https://asap17.exordo.com/panels/23/contribute/27a7ffdba8a46063d3a14b1de...

From Venezuela to our neighboring Minnesota, institutions, both political and academic, silence artists, scholars, and educators, undermine international sovereignty, and surveil and suppress student activism. We live in a world that purports post-raciality and postcoloniality, yet regimes of suppression persist. On the other hand, when we mobilize to contest or refract, states and institutions co-opt all: slogans, ideas, practices, and discourses turned to institutional short-hands for power. What other strategies and techniques are available to resist while eluding the grasp of authority? 

What this roundtable is interested in is thinking beyond direct representation. Political art has often not been refractory. In light of such suppression, art and media, not limited to composition, pedagogy, art, performance, scholarship, and more offer critical techniques of refraction. Through the term refractory, this roundtable seeks to explore the manner in which objects of art and pedagogy deflects the unwanted violent gaze of surveillance and repression. Art, even when commissioned by the state, can speak, protest, and struggle. Art can resist in ways that cannot and will not be co-opted by the institution. Engaging frameworks of pedagogy, composition, memory studies, decolonial aesthetics, and human rights scholarship among others, this roundtable investigates the ways in which art refracts state-sanctioned narratives as both counternarratives and critical sites of resistance and recovery.

This multidisciplinary roundtable considers how practices in and adjacent to the arts grapple with the potential for art and thinking to interrogate the present while telegraphing strategies for the future. We are inspired by scholars who negotiate the tensions between artists, scholars, and institutions, including but not limited to Saidiya Hartman, Walter Benjamin, Nelly Richard, Erin Graff Zivin, Christina Sharpe, María del Rosario Acosta López, Eduardo Cadava, and Fred Moten. 

How do we find techniques of refraction that can persist beyond the state of emergency? In what ways can refraction teach us to read, understand, and perceive the present against the hegemony of the state? 

Papers may explore topics such as civil unrest and genocide, state violence and interventions, censorship, acts of memorialization and remembrance, institutional surveillance, and more. With these provocations in mind, this roundtable invites papers from scholars and practitioners who engage with art, museum studies, literature, rhetoric and composition, visual media, performance studies, film and media studies, and related disciplines. Please submit 250 word abstracts and a brief bio to ExOrdo. Should you have any questions, please email Kabelo Sandile Motsoeneng (kmotsoen@umich.edu) and Jace Jung (jacejung@umich.edu) by April 13, 2026.