Barcelona, November 2025
Human Frailty and Global Solidarity
Barcelona, November 3-6, 2025
Watch the GGD Barcelona sessions on our YouTube channel.
Fragmentation and polarization in today’s world are reinforced by claims and counterclaims of victimhood. Hatred and resentment, exacerbated by social media echo chambers, swamp efforts to understand and identify with the other. Any fresh vision for global solidarity must address structural inequalities in our societies and how to alleviate them. But it will also require a fuller recognition of an often-overlooked basis of our common humanity: a widely shared sense of frailty, the human experience of suffering, weakness and humiliation.
The Promethean passions binding modern humanity—the desire for unbridled power and freedom, for unlimited self-fulfillment, acquisition of goods, and mastery of the natural world—have collided with political and environmental constraints, inflicting pain and a sense of powerlessness on multitudes across the world. Literature and the arts, with their innate virtues of ambiguity and irony and their openness to paradox and contradiction, can help us to understand our precariousness and extend imaginative sympathy across hardened boundaries.
GGD and the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) brought together writers and critics to address the relationship between human frailty and global solidarity, with a focus on voices from the Global South. A formal program of panels was flanked by informal dialogues—online and in person—with university students.
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Conversations
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Image Gallery
Image Gallery
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Pankaj Mishra, Ece Temelkuran, Marina Garcés, and Hisham Matar speak during "Building Solidarity in a Fragmented Culture."
Hisham Matar addresses the audience during "Building Solidarity in a Fragmented Culture," while Marina Garcés looks on.
Joseba Elola, Nesrine Malik, Verónica Gago, and Edurne Portela speak during "Calling Out Cruelty."
Ben Ehrenreich addresses the audience during "Paths of De-Americanization."
Gemma Saura, Nesrine Malik, Mohsin Hamid, and Ben Ehrenreich speak during "Paths of De-Americanization."
Ranjit Hoskote, Verónica Gago, and Vladimir Safatle together on a panel for "The Turn to the Global South."
Yásnaya Elena A. Gil speaks into a microphone while Rafael Vilasanjuan looks on.
Judit Carrera takes an audience question in "Europe after America?"
José Casanova speaking during "Europe after America?"
Miriam Diez Bosch, Kohei Saito, José Casanova, and Camil Ungureanu sit together in a panel on "A New Mode of Transcendence."
Paul Elie speaks on a panel with university students Carl Jambo, Emma Vonder Haar, and Aina García Mestre.