Give Thanks, Give Thanks!

Reflections on Rooted Resistance, Collective Power: A Climate, Migrant and Racial Justice Movement-Building Summit 2026

By Dana Olărescu

I am early to the Rooted Resistance, Collective Power Summit, intentionally so, giving myself time to explore Liverpool before we dive in. I decide to visit Wide-Angle View: Architecture as Social Space in the Manplan Series, 1969–70 at RIBA North, arriving just as the gallery opened its doors that morning. A staff member asks, jovially, whether they can see my tote bag, and I immediately open it so they can inspect its contents, much to their confusion. Within a few seconds, they realise that I have misunderstood them: they wanted to look at the striking image of the Palestinian flag printed on my tote, not check my belongings. This is followed by their conclusion: “You must come from London. Welcome to Liverpool, we don’t do this here!”

I am both elated by the encounter and surprised by my own unmitigated compliance with a perceived authority. This unprompted, quick lesson in normalising both policing and self-policing leads me to understand the Rooted Resistance Summit as part of the city’s wider political culture. Naturally, the discussion with the staff member also includes a whistle-stop tour of the city’s migration roots, often perceived as its strongest asset, while its involvement in enslavement and colonial commerce is less comfortably acknowledged.

The misunderstanding exposed how quickly a cultural space can become a site of surveillance. I had already internalised the possibility that the image of the Palestinian flag might prompt scrutiny. This is also how racialisation operates, through the production of certain bodies, symbols, and solidarities as more suspicious, more disruptive, or more in need of control than others.

The encounter brought to mind Michel Quarez’s 1968 poster urging us to remove the police from our own minds. Self-policing is so engulfing that it may take a while to wash its residue away.

This is a deliberately long route into writing about the Climate, Migrant and Racial Justice Movement-Building Summit. The encounter at RIBA North, and the history it brought into view, are part of the fabric of the city hosting this gathering. The summit was a two-day movement-building event bringing together 150 groups and organisations from across the UK. Its aim was to plan together, learn from one another, build solidarity, and take collaborative action across different movements.

One of the first opening contributions came from a Liverpudlian, who extended the warmest welcome to their city, a site of resistance and bravery. I felt this welcome settle around me. Sage was burning and its scent dispersed through the room, while a phrase was repeated throughout the summit: “Give thanks, give thanks!”

The opening context-setting was also moving. We were reminded of the long-overdue recognition of the relationship between race, migration, and climate; of the conditions that contributed to Jason Arday’s tragic death; and of epistemic humility – remaining open to forms of knowledge beyond those derived from dominant Western traditions.
We are here to learn from one another, with openness and curiosity. This is how you begin a movement-building gathering.

Over the two days, sessions covered topics including ‘Supporting Migrant Justice’, ‘Corporate Campaigning and Divestment’, ‘Building Capacity Through Care and Resilience’, and ‘Intersectional Policy and Domestic Climate Impacts’. Overall, the emphasis was on the far right’s growing influence, and how we might organise with one another.

There was an anxious energy in the room, as many of the communities supported by these groups are bearing the brunt of far right attacks. But there was also palpable excitement about meeting fellow organisers and making connections. I heard from Oasis in Cardiff, which provides those in asylum hotels with warm food, games, joy, and care. They do this while far-right groups camp outside the hotels to cause disruption, even though some of the people involved in these protests are themselves experiencing considerable deprivation and have also requested food and care. I heard that some of these protesters are friendly and chatty with Oasis staff, which prompted me to wonder what it might take to shift them away from these harmful views and actions.

This was not a meeting without complexity or nuance. While many accounts spoke about fighting the far right and demonstrating that certain areas and cities are not theirs, I was prompted to consider how we might stop demonising people who lean towards the far right, not its leaders or agitators, but those who have also been dispossessed and humiliated by local governments time and again. I am not suggesting that we turn the other proverbial cheek, but what if we paused to consider the bigger picture, including how much this violence is also engrossing us, little by little? Our proximity to struggle or to privilege shapes our actions, so how can we ensure the far right does not harm our communities, while also considering how to reach out to those who have been disenfranchised?

Yumna Kamel of Earth Refuge reminded us of the rolled-out red carpet that awaits members who defect to Reform: they are welcomed with financial gifts, invitations to record podcasts, and a sense of belonging. By contrast, when new people join the Left, they are often met with indifference or criticised for having taken so long to arrive. Yumna prompted us to consider how we might learn from the Right’s infectious energy and practise radically welcoming people into our spaces so that they remain involved for the long term.

These questions about welcome were being worked out in real time by organisations supporting people facing direct violence. I also heard from the Refugee Buddy Project in Hastings, which has been forced to close its Dove café amid escalating physical violence and intimidation in Portsmouth, Dover, and elsewhere in the UK. In September, far-right agitator Daniel Thomas slashed a dinghy in the English Channel while a rescue worker was on board. The Refugee Buddy Project’s Dove café runs a programme of community participation and support, and the organisation has trained various businesses to act as ‘safe spaces’ where people from migrant and refugee backgrounds can take shelter when they feel under threat. They simply display a sticker on their window showing they are a safe space. When I visited Hastings in the weeks following the summit, I was struck by how the stickers displayed in the windows of these high-street shops, alongside those proclaiming the same businesses an “Apartheid Free Zone,” gave the city a distinctive visual expression of solidarity.

However, even after a decade of building solidarity in Hastings and the surrounding areas, the café is no longer considered safe for those who use it in the current anti-immigrant climate. Spaces are closing down, while St George’s flags are going up. The closure feels like a defeat because it demonstrates how quickly sustained solidarity can be made vulnerable.

In No Straight Road Takes You There, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that everything comes in ebbs and flows. While this moment might seem particularly painful, taking a long-term view helps reveal changes that are difficult to notice from day to day. Over time, campaigns can gain momentum, beliefs can shift, and ideas once considered impossible or extreme can become widely accepted. The past fifty years have brought major changes in society, values, and attitudes. Although today may appear similar to yesterday, each decade can differ significantly from the one before it, so meaningful change should be measured over longer periods rather than in small increments. Solnit’s perspective helps me understand the café’s closure not as evidence that solidarity has failed, but as part of a more uneven cycle in which movements build, contract, and rebuild.

These questions about sustaining movements also shaped the session I contributed to. At the ‘Intersectional Comms’ session, I shared a selection of insights from Cultural Interventions in Climate and Displacement, a research paper commissioned by Counterpoints and the British Council, which we launched earlier this year. I authored the paper as a socially engaged artist using it as an opportunity to enter into conversation with artists and organisations about their working methods. The paper brings together eight case studies working at the intersection of climate and displacement, and offers recommendations for artists, creatives, educators, cultural organisations, funders, and policymakers. I briefly discussed the work of dhaqan collective, Vivien Sansour, and Emmanuela Yogolelo. Each engages with memory, continuity, and ancestral knowledge, as well as with settler violence, mineral extraction, and their profound effects on land and people.

Moving beyond communication as simply the way we speak about our work or share wider messaging, the presentation focused on how serious subjects are presented to audiences and the emotional responses they invite. What all three examples have in common is a commitment to transforming the spaces they inhabit so that audiences can feel more grounded and emotionally stable while engaging with difficult subjects.

Vivien Sansour, a Palestinian artist and conservationist, operates from a mobile kitchen, where she invites people to converse while cooking with Palestinian seeds. Since the start of the genocide, she has also hosted mourning ceremonies. Held in Colombia, Jamaica, the UK, and Turtle Island, these ceremonies have created space for grief. They conclude with planting activities dedicated to Palestinians murdered since the beginning of the genocide.

Bristol-based feminist artist duo Dhaqan Collective makes work about the disruption of ancestral practices connected to land through migration and displacement. In House of Weaving Songs, Dhaqan used a Somali dwelling, the aqal: a dome-shaped structure traditionally built by women and adorned with textiles that, when touched, play Somali songs about the community’s nomadic way of life.

Emmanuela Yogolelo creates musical performances that draw on the African practice of call and response, inviting audiences to contribute through body percussion, singing, or spontaneous words reflecting their own understanding of climate issues. In her words, this participatory approach allows audiences to consider perspectives different from their own and leave with a deeper awareness of how climate intersects with human rights, conflict, and identity, often sparking personal change.

Cultural work can create the emotional and relational conditions necessary for people to engage with difficult political realities, which better equips us to imagine and build a different future.

In the breakout session, prompted by a quote from Vivien Sansour, we collectively considered how to incorporate tenderness into our spaces, even in the midst of campaigning and escalation. Hearing about burnout, fatigue, and elevated cortisol levels among people doing the incessant work of climate, racial, and migrant justice, I began to think of tenderness as part of the infrastructure that allows us to remain in it. How might we build spaces from which we can replenish ourselves, rather than treating exhaustion as proof of our commitment?

Tenderness will not remove the courage, tenacity, and belligerence required to carry out this work. Nor should it. But it might help us withstand more without reproducing the violence of the conditions we are resisting. Listening to Anna Taylor from In-Situ describe the long road and her commitment to thinking beyond solutions in their work in Lancashire, I wondered how softness might become part of wider strategies for building power.

I thought back to the welcome I had received in Liverpool, and to the way a simple misunderstanding around a Palestinian flag had revealed how quickly we can internalise surveillance ourselves. If self-policing can become embedded in our bodies and spaces, perhaps welcome, care, and tenderness can be practised with equal intentionality. They can help us create movements beyond mobilisation in moments of crisis, allowing people to remain, contribute, rest, and return.

Give thanks, give thanks, to be entangled in this work; to the groups and communities making spaces of refuge under increasingly hostile conditions; to those who continue to organise when cafés close and flags go up; and to those imagining forms of solidarity that are capable of surviving beyond the urgency of the present.

ABOUT THE SUMMIT

The summit was organised by the Climate & Migrant Justice Organising Group (CMJ), a collective of climate, migrant and racial justice organisations, convened by the Climate Justice Coalition. They work together to build solidarity and collaboration between movements and strengthen the intersection between climate, migrant and racial justice. The Organising Group includes:

Climate Justice Coalition, Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, Racial Justice Network, Migrants Organise, Earth Refuge, Council of Ethnic Minority Voluntary Sector Organisations Scotland, Friends of the Earth Scotland, No Borders in Climate Justice, People & Planet, Climate Outreach, War on Want, Tipping Point UK, Uplift, Black Lives Matter UK and UK Youth Climate Coalition.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dana Olărescu is a socially engaged artist whose practice unfolds through sustained collaborations with diverse communities across the UK. Her long-term projects critically examine systemic inequities, working in close relationship with those most directly impacted by racist, patriarchal, and capitalist policies. Moving between installation, performance, and social design, her work foregrounds reciprocal learning and solidarity as a catalyst for social change.

REFERENCES

Quarez, Michel. “Chassez le flic de votre tête !” Illustration for Paris : [Action] magazine, 1969.
https://bibliotheques-specialisees.paris.fr/ark:/73873/pf0002255782

Gentleman, Amelia, Diane Taylor, Steven Morris, and Ben Quinn. “Far-right activist Daniel Thomas slashes dinghy with blade while rescue worker onboard.” The Guardian, 22 September 2026.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/22/far-right-activist-daniel-thomas-slashes-dinghy-with-blade-while-rescue-worker-onboard

Solnit, Rebecca. No Straight Road Takes You There. Granta Books, 2025.

Olărescu, Dana. Cultural Interventions in Climate and Displacement. Commissioned by Counterpoints Arts and the British Council, March 2026.
Online PDF: https://counterpoints.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Cultural-interventions-in-climate-and-displacement-23-Feb-2026\_Dana-Olarescu.pdf