[spectre] figure it out: Call for presentations and artist-talks @malta society of arts (deadline 10/3/24)

[brainstorm]

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.

The project’s Closing Symposium will be held at the Malta Society of 
Arts, Valletta, Malta between 18 – 20 September 2024, alongside an 
exhibition.

Submission deadline: 10 March 2024
Response date: by 30 April 2024
Symposium program announcement: by 30 July 2024
Registration deadline: 31 August 2024
Exhibition opening: 18 September 2024
Symposium dates: 19 & 20 September 2024

Please submit a short bio and abstract using the form: 
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScL88B8gMybUw2hMJJPltkdEpeP41r0bEyKTVSsW_bf9jOcQQ/viewform 


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.