The Graduate Program at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication invites proposals for the annual CONDUITS 2025 conference, this year entitled: “Incommunicative: Failure, Refusal, Resistance.”

The term “Incommunicative” is defined as “unwilling or unable to talk to people and give them information” in the Cambridge dictionary. The Incommunicative may be seen as the “opposite” to communication, but this conference attempts to explore how the Incommunicative and communication go hand-in-hand. The Incommunicative can serve as both a mode of resistance and a catalyst for social change. Galloway et al. (2014), state that “every communication evokes a possible excommunication that would instantly annul it” (p. 10), harbouring the possibility of every communication becoming Incommunicative. Therefore, it is important to examine how the Incommunicative can lead to failure, refusal and resistance. The Incommunicative can be seen as “failure” itself, exploring questions around recognition and “legibility” and how it is always possible to “fail”. We aim to rethink the power inherent in failure itself. 

The Incommunicative can also be the refusal to be affected––resistance movements are seen as “too emotional” (too much affect) (Huang, 2022). What does it mean when inscrutability (the refusal to be affected) becomes incommunicative and therefore a form of resistance? According to Mohan Dutta (2012), Resistance can be understood in terms of the cultural, social, political, and economic processes that are directed at transforming the global structures of material inequalities and the communicative inequalities that accompany these global structures. We question the inequalities present in traditional communication, and ask how to transform the very communicative structures such as infrastructures, processes, and rules that have long excluded subaltern perspectives. 

This conference aims to answer the question: how does the Incommunicative help us understand communication? What does it mean to be Incommunicative in a world where “communication” seems constant?

Some possible themes may include, but are not limited to:

• Postcolonial/anticolonial/decolonization and communicability

• Resisting the academy

• Incommunicative/Unreachable via social media and data

• Digital dissidence and big data cultures 

• The refusal to be affected and therefore incommunicable (?)

• Imagining beyond what is and can be readily communicated through delimited systems of meaning–such as non-human actors, environments, etc.

• Memory, mourning and the “unspoken”

• Incommunicative borders and the negotiation of identity 

• Decolonial Diaspora: the politics of not speaking up 

• Critiques of Communicative Capitalism 

• Incommunicative practices in virtual worlds

• The commodification of incommunicability 

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

We welcome individual and co-authored proposals for paper presentations as well as artistic interventions:

• Submissions should include an abstract of approximately 200-250, 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.

• Art works can be audio-visual, up to 10 minutes in length (mp3 or mp4), or up to 10 images (JPG, PNG, or GIF). Submissions may take the form of a short excerpt, up to a third of the length of the final submission. Please include a short (50-100 words) 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).

Please make all submissions to the Google form before midnight (11:59pm PST) Wednesday, April 2nd, 2025.  Submissions will be considered on a rolling basis.

Contact:

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

Accessibility Statement:

We are committed to creating an accessible conference for everyone. For participants attending the conference in-person, we are pleased to welcome you at Simon Fraser University’s Burnaby campus. If you have any questions or requests for accommodation, please reach out to us at conduitsconference@gmail.com with the subject line “Accessibility”.

Land Acknowledgment:

Simon Fraser University has three campuses. We acknowledge the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), səl̓ilw̓ ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), q̓íc̓ əy̓ (Katzie), kwikwəƛ ̓ əm (Kwikwetlem), Qayqayt, Kwantlen, Semiahmoo and Tsawwassen peoples on whose unceded traditional territories our three campuses sit. It is vital we continuously think about our role in on-going settler-colonialism and engage in material action.

References:

Cambridge Dictionary. (n.d.). Incommunicative. In Cambridge Dictionary. Retrieved March 5, 2025, from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/incommunicative

Dutta, M. J. (2012). Voices of resistance : Communication and social change. Purdue University Press.

Galloway, A. R., Thacker, E., & Wark, M. (2014). Excommunication: Three inquiries in media and mediation. The University of Chicago Press.

Huang, V. L. (2022). Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability. Duke University Press.