Thursday, January 22: worlds in motion
9AM
Les Arts martiaux mixtes (MMA), souvent réduits à un spectacle de violence, notamment en raison de la médiatisation orchestrée par l’Ultimate Fighting Championship constituent un espace privilégié pour interroger la manière dont le corps produit et transmet du sens au-delà du langage. Cette présentation propose d’explorer le MMA comme une forme de communication incarnée, qui met en jeu des récits et des émotions que le langage verbal ne parvient pas à traduire. Pour explorer le corps et ses affects en tant que forme de communication incarnée, je mobilise une méthodologie développée par Loïc Wacquant. Ce dernier applique dans Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (2004) une sociologie du charnel. C’est-à-dire que le chercheur engage son propre corps comme instrument de connaissance, en s’immergeant pleinement dans la pratique étudiée pour en saisir les logiques sensibles, affectives et symboliques. C’est donc en liant ma propre expérience en tant que combattant MMA et la pensée de Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945) sur la phénoménologie de la perception que je propose de penser le corps comme un sujet perceptif, expressif et communicationnel, plutôt que comme un simple objet de performance ou de spectacle. Cette présentation s’inscrit pertinemment au sein de ce symposium, étant donné qu’elle explore une manière alternative de produire du savoir, où le corps et ses affects deviennent des instruments de connaissance. Il sera donc question d’(art)iculer le monde académique et celui du savoir charnel en expérimentant une manière alternative de produire du savoir : la sociologie charnelle développée par Loïc Wacquant. En mobilisant la sociologie charnelle, je tente de mettre sur papier un savoir corporel difficile à exprimer, révélant comment le MMA constitue un langage indicible qui communique via le corps et ses affects.
Le corps qui parle : le MMA comme langage indicible
Blaise Doré-Caillouette (Université de Montréal)
Between Rock and Stone: Writing from ‘The Pond’
Ella Taylor (Queen’s University)
9:30
How do we move, think, and respond when language and text fail us? Between Rock and Stone: Writing from ‘The Pond’ begins from a fissure—both geological and epistemological—at Devonian Square in downtown Toronto, where ancient granite boulders rest within a concrete pond. Drawing on Elizabeth Povinelli’s Geontologies and her theorization of The Carbon Imaginary, this paper explores how gestures of movement—walking, dancing, and climbing—can become ethical and epistemic responses to the unstable boundaries between Life and Nonlife. Thinking with Jasbir Puar’s notion of friction and research-creation practices of Sarah E. Truman, Stephanie Springgay, and Rebecca Schneider, I trace how embodied acts like climbing the boulders of Devonian Pond can reorient our relations to the more-than-human. Through engagements with Métis artist David Garneau’s Rocks, Stones, Dust and Louise Ann Wilson’s site-specific performance Fissure (2011), I consider how artistic and bodily gestures generate knowledge—attuning us to the fractures and uncertainties of our current world. Grounded in a recent climbing event, Girls Take Over ‘The Pond’, I read the act of climbing as a frictional mode of thinking-in-movement—an articulation through touch, tension, and relation—where ethical attunement emerges in moving wrong, together.
10AM
Indigenous historical fiction: replacing lack with abundance
Maya Phillips (McMaster University)
Using historical fiction as a vehicle for retroactive self-determination, contemporary Indigenous authors replace harmful narratives of lack written by non-Indigenous authors with narratives of abundance. Comparing The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke by Tina Makereti and Gardens in the Dunes by Leslie Marmon Silko – historical novels written by authors of Māori and Native American descent, respectively, that follow young Indigenous individuals making international journeys in the company of white colonizers – as mediums for rewriting history and reclaiming identity offers an understanding of the decolonial approaches of Indigenous authors. However, although the novels’ plots are similar and their authors’ goals are unified, it would be incorrect to flatten trans-Indigenous study by, after recognizing similarities, neglecting to place the two in juxtaposition to gain a better understanding of Māori and Native American stories as uniquely complex. Both novels write Indigenous ancestors back into history, return the colonizing gaze with one of Indigenous scrutiny, and imagine futures of abundance for their descendants, but those futures are unique to the specific communities for which they are written. Aligning with the goal to “‘articulate’ worlds that haven't already been expressed,” this paper uplifts two authors who, by writing their ancestors back into history, have also written reflections of their modern world and visions of flourishing futures for their descendants. These stories, previously unexpressed in colonizers’ narratives, are finally articulated as part of the decolonizing effort of trans-Indigenous activists and intellectuals. Though labelled as fiction, these biomyths provide historical grounding to communities that have frequently been marginalized for their lack of written histories, which was interpreted as a lack of historical significance by colonial archivists, and they counter that narrative of lack with one of abundance, placing Indigenous experience at the heart of historical narratives.
Experiences of spatiality are dependent on the identity one possesses. Those with identities that have been marginalized by oppressive systems are compelled to compartmentalize facets of their essence so that they may evade threats of danger while navigating public and personal spaces. Moreover, spatiality becomes complicated when considering the intersectionality of one’s identity. One’s racial, sexual, and gendered identity impels them to occupy space differently, each person navigating their identity and spatiality as they encounter a world with varying, idiosyncratic barriers. James Baldwin’s ‘Giovanni’s Room’ (1956) is a groundbreaking novel due to its provision of a 20th-century dialogue that evokes questions of both societal and personal acceptance. In the text, one is able to perceive the social and systemic implications of queer marginalization through David’s occupation of public and personal space. To elaborate on the significance of this aforementioned symbolism, I will provide a critical analysis of how David’s queer sexuality corresponds with how he takes up space in his relations with his father, fiancé, and Giovanni. Additionally, I will articulate the correlation between David’s sexuality and his occupation of space by examining his spatiality pertaining to the city of Paris as well as the personal space of his own psyche and physical body. Beyond my analysis of Baldwin’s celebrated text, my paper implements a theory I've developed called the theory of spatiality, a conception that has helped me find the language required to articulate how one’s spatiality elucidates their marginalization. Ultimately, fully comprehending how marginalized identities occupy space enables us to better recognize how they see themselves in the world and, more importantly, the exhaustion they endure as they conform to these spaces to peacefully and successfully exist.
Space and Sexuality: The Parallelism Between Disenfranchisement and Spatiality in James Baldwin’s 'Giovanni’s Room' (1956)
Youeal Abera (McGill University)
10: 30
11 AM
A Maroon’s Technical Practice
Maurice Jones (Concordia University)
A Maroon’s Technical Practice applies the histories of Marronage resistance—runaway slaves that formed autonomous communities in the North American wilderness—to develop radical Black research-creation practices in working with and against algorithmic systems. My work follows Beth Coleman (2021) who in her piece Technology of the Surround urges us to resist the inequalities of our new algorithmic empires and instead explore a radical AI “that can be free—if not to imagine, then to generate—speeding through possibilities, junctures that are idiotic until they are not” (p. 11). While inspiring on a conceptual level I could not help but wonder how such a liberatory approach to working with algorithmic systems may manifest? In other words, what may a Maroon’s technical practice in creatively working with and against AI look like? The paper outlines A Maroon’s Technical Practice through four research-creation case studies that engage critically with algorithmic systems. Freedom Dreams explores speculative fictions and localized resistance in the work Soundscapes of an Earthly Community. Technology in the Surround examines the material (un)(re)making of technologies in feral.ai. Fugitive Collectivities investigates networks of resistance across communities and institutions in the work of the Wilding AI collective. Haunting and Dreaming Algorithmic Systems foregrounds Black and Indigenous co-liberation through the work settler-native-slave. Together, these pillars offer a framework for creatively working with and against algorithmic systems while situating these practices within wider sociotechnical and cultural contexts. A Maroon’s Technical Practice responds to the questions: Whose voices have been missing? What are alternative (art)iculations of knowledge production? How do we enter worlds that honour differences without separation? It offers a practice-based framework for understanding how Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized artists and media-makers use, refuse, and reconfigure technologies in resistance to algorithmic oppression.
imagined worlds
The Black Imagination Loop: Practicing Futures Through Black Speculative Storytelling (Workshop)
Christoper Wilson (Queen’s University)
1 PM
If the future is a mirror, Black imagination is the reflection we’ve been told not to look for, and Black speculative storytelling is how we find ourselves in it. Building on my TEDx lecture and Master’s Research Project, Black Futures: Exploring Centring Black Perspectives and Voices in Imagining Future Possibilities, this 10 - 15 minute workshop/presentation introduces the Black Imagination Loop, a four-phase practice that moves from Self-Reflection to Being Together, Acting Together, and Being Transformed into Fate. The loop treats storytelling as a design method that converts feeling into form and imagination into lived structure. Rather than trying to represent Black futures, it rehearses them: centring Black life in scenarios, refusing permissioned imaginaries, and merging creativity with political/design strategy. This proposal offers an alternative articulation when language falters, specifically, felt knowledge as a method. The Black imagination loop’s micro-exercise foregrounds accessibility and co-creation, inviting participants to enter worlds that honour difference without separation through shared, embodied practice. From the questions posed, this workshop/presentation asks, What research can language not express? And whose voices have been missing? By centring non-expert/collective intelligences and designing decolonial pathways for knowledge production.
Keynote: Galit Ariel (York University)
2 PM
Barbara P. Gordon was a prolific Chicago-based fanwriter, fanartist, and fanzine publisher. In 2020, she was the subject of an exhibition, To Boldly Go: Kirk/Spock Slash Fan Art from the Collection of Barbara P. Gordon, organized by the Chicago-based experimental cultural centre Co-Prosperity. Media fandom refers to fan communities across media forms, including television. One of its roots lies in the science fiction fandom surrounding the 1960s TV series Star Trek: The Original Series (ST: TOS), which gave rise to transformative fan practices, like slash. Describing the imagining of a romantic and/or sexual relationship between two same-gender characters, slash originated in Kirk/Spock fanzines pairing the human Captain Kirk with the half-Vulcan First Officer Spock. This led to the circulation and dissemination of creative and critical expressions about futurity, queer desires, and “post-racial” utopias. By closely reading a fanwork in Gordon’s collection, I focus on the prescient queer feminist strategies employed by predominantly female Kirk/Spock fans. But I also explore how the exhibition ignores Gordon’s “problematic” status in Star Trek fandom, which is part of an ongoing problem in which fandom’s collectively driven environments can reproduce colonial ethno-hierarchies. Therefore, this comparative analysis of Gordon’s fanzine publishing and fanart collection argues that, to recognize Gordon’s complicated legacy, she must be positioned as a “feminist killjoy,” Sara Ahmed’s instrumentalization of the unhappy, humourless feminist stereotype as a potent, misunderstood figure who challenges the status quo. Only then can we recover a feminist history amid the buried tensions within media fandom’s queer utopian visual cultures. My research engages with the conference’s themes by examining under-recognized knowledge production (the visual cultures of 1970s-1980s science fiction fandom) through a queer, decolonizing feminist lens to contend with both its lineages of feminist worldbuilding and toxic fandom practices and histories.
Of Paper Dolls, Feminist Killjoys and Queer Space Utopias: Gayle F’s Kirk/Spock Erotic Fanart in the Barbara P. Gordon Collection
Rea McNamara (York University)
3:30
4 PM
In Digital Dream: Are DreamToks the New Surrealism?
Riley Wilson (TMU/York University)
Freud’s exploration of dreams was one of the inspirations for the surrealist art movement, demonstrating the capacity for the world of the unconscious to spark new ways of thinking. This ongoing project examines the continued entanglement of dreams and art through the rise of Dream Simulation TikToks, or “DreamToks.” My focus is on two key DreamTok creators—Savanah Moss and Grant Beene—whose work is high-quality and well thought-out. My project includes both critical analysis and research creation: I will create a DreamTok of my own to better understand this digital movement. My research asks: first, and most importantly- what are Dreamtoks? Do they constitute an emergent form of surrealist art? How do the cultural and technological forces that shaped them parallel or diverge from those surrounding early surrealism? What are the political implications of the popularity of these works now? To answer these questions, I conducted close readings of twenty recent TikToks from Moss and Beene alongside news coverage of their work. The theoretical grounding for my project comes from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, key surrealist texts, and contemporary scholarship on dream sequences in cinema, especially in the work of David Lynch. By situating DreamToks within the genealogy of surrealism, this project contributes to an understanding of how the surrealist tradition can manifest itself on new media platforms. Producing my own DreamTok clarifies the creative processes at play, offering analytical insight and an embodied understanding of how algorithmic media might serve to reanimate the dream as a site of collective feeling in the digital age. By reimagining the surrealist dream through digital media, this project (art)iculates the unspoken language of the unconscious—one that resists fixed interpretation and invites more fluid, collective, and affective ways of knowing attuned to a world mediated by political, algorithmic, and aesthetic transformation.
4:30
Comment la spéculation narrative, en tant que procédé de réécriture, peut-elle réactiver la tragédie antique dans le théâtre québécois contemporain, en renouvelant les liens entre mémoire, imaginaire et fabulation ?
Annabelle Bureau (Université de Montréal)
Mon projet de maîtrise-création en théâtre à l’UQAM s’intéresse à la réécriture de la tragédie grecque dans une perspective spéculative. J’essaie de comprendre comment ces récits fondateurs, souvent perçus comme figés ou sacrés, peuvent être réinventés à partir d’un questionnement contemporain. L’idée n’est pas de les adapter, mais de les rejouer autrement. Mon objectif n’est pas de les rendre pertinents, mais de prouver que ces récits le sont toujours. Je m’intéresse à la zone floue entre la traduction, la réécriture et l’adaptation, entre la fidélité au texte et l’envie d’en détourner le sens, explorer ce qui se trouve dans les craques de son plancher. Ce qui m’importe, c’est de trouver une manière d’écrire qui reste accessible, vivante, ancrée dans notre culture québécoise : un théâtre qui parle de l’ordinaire tout en restant traversé par le sublime. La spéculation narrative me sert ici d’outil d’écriture et de réflexion : elle me permet de tester des hypothèses à travers la fiction, de me demander « et si ? » Et si le mythe se passait aujourd’hui, dans un autre contexte, sous une autre lumière, en mettant en vedette notre voisin et sa mère ? C’est une façon d’explorer comment le théâtre peut produire du savoir autrement, en passant par le sensible, par le récit, par le jeu, par l’ordinaire et le quotidien. Que se passe-t-il lorsqu’on enlève les héros, les dragons, les capes dans la tragédie, pour n’en garder que l’essence? En lien avec la thématique (art)iculer des mondes, ma démarche propose une réflexion sur la réécriture comme moyen d’ouvrir des passages entre les époques, entre les discours savants et populaires, entre ce qu’on hérite et ce qu’on invente. Ma présentation prendra la forme d’un partage de fragments de réécritures et de réflexions sur le processus, dans un aller-retour entre théorie et pratique.
5 PM
Sucúa Haven: Rethinking Multimodal Methods through the Possibilities of Circulation
Vanessa Teran Collantes
Sucúa Haven is a research-creation project that examines notions of belonging among Ecuadorians in New Haven, Connecticut (US). The project’s name originates from Sucúa, a city in the Ecuadorian Amazon where many collaborators come from. Using oral history, applied theater methodologies, and photo production and elicitation, the project represents, reinhabits, and reimagines the memories, dreams, and alternative lives of its participants. It explores how this community navigates belonging and isolation through translocal and transtemporal experiences and imaginaries. From this process, a photo-ethnofiction emerged made of a collection of short stories that together create a portrait of Sucúa Haven—a territory that exists in the United States but is also, simultaneously, Ecuador. By employing an interdisciplinary and multimodal approach, the project positions imagination—through memory and fiction—as a central dimension for understanding migrant experiences, moving beyond material realities to explore less-visible aspects such as affect, longing, and desire. The paper critically examines the methodologies used and their complementarity. It then focuses on how these approaches facilitate the circulation of the project’s outputs across diverse spaces, including oral history performances, gallery and museum installations, and listening activities with other migrant communities. These have taken place in academic institutions such as Yale (US) and FLACSO (Ecuador); community-oriented venues like a popular restaurant in downtown New Haven and the Communal Hall in Sucúa, Ecuador; the Consulate of Ecuador in Madrid; the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Quito; and Fly Gallery in Cuenca, along with academic and artistic publications. By centering circulation as a key element of multimodality, the paper highlights its potential for democratization—portraying a transnational community and territory as well as fostering dialogue and connection across symbolic borders, and moving audiences and collaborators within these distinct contexts.
Friday, January 23: resisting worlds
9AM
Engaged music: An essential vector for understanding colonial and postcolonial power dynamics in Haiti
Jean Francky Guerrier (Université de Montréal)
This research examines Haitian engaged music as a key vector of resistance against colonial, neocolonial, and epistemic structures. Through an interdisciplinary approach combining postcolonial studies, musical discourse analysis, and performativity theory, this research explores how artists such as Manno Charlemagne, Boukman Eksperyans, and RAM mobilize music to articulate political, spiritual, and identity-based consciousness. Drawing on the works of Spivak, Fanon, Gilroy, Escobar, and Hurbon, the study demonstrates that Haitian engaged music goes beyond aesthetics to become a space of knowledge and social transformation. Through its lyrics, rhythms, and symbols, it amplifies the voice of the subaltern and reconfigures power relations from a decolonial perspective. By combining culture, spirituality, and resistance, this music situates Haiti within an epistemology of the South that opens a path toward a pluriversal understanding of the world and forms of collective life. The theoretical framework of this research relies on several complementary approaches. First, John L. Austin’s theory of performativity (1970) makes it possible to view music as an act that affects reality: to sing is to act. Haitian protest songs do not merely describe a situation, they transform it, evoking hope, anger, or mobilization. Second, postcolonial and decolonial theories (Spivak, 1994; Fanon, 2011; Gilroy, 1995; Escobar, 2020; Hurbon, 1988) provide a framework for understanding how music expresses resistance to symbolic and cognitive domination inherited from colonialism. Finally, ethnomusicological approaches (Averill, 1997; Deren, 2004; Largey, 2022) shed light on the links between rhythm, Vodou, and identity. Methodologically, the analysis combines lyrics, performance, and historical context to demonstrate how music becomes a social and spiritual language.
9:30
À la croisée des mondes épistémiques : (art)iculations des savoirs environnementaux
Renata Moreira Fontoura (Université de Montréal)
À partir de l'observation fine de la croisée des mondes épistémiques, cette communication interroge les (art)iculations et les conflits qui animent le champ des évaluations d'impact environnemental (ÉIE). En suivant le parcours et les pratiques de professionnels du secteur environnemental au Brésil et au Canada, cette enquête ethnographique multi-située révèle comment l'idéal de « science environnementale corporative » — basée sur une rationalité technico-scientifique hégémonique assujettie aux impératifs marchands du néolibéralisme — opère une violence symbolique implicite qui marginalise systématiquement d'autres formes de savoir. Les savoirs relationnels, affectifs, tacites et immatériels sont rendus inaudibles, systématiquement disqualifiés par le langage standardisé des rapports techniques. L'analyse se concentre sur les micro-pratiques de ces professionnels en tant que médiateurs environnementaux, dont le quotidien - loin d'une simple exécution technique - est marqué par une lutte constante pour (art)iculer des mondes dissonants. Ils développent ainsi des réseaux informels de réflexion et de réforme professionnelle pour préserver les savoirs critiques, ainsi que des stratégies discursives pour contester le statu quo. En cartographiant ces fissures, je révèle que le champ des ÉIE, bien que traversé par des asymétries, constitue un laboratoire crucial pour une résistance silencieuse et quotidienne du métier environnemental, ouvrant la voie à une production des connaissances pluriverselles face à un monde en transition. Cette réflexion s'inscrit dans le cadre de ma thèse de doctorat, où j'analyse la manière dont les professionnels de l'environnement réinventent au quotidien les conceptions du développement durable et les principes de démocratie délibérative. Mon travail met en lumière comment ces négociations, traversées par des impératifs marchands, donnent lieu à l'émergence d'un « capitalisme affectif » dans le champ environnemental - un régime où la sensibilité est mobilisée, instrumentalisée et marchandisée.
10AM
ratemycop.ca: a pedagogy of equality against the policing of information
Daniel Platts (York University)
ratemycop.ca is an anonymous archive and counter-surveillance platform intended to provide the public with a secure site for the generation and dissemination of vital information on police activity in their communities. Currently under development, the site works to combine the rigor of existing state violence archives with the user created content of social media to attend to a lack of public data on policing, and the insecurity of using social media sites for counter-surveillance activity, thereby challenging the question of who has the right to write the public record. The policing of information refers to the use of ideological and repressive state apparatuses to control the conditions of sensibility/knowledge. The site works to confront the policing of information with the creation of technology that generates information on the police without providing the police with information on people. Following the call to overcome the traditional limitations of academic publishing often heard in research-creation, this project seeks to make research public by inviting the public in as researchers. Peer to peer capabilities are provided alongside the main archive through a fork of Webtorrent to enable the formation of autonomous research groups that can share data directly with each other without needing to go through the server first. In this way articulating worlds knowable only to those trusted to access them.
10:30
Crying Out Within the Algorithm: Fragmented Voices of Chinese Factory Workers on TikTok
Qingsong Xu (Queen’s University)
This project, is about the broken and vulnerable attempts by Chinese factory workers to speak about their lived realities via TikTok(Douyin) under increasing digital surveillance and algorithmic regulation. Under the surveillance-heavy conditions, when their traditional avenues for labor advocacy and public speech are limited or unavailable, workers release short-video posts as alternative means for expression. Posting under the banner of “citizens of the People’s Republic of China,” they request for an eight-hour workday, two-day weekends, and better wages — not only material demands, but also the right to be seen. However, these algorithmic articulations oscillate between amplification and erasure: some videos briefly go viral, while others are swiftly removed once they gain traction. The algorithm thus functions as both a megaphone and a muzzle—momentarily enabling speech before restoring silence. By analyzing a selection of worker-generated TikTok videos and their comment networks, this project examines how fragmented voices circulate, gain ephemeral solidarity, and then dissolve into digital obscurity. With a focus in media studies, this project asks: what does it mean to “speak” when your only trace is at the mercy of a blackbox algorithm? How do algorithmic infrastructure reproduce social hierarchies and labor invisibility? Drawing on theorists of affective labor, algorithmic governance, and digital precarity , this project reimagines articulation as a state of resonance rather than representation: an ongoing conversation between the silenced and the system that renders it as such. This project in turn also responds to the theme of the symposium: to (art)iculate worlds spoken in fragments: worlds where sound is data, protest is a pattern — visible for a moment, at risk of deletion always after.
11AM
“Micro-Media and Cultural Renaissance in the Mahsa Amini Uprising: Persian Symbols and Secular-Feminist Resistance in Iranian Visual Protest Media”
Saba Z. Masjedyan Jazzy (Université de Montréal)
This research-creation project explores how micro-media became instruments of (art)iculation during Iran's Mahsa Amini uprising, giving voice to worlds previously silenced by authoritarian discourse. When traditional language fails under censorship and state violence, how do oppressed communities create alternative vocabularies of resistance? The uprising witnessed an unprecedented cultural renaissance where Instagram stories, TikTok videos, and digital graffiti transformed into spaces of feminist-secular resistance. These platforms enabled Iranians to (art)iculate experiences that official narratives systematically erased—the rage of mandatory hijab, generational trauma, and dreams of freedom. Through visual analysis, this project examines how Persian cultural symbols (pre-Islamic motifs to contemporary street art) were reimagined as political expression, creating "visual insurgency." This work directly engages the symposium's core question of articulating worlds "when language fails us." Under Iran's surveillance state, direct political speech becomes impossible; protesters developed sophisticated visual grammar—hair as protest, dance as defiance, ancient symbols as modern resistance. These weren't reactions but creative world-making practices reimagining Iranian identity beyond theocratic boundaries. The project challenges academic valorization of traditional knowledge by centering ephemeral social media as legitimate theory-making sites. It amplifies voices missing from scholarly discourse: young Iranian women whose bodies became battlegrounds, whose creativity became survival. Through combining academic analysis with curated protest media, this presentation demonstrates how marginalized communities create "unruly" knowledge disrupting both authoritarian control and Western academic frameworks. By examining how Iranian protesters (art)iculated freedom through visual media, this project contributes to understanding how subaltern groups create alternative epistemologies when formal expression channels are foreclosed.
computing worlds
1PM
Between Evidence and Transcendence: Using Documentary Poetry to Unravel Research (Workshop)
Wahid Al Mamun (McGill University)
How can a documentary poetics of assemblage enable us to look at our research findings anew? What new audiences can be reached and forged in presenting poetry as research? Finally, how can a poetic (re)presentation of our research build linkages between the academic, aesthetic, and political commitments to the world around us? Taking as its starting point Michel de Certeau’s assertion that everyday life contains the nascent elements of a poetic practice (1980), this workshop invites researchers from all backgrounds to reassess their research data and to re-present their work in documentary verse. Thus, the workshop challenges participants to: 1) reconsider what normative and disciplinary conventions dictate their collection of research “data”; and 2) locate an available and emancipating medium through which research findings can be democratized. By the end of this workshop, participants will learn more about the history and conventions of “documentary poetry”, or poetry that incorporates real-life documents—such as letters, archives, and articles—into the world of the poem (Metres 2007). Additionally, participants will be introduced to different strategies—such as erasure, found poetry, decontextualization, and bricolage—that can be used to locate the poetic pulse within their research material. Although some documentary material will be provided, participants are strongly encouraged to bring their own research material that they are sitting with—such as fieldnotes, primary documents, newspaper reports, papers, essays, readings, photographs, film, etc.—to the workshop. Overall, this workshop will place critical pressure on the language, discourses, and ideologies that shape research practices, offering a creative, playful, and liberatory path out of language to confront these issues through poetic ekphrasis. The workshop model also opens up a rich space for interdisciplinary and un-disciplinary collaboration, reimagining how our particular forms of knowledge production can be shared across disciplinary silos in ways that can undo them.
2PM
Keynote: Deborah Ahenkorah
3PM
Emergent Archivism
Zachary Fleury (Concordia University)
This research-creation project investigates how sound can operate as a mode of emergent archivism—an approach to archiving that resists closure, linearity, and fixity. In contrast to conventional archives that aim to preserve and stabilize knowledge, this project explores how archives might remain open, process-based, and responsive to ongoing ecological, social, and material change. Through sound-based practices and theoretical inquiry, I seek to understand how we might articulate worlds when language, image, or text fail to capture the complexity of relations in flux. I consider how ruins, as sites of both decay and becoming-other, can be conceptualized as an emerging archive. Through the ephemerality and relationality of sound, the project seeks to attune listeners to the vitality of ruined spaces and the forces that shape them. Sound is well suited for this because it is relational by nature: to listen to leaves moving with the wind forces you to ask is it the wind I’m hearing, or the leaves? It is both—and the relationship that exists between them. The project situates ruins not as symbols of loss but as sites of emergence. They are places where decaying material infrastructures meet ecological continuities. Currently, I am experimenting with different processes by which we can sound these relationships and present them through sound installations. Emergent Archivism asks how we might live with instability and loss. It asks how we might archive in response to a world that is always in transition, which is exacerbated by fast-paced ecological change. Ultimately, this project seeks to expand the concept of the archive beyond static preservation toward living, evolving assemblages. Through the poetics of sound and the material realities of ruins, it reimagines how we document and dwell within a world in perpetual becoming.
3:30
Gendered Entanglements: Feminist Histories of Weaving, Computing, and Women’s Labour
Elyssa Bush (McGill University)
This project explores the overlooked entanglements between weaving and computing through a feminist media lens, centering the gendered and racialized labour that underpins modern technological development. Drawing on feminist historiography and critical theory, I am developing a methodology that integrates historical analysis with creative textile practice to reveal how “women’s work”—weaving, textile production, and domestic craft—forms the material and conceptual substrate of contemporary computation. Beginning with the Jacquard loom and Ada Lovelace’s algorithmic contributions, and extending to Navajo women’s weaving of semiconductors and the handwoven core memory of the Apollo missions, I trace an alternative genealogy of computing rooted in embodied knowledge and material practices. By situating fibre arts within the context of computational logic, I challenge dominant, masculinized narratives of technological innovation. As a practice-based intervention, I am producing a woven tapestry that renders the phrase “women’s work” in binary code, using black and white fibres to visualize code as text(ile). This work enacts a methodological commitment to feminist media praxis—one that (art)iculates knowledge through the material, the tactile, and the historically overlooked.
4PM
The Most Fun A Poor Person Can Have Without Getting in Trouble: A Playing Card Thesis Presentation
Kellyann Marie (Queen’s University)
For my MFA thesis, I made a deck of cards. Instead of standing at a podium and reading a paper, I played cards with my committee. Each card held a symbol from my art practice — an alligator, a dandelion, a dollar-store Jesus — and linked to an infinitely clickable website that mapped the stories and theories embedded in those images. My work asked: what would a thesis look like if it were made for the people I come from? My impoverished Southern family might not read a traditional academic paper, but they’d sit down for a game of cards. This presentation will explore play as a method of knowledge articulation — how form itself can act as theory when language or academic codes fail to hold lived experience. The deck of cards became both archive and portal, a way to build a scholarly world that reflected the rhythm of gossip, chance, and survival that shaped my upbringing. In this talk, I’ll discuss how “The Most Fun a Poor Person Can Have Without Getting in Trouble” reimagines what counts as research by translating autoethnography into something tactile, circular, and relational. This project sits at the intersection of art-making, feminist theory, and class critique. It asks what happens when an academic thesis is designed not to perform legibility, but to play — to (art)iculate a world that was never meant to be footnoted.
4:30
Sewing our skin: the construction of self through textile creation
Cassiopeia (Cassie) Wong-Wylie (University of Toronto)
The first clothes we wore were the bodies of our mothers, and perhaps we spend our lives looking to live in clothing that is as intimate, safe, and protective. Through this analogy, our clothes become an extension of our skin; a surfacing of ourselves. This paper explores how we surface identity through clothing and stitch our identities together when we sew our own garments. More specifically, it asks not how we curate our clothing as embodied skin, but what it would mean to engage the reflexive and laborious process of sewing these textiles ourselves; asking how can this process reveal new desires and extension of self, reflecting a radical practice of patchworking worlds that are tailored to us, rather than one that never wanted to clothe us in the first place. This praxis is interwoven with ideas of self-opacity and citational practice to create a vocabulary of self that is often elusive for queer people of colour (Musser, 2018). This project embodies the conference’s intent: as violent systems of capitalism and colonialism have severed us from the language of self-understanding and expression, textile work becomes a practice of making and remaking ourselves, unearthing an embodied self that was previously inarticulate. This paper takes the analogy of clothing as skin from Kirsty Dunseath in A Second Skin: Women Write About Clothes (1998) and explores it through the theoretical concepts from Matt Ratto’s critical making studies (2011) and Donna Haraway’s conception of situated knowledge (1988). These epistemological lenses emphasize the integration of hands-on making with critical inquiry, where material creation and intellectual reflection intersect (Ratto). Through seeing this knowledge of self as produced from specific contexts and perspectives (Haraway), the research process itself becomes a form of making the self and resistance to colonial knowledge systems.