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Characterised as the Solidarity Movement, the grassroots response that followed the Greek debt crisis has widely been understood as a challenge to neoliberal imperatives and an alternative to austerity. This thesis upsets such understandings by attending to the ironies of solidarity. Unpicking anthropology’s moral attachments to the Solidarity Movement, it questions the limits of scholarship that presupposes resistance, and where solidarity collapses with the idea of the ‘alternative’. Contrary to prevailing academic accounts, solidarity was not harmonious but rooted in fractured understandings of dependency, as volunteers struggled with their own habits of care and those of others. Driven by anxieties about corruption, the volunteers developed an administrative regime that limited how participants interacted with the space of solidarity. Through this proceduralisation, the volunteers displaced the indifference of the bureaucratic state with an indifferent rendering of solidarity. Egalitarianism had the further effect of compelling them to set themselves apart as the arbiters of equality. By cultivating themselves as disinterested agents, the volunteers concealed the ethical nature of their efforts and distinguished charity from solidarity. Pursuing solidarity thus led the volunteers to confront a number of ironies: that the space they created was not one of harmony but repeated conflicts; how a longing for the mundane was enfolded in radical aspirations; and that caring meant finding ways not care. In conclusion, the thesis considers the interplay of engagement and disengagement, offering a comparison between volunteers and anthropologists, by considering them as adjacent moral subjects. Interrogating the power rooted in the ability render ethical attachments, it reflects on how solidarity participates in a nostalgic desire for certainty in a moment, concurrent in anthropology, whereby potentials of self and engagement have become occupied by a politics of compassion.

Micromonas commoda(previouslyMicromonas pusilla, a unicellular photosynthetic picoeukaryote globally dominant in marine ecosystems, has previously been qualified as being strongly phototactic. To date, no detailed quantitative or qualitative description of this behaviour has been reported, nor have thorough studies of its motility been undertaken. This primary producer has only been qualitatively described as utilizing run-and-tumble motion, but such motility strategy is incompatible with its morphology comprising only one propelling flagellum. Moreover, it is still unclear as to howMicromonas sp.detects a light direction due to the lack of a dedicated eyespot; the organism is essentially blind. Here we first perform population-scale phototactic experiments to show that this organism actively responds to a wide range of light wavelengths and intensities. These population responses are well accounted for within a simple drift-diffusion framework. Based on single-cell tracking experiments, we then detail thoroughlyMicromonas sp.’s motility which resembles run-and-reverse styles of motion commonly observed in marine prokaryotes and that we namestop-run or reverse. The associated peculiar microscopic changes upon photo-stimulation are finally described and integrating those into jump-diffusion simulations appears to produce phototactic drifts that are quantitatively compatible with those obtained experimentally at the population level.