Hacking our Common Future is an invitation to engage collectively in the unfinished work of recomposing economies, institutions, and ways of life – across borders and differences – through experimentation, cooperation, and shared responsibility for the worlds we are already inhabiting and transforming.
Building on the 5th edition’s focus on Collapse and Regeneration, this conference shifts attention to what comes next: the active, collective, and experimental shaping of common futures under conditions of uncertainty, contradiction, and re-colonization, driven by predatory claims over natural resources, as well as securitarian discourses justifying territorial expansion and appropriation.
This conference provides a unique opportunity to exchange on transnational cooperation between community-led initiatives (CLIs) promoting grassroots resistance against such re-colonization, as well as on the structural and institutional conditions for the development of grassroots-led emancipatory alternatives.
We continue to face profound ecological disruption and an encroaching digital colonization of our everyday lives, which contribute to widening inequalities, political polarization, digital enclosure, armed conflicts, and the fragmentation of global cooperation frameworks. At the same time, new and old forms of CLIs are increasingly engaging in practices that do not merely repair damaged systems, but repurpose, recombine, and reimagine them. These initiatives operate across territories, cultures, and epistemologies, often outside or alongside formal institutions, generating new forms of social learning, governance, and economic organization.
From regeneration to hacking
The notion of hacking is used here not as rupture, but as a response to the limits of the sustainability and regenerative paradigms to promote truly effective responses under current conditions. It refers to situated collective practices that creatively appropriate existing infrastructures – economic, cultural, technological, and institutional – in order to redirect them toward common goods. Hacking implies experimentation, play, conflict, care, and coordination; it is a way of engaging with reality that neither fully rejects inherited structures nor passively reproduces them.
The move from regeneration to hacking can be read as part of a longer trajectory in which sustainability and regenerative paradigms are increasingly questioned for their capacity to respond to fragmentation, uncertainty, and growing institutional fatigue. Rather than reviving the promise of global planning for the common good, this call foregrounds collective reappropriation as a way of engaging with common futures under conditions of asymmetrical plurality.
As an analytical lens, the conference draws on emerging paradigms,, which depict and explain how CLIs can react to ‘paradoxical conditions’, sustain hope without denying complexity, and engage pragmatically with contradicting forces beyond their paradigmatic world-views instead of seeking final, perfect or universal solutions.
Albeit, the ultimate goal of redesigning a new architecture of societal organization to counter the challenges of our times remains at the core of a sustainable ecological and social transformation, the opportunities to drive it remain subject to context, resources and capabilities. And while our imaginaries feed on grand ideas, change in the real world starts with sustainable action within the given context along with the rules and belief-system it is grounded on. Hacking for change starts in a niche, yet, has the potential to evolve in the given ecosystem, as it becomes incorporated into the common practice and eventually engenders the advent of something new.
Community-led initiatives and transnational commoning
In a context of increasing isolationism and geopolitical fragmentation, CLIs are developing transnational forms of cooperation that bypass purely state-centered or market-driven logics. These include federated networks, platform-based cooperativism, solidarity-based digital infrastructures, and translocal alliances rooted in shared values rather than uniform identities.
Such initiatives often combine:
- cooperative and commons-based economic models and practices,
- critical engagement with digital platforms and infrastructure for data governance, including generative AI;
- relational and more-than-human perspectives on territory and livelihoods,
- cultural experimentation embedded in everyday life, including, but not limited to, artistic creation and intercultural exchange;
- renewed attention to lived experience, autonomy, and collective joy as political resources.
Rather than proposing a single pathway forward, these practices open multiple, unfinished trajectories toward common futures.
However, sustaining transnational cooperation across such plurality may require more than openness to difference, potentially involving the active construction of shared grammars that enable learning, translation and coordination without reducing diversity to uniformity.
We invite contributions addressing, among others, the following 9 thematic fields:
- Transnational cooperation and federated commons How CLIs build cross-border alliances, shared infrastructures, and cooperative ecosystems while respecting differences and local autonomy.
- Hacking digital infrastructures for the commons Critical and practical approaches to platforms, cooperative technologies, data governance, and digital tools for collective action and economic democracy.
- New political economies Emerging socio-economic practices that move beyond linear progress narratives, embracing cyclicity, contradiction, plurality, and experimentation.
- Culture, play, and everyday life as sites of transformation The role of cultural practices, aesthetic experimentation, and lived critique in reshaping values, social relations, and economic behavior.
- More-than-human commons and relational worldviews Initiatives that rethink human-nonhuman relations, land stewardship, and ecological responsibility through relational, animist, or embodied practices.
- Conflict, antagonism, and cooperation within CLIs How community-led initiatives navigate power asymmetries, internal tensions, and political disagreement without depoliticization or fragmentation.
- Knowledge, memory, and transmission Alternative pedagogies, archives, and social learning processes sustaining translocal cooperation and intergenerational continuity.
- Beyond corporate approaches to post-carbon transition The impact of CLIs on the agenda and behavior of multinational corporations, through grassroots resistance against extractivism and greenwashing, or other alternative pathways for post-carbon transition beyond the “green economy”.
- Emerging action-research methods and methodologies applied to the above sub-fields.
Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches
We welcome proposals from researchers, practitioners, activists, artists, and policymakers. Submissions may be based on:
- academic or action research,
- grassroots economic or cooperative initiatives,
- digital and platform-based experiments,
- artistic, cultural, or pedagogical practices,
- public policy experiences,
- or hybrid and experimental formats that challenge conventional academic boundaries.
We particularly encourage contributions that treat practice as a form of knowledge production, and theory as something emerging from collective, situated experience and knowledge. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary contributions are particularly encouraged when they engage with emerging paradigm theories that seek to move beyond the epistemic limits of modernist, extractivist, patriarchal and development-centric frameworks. Relevant frameworks may include, but not limited to, metamodernism, post-development theory and post-extractivist perspectives, degrowth/postgrowth, cosmo-localism, feminist/queer political economy and ecology, post/critical posthumanism, pluriversal and relational ontologies, decolonial/postcolonial thought and afro-futurism. Such approaches challenge linear narratives of progress, universalist solutions, technocratic governance and axes of identity politics, instead foregrounding situated knowledge, ethical ambiguity, oscillation between hope and critique, the co-existence of multiple rationalities and how new political subjectivities emerge from grassroots experimentation. We welcome contributions that mobilize these paradigms to analyze how CLIs negotiate paradox, uncertainty, care, conflict and power asymmetries while experimenting with alternative economic, cultural, and institutional arrangements across territories and scales.
Early Career Research and Methods Design Workshop
We strongly encourage the submission of proposals by Ph.D. students on the methodological and ethical dimensions of research within these nine fields of inquiry, with the purpose of organising a workshop on this topic for early career scholars, which will take place during the conference.
Early career researchers who wish to submit a proposal for the Research and Methods Design Workshop are invited to submit additionally to their abstracts, a brief summary on the research design and methods approach they employ for their research, which they would like to discuss, develop or share in the session. The summary on the research design and methods should not exceed 500 words. Only researchers presenting at the conference are eligible to participate in the workshop with a contribution.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
We welcome the submission of the following type of proposals:
- Paper abstracts (academic presentations or experience reports by practitioners or activists);
- Book presentation proposals on topics relevant to the five thematic fields of the conference.
- Session proposals containing the name of presenters, as well as the title and complete abstract of each presentation.
- Workshops or other practice-oriented participatory formats.
- Experience reports (practitioners and activists)
Note: Experience reports by practitioners or activists are a means for self-reflection, as well as to get feedback on their practices through dialogue and exchange with conference participants.The paper/presentation should point out the achievements of the organisation, as well as challenges and strategies developed to deal with shortcomings, constraints and lock-ins.
Each individual author (or first author in a co-authored submission) can submit a maximum of two proposals.
Proposals can be submitted in English, French, Portuguese or Spanish. However, the conference presentation must be made in English, as budgetary constraints do not allow us to offer interpretation services on site.
Abstracts will be published in a book of abstracts with ISBN. In your proposal, please indicate whether you would like to submit a full paper (manuscript) for publication in the conference proceedings. Full papers will be peer reviewed and published in Iscte-IUL’s online repository, where they will be indexed and publicly available.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
All proposals should be submitted through the following link: https://ssecommons.eventqualia.net/en/cloud/6ssec4847/account/login/
[Registration on the platform is mandatory; one co-author can submit, and co-authors will receive a notification to confirm their co-authorship].
Please follow the submission guidelines on the platform.
Grants and Bursaries requests: Due to lack of funding SSE Organization is not able to offer any grants, travel support or registration fee waivers.
Face-to-face event: This event is fully presential. It is not possible to present or attend online.
We will post regular updates on the event’s webpage (https://ssecommons.cei.iscte-iul.pt ), as well as on the social media accounts of CEI-IUL (Facebook and X). Any questions regarding organization of the conference or participation can be sent to ssecommons.cei@iscte-iul.pt.
Please feel free to circulate this Call for Contributions among your networks.
Steering Committee:
- Ana Margarida Esteves (CEI-IUL, ISCTE-IUL)
- Luciane Lucas dos Santos (CES U Coimbra)
- Tom Henfrey (Independent scholar, Portugal)
- Roman Hausmann (Institute for Ecological Economics – Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria)