The Graduate program at Simon Fraser University School of Communication hosts an annual conference, CONDUITS, this year entitled Incommunicative: Failure, Refusal, Resistance.

The 2024 CONDUITS Conference will take place on Friday, May 9th, 2025, in-person at Simon Fraser University's Burnaby Campus in Burnaby, BC, Canada. 

Call for Proposals 

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.