CFP: Resistance

If resistance has a tradition, it is one which is not unilinear or uncontested. Dominant understandings of resistance are themselves resisted, typically when certain peoples are left outside of the history or the conceptualisation of resistance. This conference explores how the notion of resistance has been challenged, both by practicesof resistance and theorisations of resistance (a distinction which can only be maintained so far).

How has the advent of new technologies shifted understandings of resistance? Is resistance distinct from politics, and if so how do both operate when neoliberal rationality becomes hegemonic? Does violence interrupt resistance, or is it generative of resistance? What conceptions of the human are presumed in discourses of resistance? Can resistance be enacted, or contested, through memory?

The Critical Studies Research Group welcomes proposals for both research papers as well as non-conventional forms of presentation, for example performances, workshops, screenings and papers that resist traditional hierarchies of academic presentation. Videos and performances should be accompanied by a short presentation detailing the work’s critical engagement with the conference theme. Submissions might be from a range of disciplines, and transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary contributions are also encouraged.

Topics might concern, but are not limited to, the following:

• Fugitivity; the undercommons; ensemble

• Memory and/as resistance

• Resistance to (neo)liberalism

• Neocolonial/decolonial resistance

• Détournement today

• Conformity and social media networks

• Populism(s) and/as resistance

• Medicine and misconduct

• Violence and nonviolence

• Counter-histories of resistance

• Democracy and/as resistance

• Queering resistance

• Horrorism; necropolitics; precarity

• Resistance in/to asymmetric warfare

• Discriminations: ableism, sexism, ageism, racism

• Police and protest

• Intersectionality and/as resistance

• Youth and resistance

• Virality, online political movements and digital resistance

Proposals should be sent as an attachment and contain a title, an abstract (of no more than 300 words) and a brief biography. If relevant, proposals can include links to give an indication of your artistic practice. The deadline for proposals is the 1st February 2016.

Please send proposals to: [email protected].

For more information please contact Megan Archer: [email protected].