“Waywardness is a practice of possibility at a time when all roads, except the ones created by smashing out, are foreclosed.” (Saidiya Hartman 2019)

In this three day workshop we aim to bring together a wide variety of activists, artists and scholars to interrogate how the wayward responds to violence but also, to think about visual culture as wayward in its work to refuse systems of oppression. Where the wayward is understood as that which threatens structures of oppression and power, through one’s deviance from oppressive systems and making a commitment to living an emancipated futurity now. 

Invoking the ‘wayward’ as the central concept within this workshop provides an opening to think beyond binaries within violence, to move beyond the constraints in which violence holds individuals and communities to. Franz Fanon famously wrote “violence can thus be understood to be the perfect mediation. The colonised man liberates himself in and through violence” (44). The wayward, in their rebellion, is often considered to be violent in their “smashing out” and it is, this waywardness we seek to explore, interrogate and most importantly, learn from. 

We seek to create a workshop that is less a conference and more a site of collective experimentation, understood as hands-on, collaborative practices where participants not only discuss violence in abstract terms but also engage materially through image (re)appropriation, testing how visual interventions can subvert, disrupt, and reframe dominant narratives. Whilst positivist histories might lay claim to a closed story, we see stories of violence as unfinished. Where the wayward plays a critical role in rupturing, disfiguring and calling into question that deemed sacrosanct. 

Invoking the wayward as our starting point, we aim to move away from the spectacle of violence and the colonised and oppressed as simply the victims of violence; the dehumanisation of the body; the violent destruction of the ecological world; the exposure to repeated brutality by militaries, police and political regimes; the saturation of photographs and videos of mutilated Palestinian bodies in Gaza in a live-streamed genocide; all of which call into question our own role in bearing witness and our responsibility.

Over these three days we seek to disrupt the violent social and political order and call for submissions which are robust, self-reflexive and ultimately, seek to be part of  wayward knowledge creation. We seek submissions from scholars, artists, writers and activists on the subject of waywardness, visual culture, violence and liberation. We invite proposals for individual papers, round-tables, as well as other wayward experiments within the sphere of visual culture, violence and liberation. 

We also welcome submissions from artists with “incubator” ideas - for this we, we imagine, a half day which revolves around a “wayward” material and the tools in which attendees can learn new skills in working with and working through. The workshop is aimed at early career scholars. 

Possible topics include but are not limited to: 

• Who gets to narrate violence? How does different media frame violence differently? The life cycles of visuals of violence and subversion; temporalities and geographic (dis)locations 
• What are the ethical constraints in working with wayward visuals within the violence of colonial knowledge systems? What are the limits within academia? Ethnographic entanglements with the wayward. 
• The question of surveillance of the wayward 
• The mundane versus the spectacle of the wayward; riot and rebellion on the streets and within the domestic space?
• Wayward Visuals and Speculative Futures and/or Imagined Liberation 
• Historical Perspectives: archiving, practices of memorialization, representation of refusal and resistance in media, art, sound and film 
• Affective encounters with the wayward 
• Destabilizing the colonial enterprise of the archive and creating possibilities for more life-affirming practices of records and memory.
• Waywardness as essential practice for utopian imaginaries of liberation
• How do we move away from ‘evidence based’ colonial epistemologies rooted in violence towards a collective knowledge making that underscores kin and community?
• The aesthetic as a liberatory practice— moving away from the sterile linguistic boundaries of colonial epistemologies.

Submissions may go beyond written essays. Photo essays, films, videos, and sound works are equally welcome. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us at ascaworkshop2026@proton.me

Submission Details 

In one PDF document, please include the following:

• Title of the project
• 250-300 word abstract 
• Personal bio (150 words max)

Send us your submissions here.

Submission Deadlines

• Call for papers open November 1, 2025
• Deadline for submissions January 25, 2026
• Accepted submissions notified by February 23, 2026

For those authors who wish to be part of a submission to a special series, we will use the workshop space to collectively workshop each other’s papers in preparation for submission. For those authors we would ask for a “work in progress” paper by May 1, 2026 - maximum 6000 words. 

Organising Team: 

Rodrigo Brum 

Rodrigo Brum is a film producer, programmer, and scholar. He is Associate Professor of Practice in the Film Program at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and a Ph.D. candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (UvA), where his research focuses on the development of film education in Africa and Latin America during the Third Cinema movement. 

Eleri Connick 

Eleri Connick’s research and writing, emphasizes creative and collaborative workshopping methods to grapple with the Palestinian exilic reality in Jordan – curating workshops across Amman. Eleri has written for Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East & North African Migration Studies, and Journal of Conflict and Society.  

Sabahat Zehra

Sabahat Zehra is an activist, researcher, and educator, working at the intersection of Art History, Visual Culture, Gender, Sexuality, & Queer theory, and Decolonial Studies. She is a PhD candidate in the ERC consolidator grant project titled: Entangled Freedoms: Decolonial Modernisms as Transnational Relations of Resistance, 1940s-1980s, housed at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (UvA). In the project, she works on de-centering the Archive in practices of historiography and explores freedom and liberation in post-colonial Pakistan through the aesthetic and the discursive.