We are happy to announce the call for presentations for the upcoming
symposium titled “Figure it Out: The Art of Living Through System
Failures”. This multidisciplinary gathering welcomes proposals from the
fields of humanities, social sciences and artistic practice. Alongside
academic papers and panel discussions, we welcome non-traditional and
experimental formats.
Submission deadline: 10 March 2024
Response date: by 30 April 2024
Symposium program announcement: by 30 July 2024
Registration deadline: 31 August 2024
Exhibition opening: 18 September 2024
Symposium dates: 19 & 20 September 2024
Please submit a short bio and abstract using the form:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScL88B8gMybUw2hMJJPltkdEpeP41r0bEyKTVSsW_bf9jOcQQ/viewform
Programme curated by: Margerita Pulè and Adnan Hadziselimovic
Gendered, racialized, bordered and exploited, marginalised, underserved,
discriminated and vulnerable communities are often forced to develop
tools and strategies that are considered unacceptable to the
institutions of the system; thus developing practices and phenomena of
coping, tinkering, making-do and circumventing exclusions. Sometimes
these tools and strategies are forged out of necessity, of survival,
sometimes to exercise rights or to secure access to basic services
available only to ‘deserving’ citizens. Such tools and strategies are
always aimed at a certain system (state, welfare institutions,
corporations, workplace, credit, housing, utilities etc.) that has its
own rules and conditions of access that these communities or individuals
cannot meet, producing and reproducing systemic exclusion.
Finding ‘holes in the system’ and developing strategies to take
advantage of system weaknesses, people use their ingenuity to avoid
detrimental effects on their lives and lives of their communities.
Moreover, such practices have now expanded into the digital sphere,
where they are facing new kinds of power structures and also getting
recombined in interesting ways. As dataveillance, algorithmic governance
and digital profiling seep into mechanisms of exclusion and
dispossession, from border controls to public transport, education,
health and housing, new workarounds, tinkering and hacking emerges. As
they do with the growing impacts of climate change, forcing underserved
communities across the globe to be resourceful and devise their own
forms of adaptation.
We are particularly seeking contributions that critically examine the
ethical dimensions of practices deemed illicit and illegal in mainstream
contexts, considering their political implications and necessity in the
face of exclusion. We encourage analyses of practices of ingenuity, of
figuring it out, that people devise facing systemic exclusions
perpetuated by state, corporate, or social institutions. Topics might
include, but are not limited to;
System Failures and Social Exclusion: Exploration of strategies used by
disenfranchised groups to navigate and subvert constraints imposed by
administrative and algorithmic regimes;
Innovative Practices of Resistance: Discussions on frugal innovation and
counter-innovation as responses to the rise of neo-fascisms and the rise
of emergencies connected to ecological collapse;
Ambivalent Figures of Resilient Subjectivation: Critical analysis of
many figures that figure it out practitioners are typically stigmatised
as: “welfare queens”, scroungers, cheaters, free riders, scamleteers,
tricksters... ;
Ethics of Research with Marginalized Constituencies: Critical and
reflexive methodologies for research practices into illegal and
unlawful, particularly the concept of 'ethnographic refusal';
Cultural and Historical Perspectives of 'Figuring It Out': Historical
and cross-cultural comparisons of 'figuring it out' practices, stories
and characterizations, as presented in artistic praxis, as well as folk
and popular cultures.
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