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:


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. 

Submission Guidelines and other information:

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


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.



Best Paper Award

In order to be considered for the Best Paper Award for the 2025 CONDUITS Conference, full papers must be submitted before April 25th, 2025. Your abstract must be accepted before the submission of the full paper. 



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.