Political activism and collective action between strikes, pandemics and virtualities

Abstract

This article poses a series of articulations on our experiences as students of the Master’s in Cultural Studies at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, as well as the forms of activism and collective action that emerged during the 2019 national strike in Colombia, which eventually led to the organization of the forum “From the Wuhan soup to the Latin American Sancocho” in early months of 2020. We built narratives from our own lived experiences to inform how the togetherness built among us can be understood as a form of solidarity and mutual support with which we confronted the different challenges presented to us by the COVID-19 crisis. We argue that this togetherness is as a result of a process which occurred both outside and inside of the formal university setting; even though we used to read about the British and North American Cultural Studies, it was through taking the streets that we learned, and even wrote, our own.