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.

RESISTANCES: counter-conduct, inter-disruptions, and compromising acts

Graduate conference – Centre for Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD and Communication Studies PhD

Concordia University | Montréal, Québec

DEADLINE: January 20, 2010 – submissions now closed

conference dates: April 15 and 16, 2010

Resistance is not new. Resistance has been done. Is there any hope for resistances of the future? What some would call the failure of resistance to make lasting change confronts the hope for engagement with cynicism. Yet resistance returns when dissent is not accounted for. As we know, resistance and repetition, know each other intimately either as revolution, or compulsion. Is this violent intimacy desirable? Indeed, desire and seduction are always already implicated in a discussion of resistance.

While power is dispersed, implicated within us both as disciplinary and dissenting agencies, we bear the scars of these fragmentary forces. How do these conflicts act within and through us?

Resistances, historical and to come, the repetition of resistant acts, the return of revolution, the failure or impossibility of oppositional tactics, the violence of two opposing forces and the underlying violence of consensus – these are some of the discussions we hope to elaborate over the course of this conference.

Finally, does talking about it work? Can we resolve, analyze, work through divisive impasses? Or, is there a limit that resists or even forbids resolution?

By initiating a call on the theme of resistances, we are exposing ourselves to failure:

it is a paradox to solicit resistance, a paradox that we, as catalysts, cannot resolve. But the unresolvable aspects of this paradox are the points of friction from which we hope this event to depart, to take issue…

Papers can engage with aspects of resistance such as:

• political, artistic, philosophical, physical, psychoanalytic, ethical
• resistant viral strains, antibodies
• historical or contemporary events of resistance, war, apartheid
• counter-histories, narrative of revolution, micro-political acts, counter-cartographies
• protest, change, stasis, resistance and the force of law
• failure, hope, love, intimacy
• power, public and private
• violence, solidarity, antagonism
• memory, trauma, repression

Responses may also take the form of non-conformist thinking, actions, and events…

Please submit an abstract of 300 words for a 20 minute presentation (an academic paper, artist`s presentation, intervention, workshop, manifesto, performance) along with a brief bio and list of technical requirements.

Send submissions to resistancesconference@gmail.com

DEADLINE: January 20, 2010.

Special call:

As a sub-stream of the Resistances conference, we also invite participants to consider delivering academic papers in non-academic settings. Set-up like flashmobs, these presentations will be given in public spaces for an incidental audience. If interested, please send your submission with a note of interest in being considered for this special call. Please include a suggestion for which public space you think your paper would be best presented in. For example, a paper about migration in an airport or bus station. If you are interested in participating in this special stream but cannot propose a space, we are more than willing to suggest one.