(image credit Robert N. Wilkins)
An exploration of resistance can only be multiple: resistance is only and at once resistances. Any attempt to prioritize a single history or a single resistance is immediately disrupted by a multiplicity of dissenting voices and actions. In this regard, a conference is an ideal form to consider resistance, since it allows multiple approaches, each singular, but none privileged as dominant.
Located at the intersection of philosophy, cultural and political theory, this conference will consider resistances past, present and future. How can we think of resistance beyond opposition? How can compromises and contradictions be approached productively? How might an artist’s work exemplify a political act?
Panels will examine various aspects of resistance, from counter- and sub-cultural movements under state ideologies to strategies for the migration of theory into praxis. Questions will be demanded of the power of mobilization: what is the relationship between the artwork and the crowd? How does the history of the labour movement implicitly privilege a Western perspective? Notions of place will also draw our concern: how does the history or the architecture of a place inform its culture? How do counter- and post-colonial histories intersect in site-specific action? The personal conflicts of love and trauma will be discussed – how does the structure of trauma (a multiplicity of suppressed voices held under the totalizing dominion of consciousness) parallel the political formation of subaltern movements? We will look at hope, failure, love and anger. How do these expressions of affects exceed the efforts of an organizing discourse?
We are hopeful that this conference will allow our ideas to meet with respondents, that there will be dissent, that our ideas will be challenged. Yet, through these challenges, we hope that our thoughts and actions may be changed.
