Issue 9: RESISTANCE

1 - resistance_smallfilesize.jpeg

Photo credit: Kim Munro - no title, 2018

Call for Proposals

Guest Editors:

ABOUT

Foucault writes, “Where there is power, there is resistance” (1990, 95). To resist—from its most modest quotidian expression to large-scale community action—implies an action against something, be it injustice, the status quo, and/or entrenched power.

To resist is to stand one’s ground and refuse to act as one is being told one must. Or to be unruly, to break the rules, to experiment and to push the boundaries. We might characterise resistance as that revolutionary impulse that Audre Lorde writes about, “not as a one-time event” but rather as “always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses” (1984, 140-1). As Donna Haraway has argued, “Revolt needs other forms of action and other stories of solace, inspiration and effectiveness” (2016, 49).

To consider the term resistance is to engage with broader questions of power, disobedience, rebellion, refusal, and objection, to name a few. It is to be reminded of long (sometimes forgotten, sometimes ignored) histories of activism for civil and environmental rights across the world. To consider resistance on unceded Boon wurrung and Wurundjeri country, in our case, is to remember the ever-present legacies of colonisation and exploitation.

As creative practitioners, there are various ways we might seek to resist and indeed come up against resistance in our work, many of which counter easy definitions. For example, Stephen Muecke has named deflection, interruption, creation, destruction and disappearance as just some ways of enacting resistance (2020).

How might we understand the various and intersecting critical concerns of resistance? What is resistance as a creative act? Or, as Rosi Braidotti asks, “how can we work towards socially sustainable horizons of hope, through creative resistance?” (2019, 156). This issue of Unlikely responds to the relationship between creative practices and/as resistance.

THEMES

Themes might include, but are not limited to:

FORMAT

The peer-reviewed edition will coincide with a series of public programs and events held in July 2023 across multiple sites in Adelaide. We also invite events which are organised interstate and internationally that form part of the broader network of activities around themes of resistance.

Contributions may include, but are not limited to, the following forms:

Creative researchers in art, performance, film, writing, audio and interdisciplinary practices are encourage to apply

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES and TIMELINE

Abstract which specifies the theme and format (300 words) plus short bio (100 words).

Use this form to submit

CONTACT

References

Braidotti, Rosi. 2019. Posthuman Knowledge, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1978. The history of sexuality. Volume I, An introduction. New York: Vintage Books

Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider. New York: Crossing Press.

Muecke, Stephen. 2020. “Resistance”, Overland, 24 Summer.