Call for Proposals

The Graduate Program at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication invites proposals for the annual CONDUITS 2026 conference on May 8th, this year entitled: “Modulations: Affect, Resistance, and Control.”

Modulation, as reconfiguration and calibration, is everywhere. Per the biological sciences, it reflects regulatory but impermanent alteration. Within 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. 

Contact

Please visit our website conduits.ca for further details, or reach out to us at conduitsconference@gmail.com with questions/comments/suggestions. 

References

Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the Societies of Control. October, 59, 3–7. JSTOR. 

Derrida, J. (1973). Différance (1967) (Trans: D. B. Allison). In Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (pp. 129-160). Northwestern University Press. 

Hall, S. (Ed.). (1997). Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices. Sage Publications. 

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. McGraw-Hill. 

Modulation (n.d.). Cambridge Dictionary. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/modulation