Under capitalism, we live separated from life. Capital’s extractive colonizing domination keeps us separated from nature, from each other, and from our own bodies, denying us a symbiotic and regenerative relationship with the natural world and with each other. Yet, certain types of bindings are integral to capitalism: capitalism depends on the combination of labour and nature for the production of value; the “emergence of capitalist accumulation and the reproduction of capitalist production” depends on “acts of violent dispossession”, on “tearing Indigenous societies, peasants, and other small-scale, self-sufficient agricultural producers from the source of their livelihood––the land” (Coulthard 2014). Capitalism is bound, in order to reproduce itself, to certain separations, so that its separations and bindings are co-constitutive. 

The upholding of capital’s expansion is inseparable from dispossession, ongoing colonialization, and utter environmental destruction. Since the 1960s, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has tripled, mostly as the result of fossil fuel combustion. The world’s wealthiest one percent is responsible for double the CO2 emissions of the poorest half of the world’s population. Deaths due to extreme weather events rise every year, and more than ninety percent of these deaths during the last-half century happened in the Global South. Violently taken from Indigenous people, forest land is constantly destroyed for commercial agriculture and cattle ranching and increasingly threatened by fires – with the highest rates occurring in South America and Africa. Even now, capitalism creates new frontiers of dispossession and exploitation through, for instance, resource-intensive infrastructures such as data centres, stealing and consuming land and water.

Capitalism necessitates violent separations and associations. It is perhaps inevitable that, to resist the brutality of capitalism, tactics of resistance – of Indigenous resistance more specifically – address capital’s double movement. For instance, pipeline blockades, a historic Indigenous form of resistance in North America and Canada, function both as a form of resistance protecting Indigenous land and sovereignty and as a way to interrupt the flow of capital by blocking the “circulation of extractivist goods” (Clover 2020). Pipeline blockades also consist of practical encampments, sites that, to maintain their interruptions, reproduce themselves every day by supplying care, shelter, food, and community (Clover 2020). In this way, “the reproduction of the camp is the blockade, the blockade is the reproduction of the camp” (Clover 2020), and the two movements are bound to each other, they sustain each other. Even negative emotions, such as “anger and resentment” (Coulthard 2014), by refusing a reconciliation with the “colonial sovereignty of the state” (Coulthard 2015), create an interruption that can be generative of anticolonial resistance and radical politics. And if we turn to non-human nature, we find another form of a generative interruption in the beaver dam. In A Short History of The Blockade, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson likens beaver dams to blockades for the ways in which beavers build dams that, by creating interruptions, generate ecosystems for the thriving of fish, moose, deer, elks, amphibians, insects, birds, trees, and more. With their dams, beavers work “continuously with water and land and animal and plant nations and consent and diplomacy to create worlds, to create shared worlds” (Simpson 2021), showing that “land [is a] system of reciprocal relations and obligations” (Coulthard 2014).

This interdisciplinary symposium wants to instigate and investigate forms of resistance to the separations and bindings enacted by the domination of capital where interruptions are world-building and associations generative – sites that become “both a negation and an affirmation” (Simpson 2021). Thinking together with Joshua Clover about tactics of struggle as simultaneously about building and fighting, “care and militancy” (2021) – the terms with which he theorizes the commune that reproduces the pipeline blockade – with Glen Coulthard (2014) about “dwelling on the negative” as generative of forms of anticolonial resistance, and with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson about “living as a creative act” (2021), we want to ask what are the forms and sites that are both an interruption and a continuation, and what are the forms and sites that can reconfigure the sharing and co-generating of life by being a negation of life under capitalism. We invite presenters to join us to think together about ways in which we can create these sites, places where we can find them, and examples of them – about ways “to think and act both creatively and destructively” (Kass 2025). We welcome people from within and beyond academia. We welcome researchers, thinkers, performers, creative practitioners, polemicists, antagonists, revolutionists, and more. If this topic speaks to you and your work in any way, we would like to hear about it.

 Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Contemporary landscapes of resistance to dispossession, exploitation, expropriation, oppression, and genocide (anticolonial, labour, policing and prisons, environmental struggles, etc) 
• Indigenous, anticolonial, trans, queer, and feminist forms of collective organizing
• The generative potentials of negative emotions 
• Struggles against digital infrastructure and the material impacts of digital capitalism 
• Histories of broader environmental struggle
• Processes of denial/affirmation of climate change, mass extinction, and capitalism
• Bodies and embodiment along the lines of class, gendering, racialisation, ableness
• The interruptions and generations of affect in the face of environmental collapse
• Ecosystems as communes, communes as ecosystems
• Representations of communes in literature and media
• Synergies and tensions between theory and revolutionary practice

We invite abstracts of no more than 300 words and a 150 words bio for presentations and performances. For proposals of roundtables and pre-formed panels, please submit an abstract for the roundtable/panel of no more than 500 words and a bio for each speaker. All proposals should include name, email address, and academic affiliation (if applicable). Please send your abstract, bios, and any query to negationsymposium2026@gmail.com. 

Attendance is free, but registration is mandatory on Eventbrite. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 31 March 2026, and we aim to notify everyone of the outcome by 15 April 2026. Please let us know if you need early notification. 

The symposium will be held at the Humanities Institute at University College Dublin on May 21st and 22nd, 2026, and it will feature a keynote lecture by Dr Glen Coulthard (The University of British Columbia). The symposium will be a masked and hybrid event, and we happily welcome both in-person and virtual proposals. Please include in your proposal if you would rather present in person or on Zoom.

The symposium is organised by UCD PhD candidates Robin Steve, Romeo Fraccari, Simon Costello, Dylan Murphy, with the support of the Humanities Institute Environmental Humanities Strand.