Everyday Internationalism: The German Democratic Republic and Postcolonial World

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State-led solidarity campaigns were a central feature of everyday life in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) throughout its existence. Evidence suggests that from the 1970s onward, over 90% of the East German population made monthly donations to the trade union-run solidarity committee. These donations were used to fund various manifestations of material solidarity with organisations, states and movements in Latin America, Africa and Asia, from student scholarships to the building of hospitals. This solidarity culture was a central subject of my PhD, which explored decolonisation as a social field between citizen and state in the GDR. The realities of this practice and its legacies in unified Germany remain underexplored in both academic literature and in the non-academic world. This fellowship will allow me to build upon research carried out for my PhD to disseminate my findings and engage in knowledge exchange with a variety of academic and non-academic partners, as well as exploring solidarity further via the carrying out of a pilot study, interviewing East German citizens and former workers in the solidarity nexus. With the expert mentorship of Dr Celia Donert, the Fellowship would allow me to further my track record of knowledge exchange, research dissemination and impact in three key ways:First, I will continue to disseminate my PhD research, publishing a monograph with Cornell University Press based on my doctoral thesis. This monograph will explore the social dimensions of solidarity as a political field between citizen and state in the GDR. In addition, I will organise two interdisciplinary events to interrogate the concept of transnational solidarity: a symposium, held at the University of Cambridge, and conference panel at the annual BASEES conference.Second, I will continue to build bridges between academia and the non-academic world, via two specific projects. I will make the results of my research accessible to social justice practitioners and activists, allowing them to use real life historical examples of the practice and theory of transnational solidarity to inform their current practice. I will do this via a workshop organised with a social justice organisation such as Journey to Justice, Global Justice Now, or trade unions with international links, such as Unite. I will also seek to promote a more nuanced and historically informed discussion regarding the topic of solidarity in German civil society via the publishing of a short text on solidarity with the State Centre for Political Education in Thuringia. This impact will be furthered by the production of learning resource that I will co-produce with the education and research department of the German state agency (BStU) responsible for the archive of the GDR secret police, which will be used by school and civil society groups to explore how authoritarianism and solidarity coexisted in the GDR. A webinar, hosted in April 2022, will serve to publicise and disseminate this learning resource.Third, the fellowship will enable me to continue to have impact on both academic and non-academic worlds by providing the funding and training necessary to begin exploratory further research. As a fellow, I will carry out a pilot study set of interviews with former GDR citizens, using training obtained in Social Network Analysis (SNA) to identify the key figures, structures, and relationships in GDR solidarity culture as well as narrative research to seek to reconstruct and explore memories of the everyday experience of state-run solidarity campaigns in the GDR. Using this pilot study as a basis for further study, I will applying for further postdoctoral funding, such as Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship or British Academy Early Career Fellowship.