We are happy to announce the call for presentations for the upcoming symposium titled “Figure it Out: The Art of Living Through System Failures”. This multidisciplinary gathering welcomes proposals from the fields of humanities, social sciences and artistic practice. Alongside academic papers and panel discussions, we welcome non-traditional and experimental formats.

Programme curated by: Margerita Pulè and Adnan Hadziselimovic

Gendered, racialized, bordered and exploited, marginalised, underserved, discriminated and vulnerable communities are often forced to develop tools and strategies that are considered unacceptable to the institutions of the system; thus developing practices and phenomena of coping, tinkering, making-do and circumventing exclusions. Sometimes these tools and strategies are forged out of necessity, of survival, sometimes to exercise rights or to secure access to basic services available only to ‘deserving’ citizens. Such tools and strategies are always aimed at a certain system (state, welfare institutions, corporations, workplace, credit, housing, utilities etc.) that has its own rules and conditions of access that these communities or individuals cannot meet, producing and reproducing systemic exclusion.

Finding ‘holes in the system’ and developing strategies to take advantage of system weaknesses, people use their ingenuity to avoid detrimental effects on their lives and lives of their communities.

Moreover, such practices have now expanded into the digital sphere, where they are facing new kinds of power structures and also getting recombined in interesting ways. As dataveillance, algorithmic governance and digital profiling seep into mechanisms of exclusion and dispossession, from border controls to public transport, education, health and housing, new workarounds, tinkering and hacking emerges. As they do with the growing impacts of climate change, forcing underserved communities across the globe to be resourceful and devise their own forms of adaptation.

We are particularly seeking contributions that critically examine the ethical dimensions of practices deemed illicit and illegal in mainstream contexts, considering their political implications and necessity in the face of exclusion. We encourage analyses of practices of ingenuity, of figuring it out, that people devise facing systemic exclusions perpetuated by state, corporate, or social institutions. Topics might include, but are not limited to;

System Failures and Social Exclusion: Exploration of strategies used by disenfranchised groups to navigate and subvert constraints imposed by administrative and algorithmic regimes;

Innovative Practices of Resistance: Discussions on frugal innovation and counter-innovation as responses to the rise of neo-fascisms and the rise of emergencies connected to ecological collapse;

Ambivalent Figures of Resilient Subjectivation: Critical analysis of many figures that figure it out practitioners are typically stigmatised as: “welfare queens”, scroungers, cheaters, free riders, scamleteers, tricksters… ;

Ethics of Research with Marginalized Constituencies:  Critical and reflexive methodologies for research practices into illegal and unlawful, particularly the concept of ‘ethnographic refusal’;

Cultural and Historical Perspectives of ‘Figuring It Out’: Historical and cross-cultural comparisons of ‘figuring it out’ practices, stories and characterizations, as presented in artistic praxis, as well as folk and popular cultures.

Submission Guidelines:

Please submit a short bio and abstract using the form here.