The fifteenth anniversary of the paradigmatic 15-M movement invites a reassessment of its generational legacy. While the early 2010s challenged the neoliberal order inherited from the so-called Cultura de la Transición—a critique later expanded through the International Women’s Strikes from a plurality of feminist standpoints—the cyclical renewal of both the institutional and grassroots left now appears to have reached an impasse. The domestic and global far-right politicization of gender, sexuality, and race has turned citizenship and democracy into exclusionary political signifiers. The interconnected social movements that once revitalized progressive politics have become increasingly entrenched in a highly capitalized and surveilled social media monopoly. The COVID-19 pandemic, the genocide in Gaza, the worsening housing crisis, the increasing precarization of everyday life, and the criminalization of feminisms and migration have placed left-wing movements in Spain and beyond in an organic and existential crisis, prompting them to move beyond self-referentiality and internal divisions in search of broader alliances and new imaginaries of social transformation. 

Against this backdrop, the seminar examines cultural artifacts that neither fully subscribe to nor simply reject the discontents of the left. Instead, drawing inspiration from the archives produced by feminist, anti-racist, and queer actors, communities, and movements, these works articulate experimental discourses, practices, fictions, and counter-imaginaries that transform political stagnation into an opening for the political to come. What emerging signifiers is the contemporary left seeking to rearticulate political struggle through? How do discourse and political praxis relate to one another under current conditions of crisis? How might we rethink the relationship between law, politics, and the political in contemporary Spain? How are feminist and anti-racist demands articulated within broader projects of leftist political transformation?

The seminar invites papers that explore minor instances and genealogies of political action challenging dominant narratives of socio-political abandonment without succumbing to neoliberal optimism. We welcome contributions that examine how Spain’s contemporary cultural production reimagines political agency beyond impasse, how radical archives and practices reshape the horizons of collective life, and how discontent itself may become the condition for unexpected forms of world-making.