[Commlist] CFP - 7th Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference: “Resilience”

7th Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference
“Resilience”
Vancouver, Canada
May 6-8, 2027
Confirmed keynotes:

• Beenash JAFRI, University of California Davis
• Fred MOTEN, NYU
• Lakshmi PADMANABHAN, University of Chicago
The Spiral Film and Philosophy collective is delighted to announce that 
its seventh full conference will take place at the University of British 
Columbia between 6 and 8 May 2027. With this in mind, we are calling for 
proposals from scholars to take part in the conference, the theme of 
which this year is resilience.

Derived from the Latin re-salire (‘to leap back’ or ‘rebound’), 
‘resilience’ has been used since the 1970s to describe the capacity of 
psychological, ecological, or computational systems to withstand a 
threatening change (i.e. crisis) without losing their structural 
integrity. In recent years of the unfolding permacrisis of global 
capitalism, the term has gained broader popularity and a subsequent 
dilution of its meaning, from NGOs measuring the resilience of 
disenfranchised communities and TikTok influencers preaching a 
‘resilience mindset’, to Donald Trump proposing an America First 
Resilience Strategy.

‘Resilience’ and/or ‘resiliency’ are concepts that have, even within 
Cinema and Media Studies, been mobilised to characterise persistence 
especially in the face of the ongoing precarisation of the world (for 
example, Rueda 2018), and during and in the aftermath of the COVID-19 
pandemic – especially in relation to film festivals (de Valck 2020; 
Grassilli and Colta 2021). Resilience has been understood as a necessary 
ingredient for women filmmakers like Ida Lupino (Grisham and Grossman 
2026), as well as for ‘minority’ filmmakers, such as those in the 
Chicanx community (Carrizal-Dukes 2021), and those from the Global 
South, including places like Colombia (Rueda 2018), India (Rani 2025), 
Kurdistan (Koçer 2014), and the Philippines (Maury and Zuchuat 2026). 
For all that resilience might characterise the enduring nature of 
non-western states, as well as those who reside within them – as 
explored, for example, by filmmakers like Ritwik Ghatak (Oberoi Vahali 
2020) and Claudia Llosa (Rojas 2017), resilience has nonetheless been 
explored as a property of the nation-state as a whole, especially in the 
face of globalization (Dissanayake 2006), with Andrew Higson 
demonstrating the ‘resilience of popular national cinemas’ in the age of 
transnational film (Higson 2021a; Higson 2021b). Indeed, André 
Gaudreault and Philippe Marion even use the term to define the condition 
of cinema in the era of digitalization and Netflix (Gaudreault and 
Marion 2020).

In this respect, resilience pertains as much to hegemonic structures and 
agents as it does to those who resist them, with Alice Pember 
highlighting precisely how, unlike resistance, ‘resilience is a 
neoliberal value that demands bodies “bounce back” from the damage 
inflicted upon them by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,’ and 
which thus has melancholy as its inverse (Pember 2020: 298). This 
connects to Mila Zuo’s reckoning that Everything Everywhere All at Once 
(Daniels, USA, 2022) is an exploration of ‘re-silly-ence’ (Zuo 
Forthcoming) – itself a creative idea and an expression of agency within 
the neoliberal academy. Given its multivalent senses and underlying 
ambivalence, then, the Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference will allow 
us to think through resilience in numerous ways – led by our excellent 
keynote speakers, and involving as many participants as is possible.

Confirmed keynotes at the conference include (in alphabetical order) 
Beenash Jafri (University of California Davis), Fred Moten (NYU) and 
Lakshmi Padmanabhan (University of Chicago).

The conference will take place on the stolen, ancestral and unceded 
lands of the Musqueam peoples, and is in 2027 a partnership between the 
Spiral collective and Cinema Thinks The World, which is funded by UBC’s 
Grants for Catalyzing Research Clusters scheme.

Send a 350-word (max.) proposal, bibliography (5 max.), and 5 keywords 
in an anonymous document as an EMAIL ATTACHMENT (PDF) to 
(spiralfilmphilosophy /at/ gmail.com). Include a short biography (with 
institutional affiliation, if applicable) directly in your email.

The deadline for submitting proposals – be they individual papers or 
pre-constituted panels of three speakers – is December 4, 2026. All 
proposals will be double blind-peer reviewed, with speakers notified in 
January 2027. Papers, except for keynote presentations, are expected to 
last 20 minutes, including clips, with 90-minute panels consisting of 3 
x 20-minute papers and 25 minutes for discussion/Q&As.

The fee for the conference is to be confirmed, pending in particular an 
application for funding through Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities 
Research Council’s Connection grant scheme. At any rate, the aim is to 
keep the fee as low as possible.

Similarly, the final size of the conference is to be confirmed – pending 
final funding amounts and the number of proposals received. The 2027 
Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference will be sure to offer an intimate 
and invigorating opportunity to carry out and to engage with 
media-focused critical theoretical work, creating individual and 
collective resilience in the face of a world system that is iniquitous 
and destructive along many simultaneous vectors.

The 2027 Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference Committee

(Scott Birdwise, William Brown, Tamás Nagypál, Philippe Theophanidis, 
with graduate assistance from Mehran Abdollahi, Aadi Bhandari and Zichen 
Liang)

Spiral Website: spiralfilmphilosophy.ca
Facebook: @spiralphilosophy
Inquiries: (spiralfilmphilosophy /at/ gmail.com)



References

Carrizal, Dukes, Elvira (2021) ‘Chicanx Filmmaking: Producing the Next 
Generation of Resilient Cinema,’ Reflections: A Journal of 
Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric, 20:3, pp. 68-78.

de Valck, Marijke (2020) ‘Vulnerabilities and Resiliency in the Festival 
Ecosystem: Notes on Approaching Film Festivals in Pandemic Times,’ in 
Philipp Dominik Keidl, Laliv Melamed,  Vinzenz Hediger, and Antonio 
Somaini (eds.), Pandemic Media : Preliminary Notes Toward an Inventory, 
Lüneberg: Meson Press, pp. 125-135.

Dissanayake, Wimal (2006) ‘Globalization and the Experience of Culture: 
The Resilience of Nationhood,’ in Natascha Gentz and Stefan Kramer 
(eds.), Globalization, Cultural Identities, and Media Representations, 
Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 25-44.

Gaudreault, André, and Philippe Marion (2020) ‘Cinema Hangs Tough,’ in 
Dominique Chateau and José Moure (eds.), Post-cinema: Cinema in the 
Post-art Era, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 pp. 67-83.

Grassilli, Mariagiulia, and Alexandra-Maria Colta (2021) ‘The Human 
Rights Film Network: Festival resilience in the time of Covid-19,’ 
NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies, 10:1, 
https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/16258.

Grisham, Therese, and Julie Grossman (2026) Ida Lupino, Director: Her 
Art and Resilience in Times of Transition, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers 
University Press.

Higson, Andrew (2021a) ‘The resilience of popular national cinemas in 
Europe (Part One),’ Transnational Screens, 12:3, pp. 199-219.

Higson, Andrew (2021b) ‘The resilience of popular national cinemas in 
Europe (Part Two),’ Transnational Screens, 12:3, pp. 220-232.

Koçer, Suncem (2014) ‘Kurdish Cinema as a Transnational Discourse Genre: 
Cinematic Visibility, Cultural Resilience, and Political Agency,’ 
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 46, pp. 473-488.

Maury, Corinne, and Olivier Zuchuat (eds.) (2026) The Transformative 
Cinema of Lav Diaz: Aesthetics, Resistence and Resilience (trans. 
Francis Guévremont), London: Routledge.

Oberoi Vahali, Diamond (2020) ‘Resilience and Survival,’ in Ritwik 
Ghatak and the Cinema of Praxis: Cultures, Aesthetics and Vision, 
Singapore: Springer.

Pember, Alice (2020) ‘“Visions of ecstasy”: resilience and melancholy in 
the musical moments of Bande de filles (Céline Sciamma, 2014),’ French 
Screen Studies, 20:3-4, pp. 298-316.

Rani, Sudha (2025) ‘A Study of Nationalism through Collective Memory of 
Transgenerational Trauma and Resilience in Indian Cinema,’ Literary 
Voice: A Peer Reviewed Journal of English Studies, 25:1 (September), pp. 
304-311.

Rojas, Adriana (2017) ‘Mother of pearl, song and potatoes: Cultivating 
resilience in Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada/Milk of Sorrow (2009),’ 
Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas, 14:3, pp. 297-314.

Rueda, María Helena (2018) ‘The Politics of Precariousness and 
Resilience in Contemporary Colombian Films,’ in Constanza Burucúa and 
Carolina Sitnisky (eds.), The Precarious in the Cinemas of the Americas, 
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 141-161.

Zuo Mila (Forthcoming) ‘Stupidity, Re(silly)ence, and Mommy Brain in 
Everything Everywhere All at Once,’ JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media 
Studies, in press, due 2027.

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