Modulations: Affect, Resistance, and Control

The Graduate Program at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication invites proposals for the annual CONDUITS 2026 graduate conference on May 8th at the SFU Burnaby campus.

Modulation, as reconfiguration and calibration, is everywhere. Per the biological sciences, it reflects regulatory but impermanent alteration. In music, it is defined as a change in style or loudness to effect or achieve an emotion (Cambridge Dictionary). Modulation, then, broadly refers to small changes that occur in response to other stimuli, incrementally operating to achieve a given a/effect. The term also has a rich theoretical pedigree, useful to make sense of power, affect, and being in postmodernity. Deleuze (1992) uses the term to describe the logic of control societies: an infrastructural form of control that operates through the fine-tuning of affect and behaviour in real time via continuous calibration. Modulation, as a mechanism of power, therefore provides a framework for understanding the constant, often banal, institutional, and technological processes of control.

Constant modulations and postponements reflect a datafied (dividual) self; the diagnostics for the digital age diverge from panopticon into more distributed, ambiguous, and challenging notions of control. Social media—the ubiquitous flow of written and audiovisual information, online interactions, and identities—exemplifies the modulating physical, sensorial, affective, cognitive and non-cognitive responses.

Today, we are faced with flows of information that continuously enact and capitalize on our responses. Building on McLuhan’s (1964) insistence that media environments reshape perception and attention, rather than simply delivering content, technology and its devices operate as extensions of the nervous system. Devices are entrenched into the everyday, becoming vessels for injustice, rage, delight, activism or resistance. These affective responses produced by information overflow are bound by technological systems, which extend differences to the embodied senses of being marked by spatiotemporal peculiarities. Put more emphatically, information technologies move faster than we can across time and space—calibrated with the tempo of capitalism. What does resistance look like? If information contains an excess of meaning (Derrida, 1973; Hall, 1997), how can noise be understood? And, if modes of being, sensing, and understanding shape our reality through variation, which itself subtends a logic of control, can resistance be located in moments of variation, noise, and excess? This conference invites applicants to reflect on how we might challenge, contest, or disturb modulated forms of governance.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

● Theorizations of agency and control amid contemporary technologies

● Political resistance and contestation

● Modularity or modules in computation

● Modulation in sound/music

● Affect and emotion

● Political Economy

● Media and Cultural Studies

● Data and surveillance capitalism

● Governance, Power, and Control

● Modularity in language, or LLMs

The CONDUITS organizing committee values the interdisciplinary nature of the graduate program at the School of Communication at SFU. We therefore welcome submissions from a wide variety of academic and disciplinary backgrounds. Past presenters at CONDUITS have come from a range of different fields and disciplines, including media studies, visual arts, film production, geography and urban studies, environmental sciences, computer sciences, anthropology, gender studies, sociology, literature, and political science.

We welcome individual and co-authored proposals for paper presentations as well as multi-modal works such as artworks, films, or performances:

• Paper presentation submissions should include an abstract of approximately 200-250 words, providing a brief description of the topic’s relevance to the conference theme, keywords, a title, and the authors’ full name(s), as well as institutional affiliations, if any. We also ask for a short biography of 50-100 words and contact information of the presenter(s). Paper presentations must plan to accommodate, at maximum, 15-minute individual presentations.

• Multi-modal presentation submissions can be audio-visual: up to 10 minutes in length (mp3 or mp4), or up to 10 images (JPG, PNG, or GIF), or web/software-based, with a description, link, video, or file attached to the website or software. Submissions for applicable formats, such as performances, may also take the form of a short excerpt, up to a third of the length of the final submission. All submissions must include a short (50-100 words) description of your work/topic and its relevance to the conference theme, with keywords, a title, the authors’ full name(s), and institutional affiliations, if any. We also ask for a short biography of 50-100 words and contact information of the presenter(s).

Please make all submissions to this form before midnight (11:59 PST) Sunday, April 12th, 2026. Submissions will be considered on a rolling basis.

CONDUITS is an annual long-running graduate conference organized by students in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Canada. We take pride in our program's legacy of critically-engaged research, and uphold this through ongoing commitments in the CONDUITS conference. Each year, we invite proposals from research pertaining to topics in media and communication studies, and welcome interdisciplinary participation from departments both in and beyond SFU. 

For more information, including previous conferences, please refer to our about page here. 

To get in touch with us, please contact the organizing committee at conduitsconference@gmail.com.