Everyday Resistance: Thinking, Making and Living in the Material World (ONLINE)

Description

Continuing our exploration of the theme of “Everyday resistance: Thinking, making, and living in the material world”, the conference continues conversations fostered at the two-day in-person conference hosted at the University of Brighton in November 2025. It will feature 9 speakers across 3 panels, in an interdisciplinary exchange that centres resistance as it is lived and embodied in the material and everyday.

Co-organised by the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics and the Design Activism research strand of the Centre for Design History, the conference aims to join theoretical research and historical inquiry. The panels will explore a range of theories of resistance alongside resistant practices, including those that do not appear immediately “political”, and which involve materials and forms of making historically subjugated (Kirsty Robertson, 2011; Roszika Parker, 1984).

Together, we will explore practical and material ways by which people resist hegemonic orders, remake social structures, and challenge oppressive systems.

Panels:
1. Micro-tactics and Making-do
2. Media & Storytelling
3. Creative counter-hegemonies & Collective resistance

Location: Online

Wednesday, March 25th 2026​

Introductory remarks ​

Panel 1: Micro-tactics and Making-do​

- Hoyee Tse (speaker), Wessie Ling (co-author): Threading Resistance, Stitching Solidarity: Tactical Interventions of the T-shirt in Hong Kong Social Movements ​

​- Pravajya Pandey: Designing Refusal: Frugality, Jugaad, and Repair as Everyday Resistance in India ​

- ​Vishal Singh: Marked Bodies, Everyday Acts: Resistance and the Afterlife of Criminalisation in Colonial Delhi ​

- ​Xinwei Zhang: Being a micro-entrepreneur: a way to daily practice of micro-resistance ​

Panel 2: Media & Storytelling ​

- Astik Mukherjee: Elegy for the Fallen Woman: Visibility and Resistance on the Colonial Stage ​

- Uschi Klein: Imagined Communities and Cultural Resistance: The Dual Role of Radio Free Europe in Communist Romania​

- John Bessai: Resistance in Aporia: Sensorial Memory and the Canadian Condition in NFBC Storytelling ​

Panel 3: Creative counter-hegemonies & Collective resistance ​

- Asis Mistry: The Fabric of Resistance: Culture, Care, and Democratic Repair in Postcolonial India ​

- Hanna Komar: Re-writing Mother and Daughter Relationship to Shake Patriarchal Order ​

Closing remarks

Period	25 Mar 2026
Event type	Conference