Spiral 2027 – Call for Papers
7th Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference
“Resilience”
Vancouver, Canada
May 6-8, 2027
Confirmed keynotes:
• Beenash JAFRI, University of California Davis
• Fred MOTEN, NYU
• Lakshmi PADMANABHAN, University of Chicago
The Spiral Film and Philosophy collective is delighted to announce that its seventh full conference will take place at the University of British Columbia between 6 and 8 May 2027. With this in mind, we are calling for proposals from scholars to take part in the conference, the theme of which this year is resilience.
Derived from the Latin re-salire (‘to leap back’ or ‘rebound’), ‘resilience’ has been used since the 1970s to describe the capacity of psychological, ecological, or computational systems to withstand a threatening change (i.e. crisis) without losing their structural integrity. In recent years of the unfolding permacrisis of global capitalism, the term has gained broader popularity and a subsequent dilution of its meaning, from NGOs measuring the resilience of disenfranchised communities and TikTok influencers preaching a ‘resilience mindset’, to Donald Trump proposing an America First Resilience Strategy.
‘Resilience’ and/or ‘resiliency’ are concepts that have, even within Cinema and Media Studies, been mobilised to characterise persistence especially in the face of the ongoing precarisation of the world (for example, Rueda 2018), and during and in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic – especially in relation to film festivals (de Valck 2020; Grassilli and Colta 2021). Resilience has been understood as a necessary ingredient for women filmmakers like Ida Lupino (Grisham and Grossman 2026), as well as for ‘minority’ filmmakers, such as those in the Chicanx community (Carrizal-Dukes 2021), and those from the Global South, including places like Colombia (Rueda 2018), India (Rani 2025), Kurdistan (Koçer 2014), and the Philippines (Maury and Zuchuat 2026). For all that resilience might characterise the enduring nature of non-western states, as well as those who reside within them – as explored, for example, by filmmakers like Ritwik Ghatak (Oberoi Vahali 2020) and Claudia Llosa (Rojas 2017), resilience has nonetheless been explored as a property of the nation-state as a whole, especially in the face of globalization (Dissanayake 2006), with Andrew Higson demonstrating the ‘resilience of popular national cinemas’ in the age of transnational film (Higson 2021a; Higson 2021b). Indeed, André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion even use the term to define the condition of cinema in the era of digitalization and Netflix (Gaudreault and Marion 2020).
In this respect, resilience pertains as much to hegemonic structures and agents as it does to those who resist them, with Alice Pember highlighting precisely how, unlike resistance, ‘resilience is a neoliberal value that demands bodies “bounce back” from the damage inflicted upon them by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,’ and which thus has melancholy as its inverse (Pember 2020: 298). This connects to Mila Zuo’s reckoning that Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniels, USA, 2022) is an exploration of ‘re-silly-ence’ (Zuo Forthcoming) – itself a creative idea and an expression of agency within the neoliberal academy. Given its multivalent senses and underlying ambivalence, then, the Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference will allow us to think through resilience in numerous ways – led by our excellent keynote speakers, and involving as many participants as is possible.
Confirmed keynotes at the conference include (in alphabetical order) Beenash Jafri (University of California Davis), Fred Moten (NYU) and Lakshmi Padmanabhan (University of Chicago).
The conference will take place on the stolen, ancestral and unceded lands of the Musqueam peoples, and is in 2027 a partnership between the Spiral collective and Cinema Thinks The World, which is funded by UBC’s Grants for Catalyzing Research Clusters scheme.
Send a 350-word (max.) proposal, bibliography (5 max.), and 5 keywords in an anonymous document as an EMAIL ATTACHMENT (PDF) to spiralfilmphilosophy@gmail.com. Include a short biography (with institutional affiliation, if applicable) directly in your email.
The deadline for submitting proposals – be they individual papers or pre-constituted panels of three speakers – is December 4, 2026. All proposals will be double blind-peer reviewed, with speakers notified in January 2027. Papers, except for keynote presentations, are expected to last 20 minutes, including clips, with 90-minute panels consisting of 3 x 20-minute papers and 25 minutes for discussion/Q&As.
The fee for the conference is to be confirmed, pending in particular an application for funding through Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s Connection grant scheme. At any rate, the aim is to keep the fee as low as possible.
Similarly, the final size of the conference is to be confirmed – pending final funding amounts and the number of proposals received. The 2027 Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference will be sure to offer an intimate and invigorating opportunity to carry out and to engage with media-focused critical theoretical work, creating individual and collective resilience in the face of a world system that is iniquitous and destructive along many simultaneous vectors.
The 2027 Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference Committee
(Scott Birdwise, William Brown, Tamás Nagypál, Philippe Theophanidis, with graduate assistance from Mehran Abdollahi, Aadi Bhandari and Zichen Liang)
Spiral Website: spiralfilmphilosophy.ca
Facebook: @spiralphilosophy
Inquiries: spiralfilmphilosophy@gmail.com
References
Carrizal, Dukes, Elvira (2021) ‘Chicanx Filmmaking: Producing the Next Generation of Resilient Cinema,’ Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric, 20:3, pp. 68-78.
de Valck, Marijke (2020) ‘Vulnerabilities and Resiliency in the Festival Ecosystem: Notes on Approaching Film Festivals in Pandemic Times,’ in Philipp Dominik Keidl, Laliv Melamed, Vinzenz Hediger, and Antonio Somaini (eds.), Pandemic Media : Preliminary Notes Toward an Inventory, Lüneberg: Meson Press, pp. 125-135.
Dissanayake, Wimal (2006) ‘Globalization and the Experience of Culture: The Resilience of Nationhood,’ in Natascha Gentz and Stefan Kramer (eds.), Globalization, Cultural Identities, and Media Representations, Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 25-44.
Gaudreault, André, and Philippe Marion (2020) ‘Cinema Hangs Tough,’ in Dominique Chateau and José Moure (eds.), Post-cinema: Cinema in the Post-art Era, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 pp. 67-83.
Grassilli, Mariagiulia, and Alexandra-Maria Colta (2021) ‘The Human Rights Film Network: Festival resilience in the time of Covid-19,’ NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies, 10:1, https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/16258.
Grisham, Therese, and Julie Grossman (2026) Ida Lupino, Director: Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Higson, Andrew (2021a) ‘The resilience of popular national cinemas in Europe (Part One),’ Transnational Screens, 12:3, pp. 199-219.
Higson, Andrew (2021b) ‘The resilience of popular national cinemas in Europe (Part Two),’ Transnational Screens, 12:3, pp. 220-232.
Koçer, Suncem (2014) ‘Kurdish Cinema as a Transnational Discourse Genre: Cinematic Visibility, Cultural Resilience, and Political Agency,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies, 46, pp. 473-488.
Maury, Corinne, and Olivier Zuchuat (eds.) (2026) The Transformative Cinema of Lav Diaz: Aesthetics, Resistence and Resilience (trans. Francis Guévremont), London: Routledge.
Oberoi Vahali, Diamond (2020) ‘Resilience and Survival,’ in Ritwik Ghatak and the Cinema of Praxis: Cultures, Aesthetics and Vision, Singapore: Springer.
Pember, Alice (2020) ‘“Visions of ecstasy”: resilience and melancholy in the musical moments of Bande de filles (Céline Sciamma, 2014),’ French Screen Studies, 20:3-4, pp. 298-316.
Rani, Sudha (2025) ‘A Study of Nationalism through Collective Memory of Transgenerational Trauma and Resilience in Indian Cinema,’ Literary Voice: A Peer Reviewed Journal of English Studies, 25:1 (September), pp. 304-311.
Rojas, Adriana (2017) ‘Mother of pearl, song and potatoes: Cultivating resilience in Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada/Milk of Sorrow (2009),’ Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas, 14:3, pp. 297-314.
Rueda, María Helena (2018) ‘The Politics of Precariousness and Resilience in Contemporary Colombian Films,’ in Constanza Burucúa and Carolina Sitnisky (eds.), The Precarious in the Cinemas of the Americas, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 141-161.
Zuo Mila (Forthcoming) ‘Stupidity, Re(silly)ence, and Mommy Brain in Everything Everywhere All at Once,’ JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, in press, due 2027.