof. Timo Harrikari
27 January, 2026

Planetary Solidarity and Social Work in the Age of the Third Modernity: Contemporary Diagnostic Perspectives

Solidarity is the moral and emotional force that holds societies and communities together. It constitutes the ethical and affective bond that connects individuals to one another, making possible coexistence, mutual responsibility, and care. Solidarity implies a commitment to the common good and a willingness to take responsibility for the wellbeing of others, even when such responsibility yields no immediate personal benefit. At its core lies the recognition that the fate of each human being is inseparably linked to that of others. Yet the forms and moral foundations of solidarity change and vary across historical ruptures, societal contexts, and temporal horizons. The developmental trajectories of societies, their economic structures, and cultural logics continuously shape how people experience belonging and to what extent they acknowledge their responsibility towards others. Solidarity can therefore be understood as a social phenomenon that reflects the moral order of each epoch as well as the vulnerabilities inherent in its solidarity base.

Social work forms part of the institutional architecture of solidarity. It is the sphere in which the moral responsibility of communities finds its concrete expression. The international ethical principles of social work explicitly require that professional practice be grounded in the respect for human dignity, the pursuit of social justice, and the promotion of collective responsibility (IFSW 2018). Social work is not merely case-based individual assistance but part of the broader societal capacity to maintain the structures and practices through which moral coherence and social sustainability are upheld.

In this essay, I will examine the transformation of social solidarity through the lens of classical theories of modernisation and situate social work within these changing configurations of solidarity. The approach is contemporary diagnostic: it seeks to interpret the present moment through the thought of Émile Durkheim, Ulrich Beck and Hartmut Rosa, and to ask what function social work may assume in the epoch of the third modernity, which is an era characterised by planetary interdependence and intensified immediacy. The key question concerns the moral and institutional means by which social work can sustain solidarity in a world where the need for it is increasingly planetary, while its normative legitimacy and structural supports are simultaneously being eroded.

The historical evolution of solidarity can be traced through three sociological traditions. The first is Émile Durkheim’s classical distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity, where the basis of social cohesion shifts from similarity to interdependence. Ulrich Beck conceptualised the second modernity through the theory of the risk society, in which solidarity arises from shared vulnerability and collective fear. To understand solidarity in the digitalised and compressed present of the third modernity, this article turns to Jürgen Habermas’s notion of distorted communicative rationality, Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance, and Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition. Through these modern classics of social theory, the paper outlines the idea of solidarity within a planetary socio-ecological fabric and explores the possibility of re-attuning the moral foundations of solidarity in a global, digital, and ecologically fragile world.


Émile Durkheim: Mechanical Solidarity in Pre-modern Societies

Questions of social cohesion and solidarity have been central to the classical canon of sociology. In The Division of Labour in Society (1893), Émile Durkheim examined the forces that hold pre-modern and modern societies together and the dynamics through which they operate. Durkheim referred to as mechanical the form of solidarity that prevailed in pre-modern communities. According to him, mechanical solidarity rested upon the homogeneity of the members of a community, their shared beliefs, and a common moral code. The collective consciousness extended deeply into all spheres of communal life. What made this form of solidarity ‘mechanical’ was the fact that the moral code was taken as natural, given, and self-evident, without a collective capacity to reflect upon its foundations or the practices through which it was applied.

Repression and criminal punishment played a central role in producing and maintaining mechanical solidarity in pre-modern societies. Crime did not primarily offend an individual but violated the moral sensibilities of the community. Punishment, Durkheim argued, was a ritual act through which the community reaffirmed its unity and restored its moral equilibrium. Communal life was sustained above all by the preservation of sameness among individuals and by the reinforcement of a moral order in which deviation was eradicated and conformity upheld. The public character of punishment served as an instrument of collective identity and cohesion, rendering visible what was considered acceptable behaviour and what lay beyond its boundaries.


Durkheim and the Organic Solidarity of Modernising Societies

According to Durkheim, the foundations of solidarity in Western societies began to transform as a consequence of industrialisation and urbanisation. The functioning of societies became increasingly complex, and the division of labour within them grew more differentiated, thereby undermining the basis of mechanical solidarity. Social cohesion could no longer rely on the uniformity of individuals, for in modern society wage labour took place outside the household, production became differentiated, and occupational specialisation developed. Durkheim (1893) referred to as organic the form of solidarity that emerged from this differentiation of labour and the resulting interdependence among various occupational groups and their respective competences. The moral bond was no longer rooted primarily in shared beliefs or a common moral code but in a consciousness of mutual dependence and reciprocity grounded in trust. Thus, organic solidarity represented a new moral structure: society remained cohesive because its parts required and complemented one another. Law, contractual relations, and modern institutions increasingly replaced ritualised punishment as the means of maintaining social cohesion.

Following Durkheim’s thesis, it may be argued that the more differentiated the division of labour became on the threshold of modernisation, the greater the need for common norms that enabled the coexistence of diverse individuals. Here lies the essential tension of modern solidarity: as individual freedom expands, so too does mutual dependence. Organic solidarity is not a natural state of human communities but an inherently fragile and continually negotiated agreement. Its maintenance has required a moral infrastructure composed of institutions that mediate collective responsibility and preserve the moral fabric of society. Talcott Parsons’s (1951) well-known AGIL model, which posits that every society and community must fulfil four integrative functions – adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency – encapsulates the basic structure through which modern societies sustain social cohesion.

Durkheim’s distinction between two forms of solidarity is, of course, categorical and a type of ideal type. Yet if taken seriously, it may be argued that the moral infrastructure established upon organic solidarity provided the very ground upon which professional social work developed. Industrialisation and urbanisation displaced people from their local communities and uprooted traditional forms of belonging. Societies required new mechanisms to sustain collective responsibility and to reinforce the social bond as the shared moral code of mechanical solidarity receded. The task of social work became to strengthen the moral integrity of society and to assume responsibility for those unable to participate in the division of labour that organic solidarity presupposed. In modern societies, philanthropy was thus incorporated into the social order and institutional framework as a means of fostering social stability.


Ulrich Beck: The Erosion of Trust and Solidarity Based on Shared Anxiety in the Second Modernity

In the Durkheimian sense, social work in welfare states functioned as a reflexive organ of the community. It sustained the moral order of society and mitigated the vulnerability of those left at the margins of the social-ecological fabric shaped by the division of labour. This moral infrastructure provided the foundation for modern collective responsibility, in which solidarity was tied to work, shared norms, and mutual trust. It was essentially affirmative in nature, grounded in faith in progress, reason, and the continuous expansion of prosperity and welfare. The very success of this model, however, laid the groundwork for the next transformation, in which the achievements of modernisation began to turn against their own foundations. Modern societies started to produce silent and unintended side effects that they could no longer control. Mutual trust and moral cohesion were gradually undermined by an awareness of surrounding risks, by growing insecurity in everyday life and employment, and by an expanding sense of human and planetary fragility.

During what Beck termed the ‘second modernity’, whose latent origins Anthony Giddens located in the 1950s, the basis of solidarity shifted from trust to the terrain of uncertainty and fear. While welfare states had long governed risks, such as unemployment or incapacity, through collective mechanisms of risk sharing (Ewald 1986), including unemployment funds and health insurance, these instruments proved inadequate to address the emergent risks of the late twentieth century. In his theory of the risk society, Ulrich Beck (1992) argued that the very products of modern industrial society, such as technological innovation, nuclear energy, economic globalisation, and environmental degradation, generated collective and transnational risks that could not be contained within the limits of the nation state. At the same time, the individualisation tendencies of the second modernity gave rise to what Giddens (1991) described as ‘life politics’, in which the grand narratives of religion or ideology no longer provided a framework for personal decisions or biographical meaning. As a result, questions of anomie, ontological insecurity, mental distress, and the compensatory routines of everyday life became central to late modern experience.

The logic of the risk society is therefore twofold. On one hand, individualisation and life-political projects have rendered risks personal and their management a matter of private choice. On the other, global phenomena such as climate change have expanded the scope of risk into what Beck termed a ‘cosmopolitan community’ (2005), founded upon shared vulnerability that transcends social class, national borders, and generations. If global and transnational risks are shared, then responsibility must also be collective. Yet this form of solidarity based on risk governance entails a profound paradox. Risks engender uncertainty, anxiety, and fear that can unite people, but they also breed mistrust, defensiveness, and competition for safety. Anxiety and fear does not necessarily bind communities together; it may equally encourage withdrawal, erect boundaries, and intensify divisions between groups, thus nurturing prejudice, stereotyping, and hostility. The modern world has, in historical perspective, enjoyed an exceptionally secure social fabric over recent decades, which is something easily forgotten amid contemporary discourses of threat and securitisation.

The assessment and governance of risk have likewise become central tasks for social work in the risk society (Webb 2007). Social work is charged with managing and mitigating the risks that intrude upon the lives of its clients while also supporting their life-political projects. In this respect, its practice often continues the traditional casework orientation, albeit framed by the lexicon of risk. Social work also fills the gaps left by collective risk management systems such as welfare and social security institutions, particularly in cases of labour market exclusion or insufficient income. Although the ‘person-in-environment’ approach has been a defining feature of social work since Mary Richmond (1917), the issues raised by the risk society and the various forms of ecological disorganisation such as heat, drought, and flooding, observable not only near the equator but also in developed Western societies, have strengthened post-anthropocentric perspectives and fostered eco-social orientations within contemporary social work.


The Third Modernity? Compressed Present, Fragmentation, and Distorted Communicative Rationality

The core texts that defined the second modernity were published in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Over the past three decades, however, the socio-ecological fabric of Western societies has changed profoundly. Technological development has always guided the trajectory of human civilisation from the use of tools to the invention of the steam engine and the telegraph. The digital revolution, encompassing both its infrastructure and applications, has been described as the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ (Rifkin 2008). The networks enabled by this transformation have created an immediate and planetary structure of interaction and possibility. At the same time, digital technologies have facilitated the transfer of cultural artefacts and financial capital within a virtual dimension at a speed that would have been inconceivable to those living in the early twentieth century.

The diffusion of digital technology and the tendencies of the so-called ubiquitous society (Greenfield 2010) have transformed the socio-ecological fabric of contemporary life. If the modern world was organised within institutional ‘boxes’ and the second modernity softened their boundaries (Bauman 2000), the metaphor of the third modernity is a dense, network-like configuration (Castells 2010) that is only partially ordered. The traditional spatial and temporal parameters of human activity are radically altered: the world compresses, interdependence increases, temporal rhythms accelerate, and distances vanish through digitalisation and networked communication in a historically unprecedented way. The sociological distinctions between micro and macro levels, so influential in the 1960s, now appear irrevocably outdated when one considers that we can engage in face-to-face dialogue with a person on the opposite side of the globe through a handheld device. Although access to mobile and internet connections still varies globally, by the mid-2020s nearly the entirety of human civilisation has become integrated into this planetary network.

As this new dynamic takes hold, the dynamics of solidarity change. With the transformation of spatial parameters, the growth of interdependence, and the ‘death of distance’ (Cairncross 1997), populations and cultures across continents have come into closer contact. The digital infrastructure provides a planetary platform for interaction and the potential for cosmopolitan forms of solidarity to develop within the everyday arenas of a virtual civil society. Yet critical voices have warned that such developments may lead to ‘clashes of civilisations’ or even to civilisational decline (Huntington 1996). The maintenance of this global infrastructure requires committed actors, economic resources, and natural energy sources, particularly electricity. Moreover, its alleged democratic openness is deceptive: transnational corporate actors such as Google and Microsoft, through the algorithms they design, subtly shape users’ consciousness, behaviour, and decision-making. Moreover, the planetary digital infrastructure is fragile and vulnerable. Global powers increasingly exploit this digital vulnerability through hybrid influence and regulatory control as an instrument of geopolitical expansion. Although such strategic manipulation is not new, the conjunction of digital interdependence and hybrid influence has elevated it to an entirely new level (Hardt and Negri 2000).

Digital networks, intensified spatial experience, and growing interdependence have undoubtedly brought people and cultures into unprecedented proximity. The communicative architecture of the ubiquitous society ensures that local events and cultural fragments circulate globally within seconds, entering everyday consciousness as so-called ‘viral’ phenomena. Yet communication surrounding such viral events rarely reflects the ideal of communicative rationality (Habermas 1987). Instead of reasoned deliberation and the pursuit of mutual understanding, the communicative ideal appears in a distorted form, manifesting as individual performances driven by visibility, clicks, and followers, rather than by dialogue or reflection. In this economy of affect, moral pathos and emotional expression are rewarded with visibility. The resulting form of solidarity can be described as performative or ‘click-based’ solidarity, in which moral gestures and emotional intensity substitute for sustained commitment, while the structural foundations of solidarity are absent. Empathy, sympathy, aggression, anger, and outrage follow one another in algorithmically conditioned rhythms. Such affective cycles erode the foundations of trust-based solidarity, transforming shared vulnerability into competition for victimhood and turning fear into a political currency. Instead of fostering understanding or resonance, digital communicative spaces generate a fragmented and affectively charged marketplace where compassion is selective and hostility often goes viral.

This logic extends beyond social media to everyday politics and the practices of the mainstream press. The pursuit of visibility through emotionally charged headlines has become a defining feature of the attention economy of digital capitalism. The boundary between tabloid sensationalism and serious journalism has blurred, as intertextual references circulate in fractions of a second, news spreads virally across networks, and the verification of sources becomes increasingly complex. A further political dimension traverses this planetary media landscape. Platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and even private messaging between political leaders have become central arenas of political communication. Particularly among the populist far right, strategies of disruption, emotional agitation, and deliberate confusion have replaced conventional political discourse. Their tactics rely on polarisation, the construction of enemies, and the exploitation of fear as a unifying emotion. This form of exclusive solidarity reinforces a sense of superiority through imagined threats, maintains internal cohesion through exclusion, and counts not on universal responsibility but on the logic of antagonism. The past decade’s debates on the ‘post-truth’ condition have revealed how the manipulation of emotion, information, and perception has reached an intensity unimaginable during the Cold War. In the age of digital technology and artificial intelligence, the capacity to distort truth and fragment solidarity has ascended to an entirely new plane.


The Crisis of Resonance, the Possibility of Planetary Solidarity, and the Role of Social Work

Critical theory has long woven its arguments around a civilisation-critical narrative and a dystopian vision of society. This lineage encompasses Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of bureaucracy, Ulrich Beck’s risk society, and Jürgen Habermas’s analysis of distorted communicative rationality. Communicative action – the capacity for public dialogue and the pursuit of mutual understanding through rational deliberation – has been central to the moral core of democratic life in modernity. Yet this ideal has increasingly been challenged by political manipulation, emotionalised discourse, and reactive forms of communication in which the search for mutual understanding and the ‘better argument’ has been displaced by performative emotionality (Harrikari & Rauhala 2019).

Among the leading figures of critical theory, Hartmut Rosa’s (2013) writings on social acceleration extend Habermas’s critical reflections initiated in the 1980s. According to Rosa, technological development accelerates both the everyday and institutional rhythms of human life. In his work Resonanz (2016), Rosa describes a world in which accelerated time, technological control, and constant accessibility have diminished humanity’s capacity for connection, in other words resonance, with others and with the surrounding world. Resonance requires that the individual remain receptive to reality: to hear and be heard, to respond and receive a response. When this reciprocity is lost and relationships become instrumental, a ‘crisis of resonance’ emerges. The culture of control and efficiency characteristic of modernity have rendered the world ‘mute’: people communicate more than ever, yet they speak past one another and fail to meet. The click-driven sphere of social media epitomises this experience, demonstrating a condition in which the connection to others, to nature, and to one’s inner world becomes shallow, fragmented, and intermittent.

Habermas and Rosa differ from other critical theory authors in that they deliberately seek to avoid dystopian conclusions and to identify pathways toward normative renewal. The same imperative applies, even more strongly, to the field of social work, which cannot afford to retreat into the shadow of dystopia but must instead articulate ethically viable and practically grounded means of sustaining solidarity amid the crisis of resonance. Social work encounters clients living in vulnerable circumstances, whose lives are marked by uncertainty, isolation, and experiences of exclusion. At the same time, it operates within a public sphere where empathy and collective responsibility have lost much of their moral legitimacy. Contrary to the Thatcherite dictum that ‘there is no such thing as society’ ot the disappearance of ‘social’ (Rose 1996), social work must defend the very principle of solidarity. Thus, its professional ethics, rooted in the respect for human dignity, social justice, and care for the most vulnerable stand as a counterforce to the instrumental and affectively charged climate of the modern age of compressed planet.

The idea of planetary solidarity may be viewed as a moral counterpoint to the crisis of resonance. It does not signify a nostalgic return to the communal forms of the past but rather a moral attunement to a world that recognises the interdependence and transnational entanglement of human societies. A planetary orientation expands the sphere of solidarity beyond national, cultural, and even species boundaries. It entails an awareness that human well-being is inseparable from the well-being of other living species, of nature, and of the biosphere itself. This foundation of solidarity presupposes resonance: the capacity to be attuned, to connect, to hear and to be heard. Axel Honneth’s (1995) theory of recognition complements this perspective by emphasising that solidarity consists in the acknowledgement of the other’s value as part of a shared planetary fabric.

The planetary socio-ecological fabric and the solidarity among the actors responsible for sustaining it is not an abstract utopian ideal. In the compressed modern condition, local and global phenomena have become inextricably intertwined. The effects of climate crisis, migration, digital deprivation, and political polarisation are manifested daily in the practice of social work. Every ‘person in situation’ is simultaneously embedded in the global economy, in digital networks, and within the socio-ecological web of planetary interdependence. This reality assigns to social work a new moral function: to act as an interpreter in a world where individual actions may resonate globally and where every local decision forms part of the planet’s collective fate. In practical terms, this requires a reflexive professional identity that integrates ecologically sustainable methods, participatory communities, and a critically informed digital orientation. It also demands the courage to resist the forces that seek to restore exclusive identity communities and to base collective life on the politics of fear.


Conclusions: The Re-attunement of Solidarity?

In this brief essay, I have examined the transformation of social solidarity through the lens of classical modernisation theory and considered the position of social work in relation to these evolving forms of solidarity. My approach has been diagnostic in nature, asking what kind of moral and institutional function social work might assume in the era of the compressed and planetary age. The history of solidarity is, in this sense, the history of modernisation as well: a narrative of how societies, across shifting economic, technological, and cultural conditions, have articulated their moral bonds and constructed the foundations of social cohesion. Émile Durkheim described premodern solidarity as a set of mechanical practices that held communities together, and modern solidarity as organic, rooted in the division of labour, trust, and reciprocity. Ulrich Beck, in his writings on the risk society, characterised late-modern solidarity as founded upon shared fear and vulnerability. Although Beck’s risk sociology offered little comfort from dystopian conclusions, his later work pointed towards cosmopolitanism and a status of world citizenship as potential responses (Beck 2005).

Like all earlier attempts to define modernisation, the notion of a ‘third modernity’ remains hypothetical: modernity as such may never have existed in any coherent or unified form. Yet if we take the hypothesis seriously, we may ask what kind of solidarity it presupposes. It would be tempting to regard it merely as a continuation of late-modern risk culture, in which fear and collective anxiety draw people together. Indeed, the public sphere of the mid-2020s appears saturated with dystopian imagery, crises, and developments that challenge the ethical foundations of social work. The digital environment has transformed the moral rhythms underlying solidarity: online communication has become rapid, superficial, and fragmented. The Habermasian ideal of communicative rationality is frequently replaced by the logic of the attention economy by distorted forms of communication driven by personal visibility and emotional performativity, where resonance, the capacity for genuine connection, is often absent.
Yet the digital condition has created within our planet’s socio-ecological fabric a new architecture of possibility, enabling immediate and direct interaction between people physically distant from one another. The compression of the world and the intensification of interdependence bind human communities into a shared existential fate amid the global crises of environment, climate, displacement, and xenophobia. If solidarity is grounded in this shared existential condition, then conceiving it as a relation to the world in which resonance and recognition constitute its moral core may offer a path toward its re-attunement. This observation further illustrates how the forms of solidarity have shifted from shared moral codes to inward experiences and the qualitative texture of interaction.

International human rights conventions and professional ethical frameworks can provide the institutional and normative context within which social work fulfils its societal function in an age of eroded trust, climate transformation, and proliferating dystopias. Within its everyday rationalities, social work retains what much of public discourse has lost, that is, the capacity to listen with resonance, to respond with empathy, and to recognise the other as a moral subject. Through its practice, social work weaves the threads of solidarity that keep individuals connected to society and prevent their marginalisation. In a broader sense, local practices of social work are embedded within a planetary socio-ecological fabric (Harrikari 2023) in which the re-attunement of solidarity and the renewal of connection extend beyond human relations to encompass ecosystems, nature, and the living conditions of future generations. Thius, resonant solidarity is not merely a virtue of the present but a precondition for humanity’s future. Social work possesses all the moral resources to form its ethical core.

Solidarity in Social Work – a framework for Education, Research and Practice
Jorunn Vindegg and Håvard Aaslund, Oslo Metropolitan University

Introduction
Solidarity is regarded as a core value and principle in the social work profession, paying attention to social justice and inclusion. Practitioners are expected to stand with people in vulnerable life situations, recognizing and supporting their rights and dignity. Nevertheless, the concept may remain abstract, appearing more like a moral ideal or an honorific term to underscore the noble intention of goodness. In this paper, we tend to explore different origins of the concept in the social sciences and exemplify how solidarity may be promoted in a training program for educational professionals and social workers in the field across five European cities.
The Global definition of social work (IFSW and IASSW 2014) states in its core mandate:
In solidarity with those who are disadvantaged, the profession strives to alleviate poverty, liberate the vulnerable and oppressed, and promote social inclusion and social cohesion.
The Global Social Work Statement of Ethical Principles (IFSW 2018) highlights Building Solidarity in paragraph 3.5
Social workers actively work in communities and with their colleagues, within and outside of the profession, to build networks of solidarity to work toward transformational change and inclusive and responsible societies.
The definition and the statement link solidarity to social inclusion and community work to achieve a better society. Paragraph 3 is about promoting social justice, challenging discrimination and institutional Oppression (3.1), respect for diversity (3.2), access to equitable resources (3.3) and challenging unjust policies and practices (3.4). The statement acknowledges that social workers work in and with conflicts, and it is stated that social workers are not compelled to act when it would put themselves at risk.
Solidarity is thus not only a moral imperative but also a strategic approach to achieving social justice. It implies mutual support, collective responsibility, and shared commitment to human dignity and rights. Solidarity, as articulated in the Global Statement, is a dynamic and multifaceted principle that must be continuously negotiated in social work. By examining its application in research, education, and practice—and through concrete examples, we can better understand both its transformative potential and its limitations. Doing so, we invite further dialogue on how solidarity can be ethically and effectively enacted in a globalized and pluralistic world. We start by tracing the history of the concept and introducing some contemporary theories before presenting examples from social work practice in the LOCUS project.

The foundation of the concept of solidarity
The early legal and linguistic origins of the concept may be traced back to the Latin term
´in solidum´ (Roman law) and meant joint responsibility among co-debtors which was an early form of shared obligation (Bayertz, 1999). The French “solidarité” first appeared in the 1765 Diderot & d’Alembert Encyclopédie, signifying mutual responsibility and interests. During the French Revolution in the late 18th - early 19th century, “solidarité” became widely used to express unity and collective identity among revolutionaries and through the 19th century, it became linked to labour movements and political ideologies, gaining traction in both progressive and conservative currents (Metz, 1999).
In his study of solidarity in Europe, the Norwegian sociologist Steinar Stjernø (2004, p.16) distinguishes analytically four aspects of solidarity:
• The basis or foundation for solidarity
• The objective or function of solidarity
• The inclusion, who is included and who is excluded
• The collective orientation, the strength and allowance for individuality and individual freedom
Stjernø emphasises the recognition of sameness in terms of belonging to a larger group or community as crucial for solidarity as well as a feeling of interdependence. In social theory, solidarity entails two core items: the relationship between I and we, and a relationship between them and us. Moreover, consideration of the relationship between the individual's freedom and autonomy and the individual´s preparedness to subordinate this to the group is essential, alongside expectations of obligations and duties (Stjernø, 2004).
In modern social sciences, solidarity refers to social cohesion and mutual support within a community or society. It is rooted in shared norms, collective identity, and moral obligations. Notably, the classical sociologist Émile Durkheim (1893; 2018) distinguishes between mechanical solidarity, based on similarity and tradition, and organic solidarity, based on interdependence and specialisation, in modern societies. Solidarity thus serves as both a descriptive and normative principle for maintaining social order. The German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas (1996) proclaims, for example, that solidarity sustains deliberative democracy and communicative action, which is vital for social integration, whereas the American political and legal philosopher John Rawls (1999) connects solidarity to principles of justice and fairness, and underpins cooperation in a well-ordered society
Conversely, in the theory of science, solidarity manifests as epistemic cooperation among scientists. It emphasizes shared methodological standards, trust in collective inquiry, and mutual critique to ensure the reliability of knowledge production. This form of solidarity is procedural and epistemic rather than moral, focusing on sustaining the integrity of scientific practices.
Nevertheless, similarities across the social sciences and the theory of science include their reliance on collective norms, cooperation and trust to maintain stability, respectively social stability and epistemic reliability. Differences arise in their domains, goals, and foundations. Social solidarity is grounded in identity and values, aiming for social integration, whereas epistemic solidarity is grounded in methodological commitments, aiming for credible knowledge.

Further perspectives on solidarity
The American philosopher, critical theorist and feminist Nancy Fraser has also engaged in discussions on solidarity. She builds her perspectives on Habermas and Benhabib, relying particularly on social justice, feminist theory and critical theory. A key contribution can be found in her essay "Toward a Discourse Ethic of Solidarity" (Fraser, 1985), where she discusses how dominant groups have privileged access to what she calls the “socio-cultural means of interpretation and communication. She claims that these vocabularies generally constitute people as rational and self-interested, mainly reflecting the experiences and point of view of white Europeans. Consequently, this moral or political vocabulary would hardly give voice to people experiencing ongoing dependency, such as (sub)cultures of subordinated racial and ethnic groups. Women, people of colour, the poor and other groups in disadvantaged positions may be structurally hindered from participation and belonging with members of dominant groups in processes of communicative interaction. Fraser sees solidarity as a form of resistance against structural injustice. It is not merely emotional bonding, but a political and social struggle to change the institutional and cultural structures that produce inequality. Consequently, she argues for three dimensions of justice: Redistribution (economic justice), recognition (cultural justice) and representation (political justice) (Fraser, 2005). These perspectives are highly relevant to social work practice, where social workers with middle-class backgrounds work with disadvantaged individuals and groups, aiming to empower their position and dignity. Social work concerns supporting and caring in everyday life, on different levels, negotiating with individuals, families, neighbours and colleagues, which is a form of solidarity. Moreover, supporting groups of inhabitants by sharing information about injustice, mobilising actions and protests is solidarity in action. Learning about others’ experiences and perspectives—especially those of marginalized people—and challenging one´s own biases is a key practice of solidarity.
After the Second World War, the welfare state became essential to secure democracy against the threats from totalitarianism. Social work was an important part of this project and the aforementioned mandate to secure solidarity while respecting and enhancing personal autonomy (Lorenz, 2025).
On an institutional and political level, welfare systems such as universal healthcare, free education, and social support are expressions of solidarity. They are built on the idea that people have a responsibility toward one another. Trade unions are classic examples of solidarity in practice, where workers unite to secure rights and improve working conditions. This is particularly relevant in the Nordic countries, where trade unions and professional associations are merged in social work national organisations. Humanitarian aid, climate justice and support for democratic movements in other countries are crucial expressions of international solidarity across borders.
Currently, social work is under threat from both neoliberalism and populist nationalism. Wars, health insecurity, race and gender conflicts, climate crisis and crisis of identity as splitting tendencies that change the nature of social solidarity and fundamentally contrast with the approach characteristic of social work, namely basing solidarity on a collaborative commitment to practising shared goals, values of social justice and projects. Lorenz proposes a democracy-promoting approach to social work skills and methods to strengthen marginalized people's capacity to address conflicts and exclusion and to engage collaboratively in political change processes (Lorenz, 2025).
Academic social work is for and foremost, about promoting social justice. In teaching and research, solidarity is expressed by including marginalised and anti-oppressive perspectives in the curriculum in inclusive learning environments. However, solidarity in teaching and research can also encompass including marginalised people or service users in processes of knowledge production, teaching or dissemination (Aaslund, 2023; Beresford, 2012). Laging and Heidenreich (2017) have conceptualized how lecturers need to balance educational aims against empowerment aims. Simultaneously, students report solidarity as an outcome of working side-by-side with residents in marginalised communities (Aaslund & Woll, 2019).

Building solidarity across borders
A relevant example of solidarity in social work education is the LOCUS project (Labs of Contextualized Urban Social Work), a collaboration and innovation among students, urban residents, and community-building professionals across European countries. Social work students in five cities (Madrid, Oslo, Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Tallinn) participated in collecting data alongside practitioners and residents in target communities. A database of audiovisual material based on survey data of over 2000 residents was developed in collaboration with residents, social professionals and lecturers. Additionally, the students performed face-to-face interviews and participant observations.
The overall aim of the LOCUS-project was to prepare social work students to contribute to social inclusion and community building in 21st-century European cities, thereby fostering solidarity in practice. The core ambition was to enable students to contribute to a better understanding of the needs and lifeworld perspectives of residents in diverse, multicultural and fast-changing and/or marginalized urban neighbourhoods. Todo this, lecturers, researchers and fieldwork partners worked together to decide on interesting neighbourhoods’ questions, methods and ways of feeding back the research findings to residents and other stakeholders. To extend the experiences from the partnership and cooperation, specific training programs were developed for educational professionals, respectively, and employed social workers in the field. Lecturers are instructed how to establish a strong partnership with social work organisations, develop research skills with their students, and engage in ethnography in collaboration with citizens, social workers and students, whereas social workers are trained on how to facilitate social science research in their organisation in collaboration with Higher Educational Institutes, their students and citizens. Furthermore, a manual or step by step-plan, is offered to show how this educational program can be implemented in specific contexts. (LOCUS – HOME 2025)
A partnership between higher education institutions and fieldwork partners creates dialogue among students, residents, professionals, and educators. In this manner students experience how solidarity works on different levels. To illuminate the learning process, we draw on experiences from students' fieldwork in Oslo during a two-week period in 2025.
• Grass-roots solidarity: Students have diverse backgrounds and may lack knowledge of living conditions in the different boroughs of Oslo. Some areas are depicted in the media as dangerous and poor, with fewer resources than other parts of the city. Many of the students have not been to these areas. By meeting and communicating with local people and engaging in activities, students reported that they had changed their views of the area and the people living there, and that they found the people to be resourceful and caring about their neighborhood. Moreover, they had a stronger understanding and sympathy for their problems. One student even reported being told off by a resident for coming to their community and calling it a deprived area, as they were tired of the negative focus of the community. Students and fieldwork partners were also involved in the organisation of community meetings where residents and other local stakeholders provided feedback on students’ findings and discussed neighbourhood needs and opportunities for a better future of solidarity.

• Intra-student solidarity: Actually, at the same time, a large minority of our students originates from the south or eastern parts of Oslo. In some groups, this led to a different dynamic among the students, since these minority students had insider knowledge of the community and the local areas where they were doing fieldwork. Some even had useful language competence. Some majority students reflected on feelings in a role as a minority.

• Institutional solidarity: For the field partners, a central aim of the project was to become attractive workplaces for social work students and, at the same time, contribute to providing knowledge about social work in an urban context. This is a required competence for employment in the municipality. This shared responsibility for educating social work practitioners extends beyond the usual university–field placement relationship. It involves a shared commitment to emphasizing community work to strengthen solidarity.

• International solidarity: Moreover, the international cooperation includes building international solidarity between students, field partners and academics across borders. By meeting students, field partners and academics from other countries, solidarity is built across borders. Observing and talking with people living in different areas contributes to more fun and better learning conditions for students.

Towards an enhanced understanding of solidarity on social work.
In this paper we have argued that solidarity, too often treated as a self-evident virtue in social work, demands both conceptual specification and practical realization. Classical and contemporary theories illuminate its stakes. Durkheim anchors solidarity in interdependence, the social fact that individuals are constituted through relations. Habermas positions solidarity as a precondition for communicative action and deliberative democracy, a normative bond that sustains social integration through reason-giving and Rawls links solidarity to justice and fair cooperation within basic institutions. Fraser reframes solidarity as the achievement of participation, drawing attention to the structural and cultural barriers that exclude some from co-determining social life. Stjernø’s analyses of the four aspects of solidarity and Lorenz’s reflections on the ethos of European social work considering the challenges from neoliberalism and populist nationalism further foreground the tension between collective commitments and individual autonomy that practitioners must navigate.
The LOCUS project exemplifies how solidarity can be built as practice rather than proclaimed as rhetoric. By inviting residents to explore their neighborhoods together and co-shape local initiatives, LOCUS works across the very obstacles to participation Fraser identifies—status subordination, misrecognition, and resource constraints—thus widening who is present in the conversation and how decisions are made. Crucially, such projects reveal that solidarity is not merely a moral disposition, but a set of situated practices and learned attitudes cultivated in encounters with others.
For social work, the key implication is that solidarity must be given concrete content in education and fieldwork. Curricula should situate solidarity historically and philosophically, enabling students to recognize how interdependence, public reasoning, fairness and participatory justice articulate distinct but complementary dimensions of the concept. This theoretical grounding should be integrated with field experiences that create “communicative spaces” where students, inhabitants and community members deliberate as epistemic peers.
In future work, field practice could be designed to make inclusion work visible and accountable. Students can be tasked to do participate observations, mapping who is absent from participatory processes, identifying material, cultural, and procedural barriers. Moreover, students may be trained to perform scientific methods like surveys and qualitative interviews.
Lorenz’s emphasis on professional identity as a moral-practical craft is relevant to strengthening solidarity. Students learn to balance between supporting individual autonomy and nurturing collective capacities. Designing tasks that require collective decision-making and shared accountability help students rehearse this balance in practice. Partnerships with community projects like LOCUS can provide iterative sites for such learning, ensuring that solidarity is experienced as co-production rather than instruction. The international partnership is paramount to enhance solidarity and meet the European challenges.
Solidarity in social work is both a normative horizon and a repertoire of practices. It is enacted in everyday interactions, sustained by democratic communication, and tested at the boundaries of inclusion. If it is to matter beyond being an honorific, it must be taught, practiced, and evaluated. Social work education is crucial for this work. Giving students theory and structured opportunities to practice solidarity equips them to combine interdependence, justice, and participation into the fabric of collective life.