[Commlist] CFP - Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference 2026: “Radical”

*Call for Papers
6th Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference
“Radical”
Toronto, Canada
May 15-16, 2026*

“To be radical,” Karl Marx writes, “is to grasp things by the roots.” 
Across centuries, radical has meant at once origin and extremity, 
essence and rupture, reform and rebellion. From 18th- and 19th-century 
political movements to 20th-century avant-garde explosions, from 
totalitarian system-building projects to their no less violent anarchic 
refusals, radicality has always carried a double edge: the urge to 
create and the impulse to destroy, the mediation of order and the 
immediacy of rupture. By the late 20th century, “radical” even entered 
the vernacular of youth slang—“rad,” “awesome,” “cool”—a shift that 
highlights its constant reappropriation. More recently, it has appeared 
in the lexicon of the culture wars between an increasingly authoritarian 
right and the now fading “woke” left, designating groups like the 
supporters of Palestine or the red- and blackpilled manosphere, 
respectively, as undesirable. The 2026 Spiral Conference takes up this 
rich and ambivalent legacy, inviting reflections on what it means to be 
radical today: to break with the given, to accelerate intensification, 
to disrupt order, or to imagine new forms of social, political, and 
aesthetic life.

Radicality can be unsettling, even disturbing. André Breton’s notorious 
provocation that the simplest surrealist act would be to run into the 
street and fire blindly into the crowd remains a powerful, troubling 
metaphor for rebellion without measure, a rejection of reason and 
convention in search of a “superior reality.” This image, criticized 
even in its own time, nonetheless dramatizes the radical act as rupture, 
as refusal of mediation, as extremity pushed to the point of violence. 
What does such a metaphor mean now, in an age when emergencies such as 
the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are at once permanent and normalized, when 
radical gestures risk immediate co-optation, when the dream of explosive 
freedom meets the reality of systemic capture?

Cinema, perhaps more than any other medium, stages the paradox of the 
radical: at once bound to apparatus, industry, and repetition, yet 
capable of rupture through montage, distortions or clarifications of 
perception, and the shock of the image. From early avant-garde 
experiments to contemporary digital media, film has been a site where 
philosophy and aesthetics meet to question whether the moving image can 
truly enact a break with form and thought, or whether it inevitably 
reinscribes order even as it seeks to destroy it. What does it mean for 
cinema—or media more broadly—to be radical today: to disrupt 
spectatorship, to unmake narrative, to intervene in political systems of 
mediation, or to reveal the very conditions of representation themselves?

Spiral 2026 invites scholars, artists, and practitioners for 20 minute 
presentations that interrogate the powers and paradoxes of the radical 
in cinema and moving image media: destructive, constructive, terrifying, 
liberatory, immediate, mediated.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Radical as root, rupture, and/or intensification • Radicalism as 
insurrection, explosion, and aesthetic experiment • Dialectics of 
radical form and radical content (and other permutations) • Political 
modernism and its legacies • Totalitarian system-building versus 
anarchic destruction • Theoretical terrains of immediacy and critique • 
Tactical embodiment and the poetics of survival • Indigenous resurgence 
as radical epistemology • Radical land relations and the decolonization 
of property • Abolitionist futurities and trans liberation • 
Eco-anarchism and the aesthetics of resistance • Radical relationality 
and more-than-human sovereignty • Extinction, grief, and insurgent hope 
• Indigenous critiques of extraction and technocapitalism • Fugitive 
kinship and cross-marginal solidarities • Ecological and decolonial 
temporalities • Queer ecologies and the politics of interdependence • 
Trans aesthetics of opacity, refusal, and tenderness • Anti-extractive 
art and the radical nonhuman in its animal, vegetal, and elemental forms 
• Dark Enlightenment, accelerationism, and/or technofeudalism • 
Extremism and the limits of control • Co-optation and domestication of 
radical forms • Shifting cultural constellations of the “rad,” the 
“awesome,” and/or the “cool”


The Keynote Speaker is Mila Zuo, Associate Professor in the Department 
of Theatre and Film at University of British Columbia. Zuo is the author 
of Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium (Duke 
University Press, 2022) focuses on the affective racialization of 
Chinese women film stars, demonstrating the ways which vulgar, 
flavourful beauty disrupts Western and colonial notions of beauty. 
Vulgar Beauty won the 2024 Outstanding Achievement best book award in 
media, performance, and visual studies from the Association for Asian 
American Studies. Zuo is also the director of award-winning films, 
including Carnal Orient (2016) and Kin (2021). She is currently working 
on her first feature, Mongoloids.


The conference will be held at Cinecycle (129 Spadina Ave.) in Toronto, 
Canada on Friday, May 15 and Saturday, May 16, 2026.

Send a 350-word abstract, bibliography (5 max.), 5 keywords, and short 
biography (with institutional affiliation, if applicable) in ONE 
DOCUMENT as an EMAIL ATTACHMENT to (spiralfilmphilosophy /at/ gmail.com) by 
January 15, 2026. Notice of acceptance or rejection will be sent 
promptly via email.

Conference Registration Fee:
Conference Attendance: $150 (Canadian)
Graduate Students and Underemployed: $75 (Canadian)

Conference Website:
spiralfilmphilosophy.ca

Facebook:
@spiralphilosophy

For inquiries contact:
(spiralfilmphilosophy /at/ gmail.com)

Organized by:
The Spiral Collective
in collaboration with
CFMDC
York University

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