[Commlist] CFP: Conference Contagion, Information, Territory

Conference: Contagion, Information, Territory
Leiden University, 17-19 June 2026

Submission deadline: 31 January 2026
Website: https://contagiousterritories.org/conference.html 
<https://contagiousterritories.org/conference.html>
Email: (contagious.territories /at/ hum.leidenuniv.nl) 
<mailto:(contagious.territories /at/ hum.leidenuniv.nl)>

Keynote speakers:
Dr. Ramon Amaro (Design Academy Eindhoven)
Prof. Dr. Jasbir Puar (University of British Columbia)

As new forms of exclusion and colonialism are emerging and old apartheid 
policies reinvigorated, the movement of people, the spread of disease, 
and the circulation of information become ever more central to our 
understanding of war, politics, identity, and government. The war in 
Gaza and illegal occupation in the West Bank are a case in point. This 
conflict is not just territorial, it is informational, and the Israeli 
government employs strategies of withholding care and barring 
humanitarian aid to preemptively immunize Israel’s cultural and legal 
self-perception as a ‘uniquely’ Jewish nation-state, against Palestinian 
life. As the international movement of trans* and queer people is 
restricted in ways that bring to mind the late 20th century response to 
the HIV/AIDS crisis, gender and sex education are thought of as 
‘infecting’ children with particular sexual preferences, or encouraging 
trans* identification in them. Meanwhile, the language of contagion is 
activated politically and by opposing factions. Where some speak of a 
“woke mind virus,” others attempt to make sense of fascist protests like 
the January 6th attack on the Capitol in 2020, or the 2025 extreme 
rightwing riots in The Hague, the Netherlands, as fueled by viral online 
discourse and contagious hatred of immigrants.

In response to these concerns, contagion, information, and territory 
emerge as central concepts of political analysis and critical thought. 
Contemporary artists and writers like Isadora Neves Marques, Tabita 
Rezaire, Michel Nieva, and Anne Boyer reflect on these convergences in 
their practice, and academic consideration of such work may help 
theorize them further. It is for this reason that we call for papers 
that seek to map the connections between contagion, information, and 
territory through critical analyses of cultural objects.

How do public health interventions, immunization policies, and 
biopolitical regimes help govern populations under conditions of 
uncertainty? Concepts of (auto-)immunity, and parasitism, have been 
central to discussions around biomedicine, territory, and democracy, and 
considerations of care, the viral, and vaccination have found new 
urgency during the COVID-19 pandemic (Cohen 2009; Esposito 2008; Serres 
1982; Derrida 2004; Di Cesare 2021; Povinelli 2016). Angela Mitropoulos 
helps us wonder how insurance, contracts, and risk-prediction have 
historically structured vulnerability and precarity along lines of 
gender, race, and capital (Mitropoulos 2012). Jasbir Puar has mobilized 
the notion of “debility” to critically examine discourses around a 
variety of crises, urging us to focus on the endemic nature of state 
sanctioned “debilitation” as part of biopolitical regimes of power and 
in the context of Palestinian rights (Puar 2017).

For this conference, we are particularly interested in scholarship that 
brings these concerns into dialogue with contemporary technological and 
political realities (Pasquinelli 2023; Amoore 2013; Parisi 2013). How do 
data infrastructures and algorithmic systems (re)produce social 
hierarchies and how do they relate to what Ramon Amaro refers to as “the 
black technical object” (Amaro 2023)? How can bio- and necropolitical 
configurations around human embodiment, along with their relationship to 
disease, harm, and contagion, be theorized in connection to processes of 
territoriality and critical analyses of datafication in this 
“techno-libertarian age” (Mbembe 2021)? How does the transformation of 
European borders into “deathscapes” rely on a logic of securitization 
and immunization supported by digital infrastructures of control and 
racialized surveillance (Pugliese 2022; Stümer 2018; Browne 2015)?

In conversation with cybernetics, Sylvia Wynter reminds us that the 
Foucauldian framework around security requires further elaboration to 
confront how the category of “Man” has historically depended on 
racialized life and the enduring histories of plantation economy, 
colonialism, and chattel slavery (Wynter 2003 & 2018; Foucault 2007; 
Tsing 2021). Articulations of territory, anxieties around health, 
cleanliness and contagion, and regimes of information and datafication 
intersect, and give rise to an assemblage in which differentially 
racialized, gendered, classified, and categorized human and non-human 
figures emerge (Weheliye 2014; Gossett & Hayward 2020). In response to 
this assemblage that exists at the center of contemporary political, 
cultural, and social subjection and abjection, we invite paper proposals 
reflecting on the relationship between contagion, information, and 
territoriality.

Responses might encompass, but are not limited to:

-          Metaphors of disease in relation to data and territoriality.
-          Neoliberal governmentality, borders, and racialized data.
-          Technologies and models of preemption, prediction, and 
inoculation.
-          Necropolitics, data, and immunity in its territorial and 
biomedical inflections.
-          Cultural imaginaries and histories of technologized futures 
and territories.
-          Debility and debilitation as endemic biopolitical strategies.
-          War, occupation, and apartheid in relation to information, 
territory, and contagion.
-          Insurance, financialized capital, and techno-libertarianism.
-          Infection and contagion in relation to BIPOC, queer, and 
trans* stigmatization and movement.
-          Biosecurity, border regimes, and the management of virality 
(HIV/AIDS, bird flu, BSE, Zika, etc.).

We welcome submissions on these themes across fields and disciplines. 
Please submit abstracts for 20-minute presentations of 250 to 300 words, 
along with brief biographical notes (about 50 words) to 
(contagious.territories /at/ hum.leidenuniv.nl) 
<mailto:(contagious.territories /at/ hum.leidenuniv.nl)> by January 31, 2026. 
We especially encourage queer, BIPOC, disabled, working class, and other 
marginalized scholars to apply. Notifications of acceptance will be sent 
by February 28, 2026. Please note that attendance at this conference 
will be in-person ONLY. For more information, please contact us at 
(contagious.territories /at/ hum.leidenuniv.nl) 
<mailto:(contagious.territories /at/ hum.leidenuniv.nl)>. For updates visit 
www.contagiousterritories.org <http://www.contagiousterritories.org>.

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