[Commlist] CFP – Imagining Resistance: Actions, Methods, and Technologies of Protest

Call for Papers
International Conference

Imagining Resistance
Actions, Methods, and Technologies of Protest

University of Bergamo
Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

12–13 March 2026

Organized by: Martina Misia, Stefano Mudu, Andrea Pitozzi, and Giuseppe 
Previtali within the activities of the CReN Research Group.

No payment from authors will be required; there are no article 
processing or submission charges associated with this call for papers.

Since the nineteenth century, collective protest has been one of the 
most visible and transformative forms of political dissent. From 
workers’ strikes and anti-colonial struggles to feminist marches, 
student uprisings, and contemporary climate movements, the act of taking 
to the streets, or occupying other symbolic and material spaces, has 
profoundly shaped modern and contemporary political imagination. 
Protests not only register demands for justice, equality, or 
recognition; they also generate new expressions of collective action, 
produce original aesthetic repertoires, and mobilize technologies and 
devices that redefine how dissent is made visible, mediated, remembered, 
and historically narrated. In this sense, protest is as much a cultural 
and aesthetic phenomenon as it is a political one.

The heterogeneous quality of these various political phenomena urges us 
to nuance our understanding of uprisings, stressing continuities and 
differences between various forms of resistance. In this respect, this 
international conference aims to foster a broad reflection on the 
expressive practices of protest and the multiple forms of resistance 
they generate. Focusing on the various ways in which political agency is 
collectively thought, questioned, and performed today, Imagining 
Resistance will investigate protests as a laboratory of counter-power 
that is not necessarily linked to a revolutionary outcome, but to a 
collective effort to imagine differently the aesthetic and political regime.

To imagine resistance is to explore how protest functions as a mode of 
political articulation and as a creative practice that challenges 
established orders. Specific attention will be devoted to the 
intersection between theory and practice: the conceptual frameworks that 
help us understand the specificity of protest, as well as the study of 
specific cases that reveal how dissent unfolds in particular historical, 
spatial, and technological configurations.

We therefore welcome contributions that interrogate protest from 
different perspectives. On a theoretical level, the conference invites 
reflections on the relation between protest and political philosophy, 
the distinctive traits of dissent as a political act, and the ways in 
which collective resistance reshapes the grammar of politics. We also 
encourage studies inquiring into the temporalities of protest, its 
sudden eruptions, its duration, its afterlives, and its spatial 
dimensions, from the occupation of squares and streets to digital 
networks and dispersed forms of action. By bringing these approaches 
together, the conference seeks to open a conversation on protest as a 
multifaceted phenomenon in which imagination and materiality, aesthetics 
and politics, converge.

Rather than considering protest or revolt merely as a represented theme, 
the conference aims to explore how practices of resistance shape and 
transform aesthetic languages, functioning not only as content but as a 
principle of formal and stylistic experimentation. More specifically, we 
invite contributions connected with (but not limited to) the following 
topics:

- Theories of protest and resistance: the role of political philosophy, 
critical theory, cultural studies and other disciplines in 
conceptualizing protests.

- The temporality and memory of protests: from sudden eruptions and 
cycles of mobilization to their afterlives, practices of documentation, 
preservation, and re-activation. Particular attention may be devoted to 
the “archives of dissent” and to cultural forms (literary, visual, or 
performative) that register how present struggles are continuously 
haunted and reshaped by past conflicts, such as in postcolonial contexts 
where histories of resistance are transmitted and reactivated across 
generations.

- Archaeologies/genealogies: in which ways old forms of protest (such as 
modern revolts or collective movements of the 20th century) predate 
contemporary phenomena and help us conceptualize what we nowadays 
recognize as a revolt?

- The relationship between protests and spatiality: squares, streets, 
institutions, frontiers, digital platforms, and the emergence of 
dispersed networks.

- Literature and protest: narrative strategies, poetic forms, and 
textual practices in which dissent becomes a principle of formal 
innovation, shaping genres, stylistic experiments, and, in Foucauldian 
terms, the emergence of alternative discourses and archives on/of 
resistance.

- Visualizing, verbalizing, and performing protests: the contribution of 
photography, cinema, visual arts and art history, sound and performance, 
textual and digital media to re-imagine and make protests visible. Case 
studies may include specific artworks, artists, or cultural texts.

- Global aesthetics of protests: the circulation of images, symbols, and 
repertoires across borders and the creation of a common language of 
gestures, also through comparative analysis of different kinds of protest.

Roundtable | Protest and Digital Technologies

As part of Imagining Resistance, a roundtable will explore the complex 
and evolving relationship between protest and digital technologies. From 
grassroots mobilizations to transnational solidarity networks, digital 
media have become crucial tools for amplifying activist voices and 
constructing alternative narratives that challenge dominant discourses. 
At the same time, they generate new dynamics of surveillance, 
commodification, and fragmentation.

The roundtable will feature five to six speakers, each asked to present 
a brief theoretical input, followed by a collective discussion moderated 
by a chair. Those interested in this presentation format are kindly 
requested to indicate it clearly in their abstract. The selection of 
participants and the final structure of the session will be at the 
discretion of the conference organizers and scientific committee.

Submission Guidelines

Contributions may take the form of a traditional paper, but we encourage 
attendees to think beyond this format and towards other generative modes 
such as interviews or in-conversation-style talks, archival 
explorations, performances, readings, screenings, and collaborative 
workshop activities.

Please send an abstract (max. 300 words) and a short bio (max. 150 
words) to (martinaelisabetta.misia /at/ unibg.it) 
<mailto:(martinaelisabetta.misia /at/ unibg.it)>,(stefano.mudu /at/ unibg.it) 
<mailto:(stefano.mudu /at/ unibg.it)>,(andrea.pitozzi /at/ unibg.it) 
<mailto:(andrea.pitozzi /at/ unibg.it)>, (andgiuseppe.previtali /at/ unibg.it) 
<mailto:(giuseppe.previtali /at/ unibg.it)> by 14 December 2025. Selected 
speakers will be notified by 9 January 2026. Twenty-minute papers may be 
submitted and presented in either Italian or English.


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