[Commlist] Upheavals Conference CFP

Biennial Conference: Upheavals
November 5-7, 2026
Cultural Studies Department, Trent University, Canada
Location: Peterborough, Canada, and Online (Hybrid)

This multi-disciplinary conference, organized in conjunction with the 
Cultural Studies Graduate Programs at Trent University, with support 
from the Centre for Theory, Culture, and Politics (TCP) and The John 
Fekete Distinguished Lecture, brings together scholars, artists, and 
cultural practitioners to reflect on a present marked by ongoing 
upheavals. The concept highlights that we are no longer facing a single 
crisis in the arts, politics, or the cultural field broadly considered, 
but rather a state of change, instability, and uneven collapse across 
multiple scales.

Cultural critics often frame this conjuncture pessimistically. Whether 
it be Bernard Stiegler’s state of “disruption” akin to “madness,” James 
Bridle’s “new dark age,” or simply the result of what Marek Poliks and 
Roberto Alonso Trillo call “exocapitalism,” there is a sense that our 
shared systems are reaching an acute phase of unsustainability. 
Democracy, labour, community, environment, the law and judicial systems 
alike, once assumed to be stable are now under strain with profound 
cultural consequences. While threats to the normative “rules-based 
international order” (Canadian PM Mark Carney) reach consensus among 
those in power, there is an increasing demand to build alternative 
models, whether to counter the onset of “discriminating data” as 
espoused by Wendy Chun, foster grassroots “viral justice” as proposed by 
Ruha Benjamin, or “defund culture” as proclaimed by Gary Hall. From this 
perspective, upheaval not only names a present-day condition that 
challenges us fundamentally. It also provides us with opportunities to 
imagine ways of thinking that resonate with the positionality of 
cultural studies itself: to adopt, adapt, and respond to uncertainty.

Conference participants and invited keynote speakers may emphasize how 
to respond to these challenges through scholarly inquiry or through 
media arts, practice-based research, multimodal forms, and activist 
models. Our collective aim is to examine how new and enduring approaches 
to research in cultural studies and cognate disciplines help to redirect 
modes of knowledge mobilization and dissemination towards 
community-based goals and actions. Participants may consider how 
artistic, experimental, and politically committed media practices 
respond to, register, and sometimes interrupt contemporary upheavals. As 
boundaries between media forms continue to blur, this event will 
explicitly foreground the pressures facing artists and cultural workers 
in increasingly dire creative economies. It will also consider how the 
university paradoxically serves to aggravate them.

Proposed topics may include the following:

Environmental Justice
-The racialized distribution of environmental harm
-Climate collapse
-Resource extraction, colonial legacies, and global inequities
-Intersections of race, ecology, and capital

Artistic and Cultural Production
-Artistic and media responses to uncertainty
-Representations of border regimes, migration, and displacement
-Cultural production and labour conditions
-Media as a site of everyday survival and political visibility

Technology, Automation, and Value
-Artificial intelligence and creative practice
-Data systems and the reshaping of cultural production
-Automation and artistic labour
-Authorship, truth, and creative agency in algorithmic culture

Cultural Resistance
-Media and the rise of political extremism
-Racism and exclusionary politics in global contexts
-Cultural institutions and the limits of neutrality
-Art and media as forms of contestation

Institutions, Responsibility, and Academic Freedom
-Universities in times of political upheaval
-Defunding of the arts
-Academic freedom and institutional accountability
-Cultural policy and public responsibility

Confirmed speakers
Colleen Lye is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley, where she 
teaches courses on marxism and critical theory, Asian American Studies, 
and 20th and 21st century literature. Lye is the coeditor of After Marx: 
Literature, Theory and Value in the Twenty-First Century (with 
Christopher Nealon, Cambridge 2022). Her book America's Asia: Racial 
Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 (Princeton 2005) received the 
Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association of Asian American 
Studies and was named a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Prize from 
the American Studies Association and a Choice Outstanding Academic 
Title. She has coedited numerous special journal issues on the topics of 
peripheral realism, Asian racial form, financialization, and the 
humanities and university struggles. The dossier The Struggle for Public 
Education in California (coedited with Christopher Newfield) appeared in 
a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly that won MLA's Council of 
Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) Award for Best Special Issue of 2011.

Deb Cowen is a Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at 
the University of Toronto. Deb’s research explores questions of supply 
chains, circulation and infrastructure, attending to the co-production 
of race and space, sexuality and social ordering, and imperial intimacy 
and urban life. The author of The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping 
Violence in Global Trade and Military Workfare: The Soldier and Social 
Citizenship in Canada, Deb also co-edited War, Citizenship, Territory 
and Digital Life in the Global City: Contesting Infrastructures, and 
with Katherine McKittrick and Simone Browne co-edits the Duke University 
Press book series Errantries.

The conference will also host panels from a new dedicated track of 
Research Working Groups, organized under CACS-ACÉC to support 
longer-term collaboration across research, artistic practice, activism, 
and teaching: Further details regarding our working groups can be found 
on our website: https://cacs-acec.org/research-working-groups/ 
<https://cacs-acec.org/research-working-groups/>

Submission Details
We welcome individual proposals for papers, media and art presentations, 
and more as well as group proposals for panels, roundtables, and 
workshops. Please submit a proposal of 300 words via this clickable 
google forms link: 
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfCWUvZj-aNpsByNaS750ypadx_ZgWFRwfzqPbrOsBoj_G43Q/viewform 
<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfCWUvZj-aNpsByNaS750ypadx_ZgWFRwfzqPbrOsBoj_G43Q/viewform> 


Submissions will remain open and first reviewed after June 30.

Please be in touch with (trentcacs26 /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(trentcacs26 /at/ gmail.com)> with any questions or ideas.

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