Virtual Graduate Conference
May 12-13, 2022
Failure: Systems at their Limit is a student-run conference organized by first-year MA students in the Media Studies program at Concordia University in Tio'tia:ke/Montreal.
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Failure: Systems at their Limit
Failure: Systems at their LimitVirtual Conference May 12-13, 2022
( La version française suit ci-dessous )
As a practice, failure recognizes that alternatives are embedded already in the dominant and that power is never total or consistent; indeed failure can exploit the unpredictability of ideology and its indeterminate qualities.1
–Jack Halberstam, “The Queer Art of Failure”
–Jack Halberstam, “The Queer Art of Failure”
“Failure: Systems at their Limit” is a multimedia graduate conference grounded in the field of Communication and Media Studies. For this year's theme we invite participants to think and experiment with and through failure in its many forms. We encourage attendees to explore their own relationships with failure at any scale, as well as in the intersections of the personal and the collective. We understand failure as a complex and continuous process that can be both deeply personal and political — playing out in our nervous systems and across vast networks. Failure is felt differently by everyone. It can be destabilizing, but can also lead to unforeseen possibilities: creative breakthroughs, unfamiliar terrain, and innovative solutions to questions we had not yet posed. In the form of planned obsolescence, it can be a capitalist strategy. At the institutional level, it can behave as an instrument of oppression. And, in the face of these powers, it can be a tool of resistance. Failure can be total, partial, blatant, or obscured — it can mark an ending or create space for new forms of life and livelihood.
As global systems are pushed to their limits and our bodyminds are forced to grapple with the shifting world around us, we invite you to get curious about failure, its nuances and contradictions, its possibilities. Together, we hope to explore the fractured terrain that surfaces beneath notions of perpetual progress and unrestricted growth. At this crucial turning point where people and resources are exhausted, we ask: what can failure reveal and what can it teach us?
Download the call for proposals
(submissions closed)
(submissions closed)
- Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 88.
Failure: Systems at their Limit
Failure: Systems at their Limit
Conférence virtuelle 12-13 mai, 2022
En tant que pratique, l'échec reconnaît que les alternatives sont déjà intégrées dans le dominant et que le pouvoir n'est jamais total ou cohérent ; en effet, l'échec peut exploiter l'imprévisibilité de l'idéologie et ses qualités indéterminées.[Traduction libre]
-Jack Halberstam, "The Queer Art of Failure"
-Jack Halberstam, "The Queer Art of Failure"
Alors que les systèmes qui nous entourent sont déstabilisés, poussés à leur limites, les individus doivent s’adapter à un monde en changement. C’est dans cette optique que nous vous invitons à réfléchir l’échec, les nuances, contradictions et possibilités générées par ce concept. Cette conférence propose d’explorer le terrain fracturé qui se cache sous les notions de progrès perpétuel et de croissance illimitée. Dans cette époque où l’épuisement des ressources, l’enchevêtrement des crises et l’épuisement des individus est perceptible, nous posons la question : Que révèle le concept d’échec ou de défaillance, qu’est-il possible d’apprendre, de découvrir?
Téléchargez l’appel à proposition
(nous n'acceptons plus les soumissions)
(nous n'acceptons plus les soumissions)
This conference was made possible thanks to contributions from:
Virtual Graduate Conference
May 12-13, 2022
