Barcelona, November 2025
Human Frailty and Global Solidarity
Barcelona, November 3-6, 2025
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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 will bring 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 will be flanked by informal dialogues—online and in person—with university students.