How does a desirable future emerge in the midst of the crisis-ridden present through processes of communitisation and solidarity? The subproject "Ecological Solidarity - Local Articulations of Forward-looking Practices and Discourses in the Midst of the Climate Crisis" examines how contemporary ecological protest movements can anticipate and realise the utopia of a sustainable and solidary society through forward-looking practices.

Future-oriented practices are anchored in the interwoven economic, political and ecological dimensions of the crises of the present. In this context, the concept of the climate crisis depicts a future scenario in which capitalist global ecology and the endless conquest and exhaustion of the earth and its resources have created a global state of crisis that leaves nothing available for socio-ecological regeneration and reproduction (Moore 2021: 749). However, the concept of crisis can also mark the moment of transition to something else (Vradis & Dalakoglou 2011: 15). Under constantly worsening survival conditions in times of transformation (Tsilimpounidi 2016), exploring the "possibilities of survival on the ruins of capitalism" (Haraway 2016: 37) is a collective necessity - also in order not to escape responsibility for the effects of the climate crisis in other regions. The future scenario of the climate crisis forces us to practice the art of survival - "the art of surviving on a destroyed planet", as the post-humanist theorist Anna Tsing describes it (Tsing et al. 2017) - and at the same time raises the question of solidarity in surviving in the future, questions about the communitisation of disappearing resources and habitable land, questions about the mobility of the less privileged and the isolation of future societies.

In order to be able to address such questions, both as researchers and in society as a whole, this subproject uses and develops methods that transform the education of a collective, fictional, dreamy, utopian imagination into a transferable technique of qualitative research (Shukaitis and Graeber 2007: 32). To this end, we manage participatory ethnographic research in forest occupations and in European rural (border) regions, mapping both the alternative interpersonal relationships that emerge here and new human-environment relationships in order to expand the notions of communitisation and border-crossing solidarity. Future-oriented practices that do not require the contingent illumination of a demonstration or protest action and are anchored in everyday life are also brought to the fore. In dialogue with post-humanist theories (Haraway 2016, Latour 2020), relational ontologies of indigenous communities (Kohn 2013, de la Cadena/Blaser 2018), materialist perspectives on the ecological crisis (Saito 2023, Schaupp 2024, Brand/Wissen 2024) and with a focus on practices of care and caring in "a more-than-human world" (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017), we would like to explore refuges for future-oriented and solidary practices with all species that accompany us, a "multispecies solidarity" (Haraway 2016: 36), to investigate.

Transferred to a socio-political understanding of future-oriented practices of social actors in ecological social movements and "non-movements" (Bayat 2013), these can be summarised under the concept of an ecological class. By referring to the class-political dimension of ecological issues, the key authors Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz want to emphasise "political dynamics in the conceptualisation of social conflicts, the formation of experiences and collective horizons" (Latour & Schultz 2022: 13). Defined by the material conditions of existence in the climate crisis (ibid.: 19), the concept of an ecological class ties in with a post-humanist political ecology and manages to communitise in the sense of "making-kin" in ecological solidarity for collective survival. The political practices theorised in this way form the empirical basics of the subproject in the resistant territories of occupied forests and collectively managed lands.