Call for Papers
6th Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference
“Radical”
Toronto, Canada
May 15-16, 2026

“To be radical,” Karl Marx writes, “is to grasp things by the roots.” Across centuries, radical has meant at once origin and extremity, essence and rupture, reform and rebellion. From 18th- and 19th-century political movements to 20th-century avant-garde explosions, from totalitarian system-building projects to their no less violent anarchic refusals, radicality has always carried a double edge: the urge to create and the impulse to destroy, the mediation of order and the immediacy of rupture. By the late 20th century, “radical” even entered the vernacular of youth slang—“rad,” “awesome,” “cool”—a shift that highlights its constant reappropriation. More recently, it has appeared in the lexicon of the culture wars between an increasingly authoritarian right and the now fading “woke” left, designating groups like the supporters of Palestine or the red- and blackpilled manosphere, respectively, as undesirable. The 2026 Spiral Conference takes up this rich and ambivalent legacy, inviting reflections on what it means to be radical today: to break with the given, to accelerate intensification, to disrupt order, or to imagine new forms of social, political, and aesthetic life.

Radicality can be unsettling, even disturbing. André Breton’s notorious provocation that the simplest surrealist act would be to run into the street and fire blindly into the crowd remains a powerful, troubling metaphor for rebellion without measure, a rejection of reason and convention in search of a “superior reality.” This image, criticized even in its own time, nonetheless dramatizes the radical act as rupture, as refusal of mediation, as extremity pushed to the point of violence. What does such a metaphor mean now, in an age when emergencies such as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are at once permanent and normalized, when radical gestures risk immediate co-optation, when the dream of explosive freedom meets the reality of systemic capture?

Cinema, perhaps more than any other medium, stages the paradox of the radical: at once bound to apparatus, industry, and repetition, yet capable of rupture through montage, distortions or clarifications of perception, and the shock of the image. From early avant-garde experiments to contemporary digital media, film has been a site where philosophy and aesthetics meet to question whether the moving image can truly enact a break with form and thought, or whether it inevitably reinscribes order even as it seeks to destroy it. What does it mean for cinema—or media more broadly—to be radical today: to disrupt spectatorship, to unmake narrative, to intervene in political systems of mediation, or to reveal the very conditions of representation themselves?

Spiral 2026 invites scholars, artists, and practitioners for 20 minute presentations that interrogate the powers and paradoxes of the radical in cinema and moving image media: destructive, constructive, terrifying, liberatory, immediate, mediated.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Radical as root, rupture, and/or intensification • Radicalism as insurrection, explosion, and aesthetic experiment • Dialectics of radical form and radical content (and other permutations) • Political modernism and its legacies • Totalitarian system-building versus anarchic destruction • Theoretical terrains of immediacy and critique • Tactical embodiment and the poetics of survival • Indigenous resurgence as radical epistemology • Radical land relations and the decolonization of property • Abolitionist futurities and trans liberation • Eco-anarchism and the aesthetics of resistance • Radical relationality and more-than-human sovereignty • Extinction, grief, and insurgent hope • Indigenous critiques of extraction and technocapitalism • Fugitive kinship and cross-marginal solidarities • Ecological and decolonial temporalities • Queer ecologies and the politics of interdependence • Trans aesthetics of opacity, refusal, and tenderness • Anti-extractive art and the radical nonhuman in its animal, vegetal, and elemental forms • Dark Enlightenment, accelerationism, and/or technofeudalism • Extremism and the limits of control • Co-optation and domestication of radical forms • Shifting cultural constellations of the “rad,” the “awesome,” and/or the “cool”


The Keynote Speaker is Mila Zuo, Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at University of British Columbia. Zuo is the author of Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium (Duke University Press, 2022) focuses on the affective racialization of Chinese women film stars, demonstrating the ways which vulgar, flavourful beauty disrupts Western and colonial notions of beauty. Vulgar Beauty won the 2024 Outstanding Achievement best book award in media, performance, and visual studies from the Association for Asian American Studies. Zuo is also the director of award-winning films, including Carnal Orient (2016) and Kin (2021). She is currently working on her first feature, Mongoloids.


The conference will be held at Cinecycle (129 Spadina Ave.) in Toronto, Canada on Friday, May 15 and Saturday, May 16, 2026.

Send a 350-word abstract, bibliography (5 max.), 5 keywords, and short biography (with institutional affiliation, if applicable) in ONE DOCUMENT as an EMAIL ATTACHMENT to spiralfilmphilosophy@gmail.com by January 15, 2026. Notice of acceptance or rejection will be sent promptly via email.

Conference Registration Fee:
Conference Attendance: $150 (Canadian)
Graduate Students and Underemployed: $75 (Canadian)

Conference Website:
spiralfilmphilosophy.ca

Facebook:
@spiralphilosophy

For inquiries contact:
spiralfilmphilosophy@gmail.com

Organized by:
The Spiral Collective
in collaboration with
CFMDC
York University