SOT6WW

Participants

Schedule

Summer of Theory 6: “Where’s Winter?”

Summer is beautiful in Victoria, BC. Hearing birds chirping, forest bathing in old growth, or enjoying the sun by the beach, one could easily forget the eco-social dangers that increasingly intrude into everyday life. Sometimes, a bit of forgetting is adaptive. However, we gather to respond collectively to damaged life in these difficult times. How has capitalist realism (Mark Fisher)—or however you prefer to narrate this tundra of utility, scientism, and economistic logics—invaded your scene? It may be the art world or academia or some other area; this catastrophe takes different but related forms in different realms, and we’re interested in all of them. Is winter already here? What forms of play and/or solidarity could shelter us from winter or even hasten the journey to a better time?

We invite you to take our theme and align it with your passions. You could orient to literal winter or to catastrophe in art, literature, poetry, film, music, or theory. You could play with the open signifier, ‘WW,’ arguing for ‘weekend warriors’ in this time of professionalization. You could ask “what’s wrong?” along the lines of REM’s “it’s the end of the world and I feel fine.” You could take “Where’s Waldo?” in Thomas Pynchon’s direction, leaving a page where he simply can’t be found. You could offer a dance, a critique, an installation, a poem, a play, or a complaint (see Avital Ronell’s Complaint on the intellectual history of the ‘kvetch’).

The Summer of Theory, an annual symposium that has taken place at the University of Victoria since 2018, convokes artists, researchers, and researcher creators in order to think about various topics around theory, play, creativity, animality, poetics etc. We bring together community participants (inside and outside the academy) from across Canada, and internationally (Poland, France, Brazil, New Zealand, U.S.A.) to think about theoretical and artistic concepts concerning preoccupations around politics, society and culture. This anti-disciplinary context (in John Mowitt’s sense) allows us an ideal space both for forecasting winter and weathering it in style. In November 2024, we hosted the first “Fall of Theory,” which began to raise questions about whether theory has already fallen and its relation to falling/failing. The time has come to ask, “Where’s Winter?,” which violates Bergson’s injunction against spatializing time (after all, it’s always winter somewhere) to think the depths of the approaching catastrophe precisely to help forestall it. Is this a ‘normal’ seasonal winter that may soon give way to something more hospitable? Or is this the ‘impact winter’ after some turning point into ontological catastrophe? (Those too allow cyclical regeneration, but with irreversible loss). 

Potential topics (but not limited to):

• Theories of apocalypse (in either the etymological or biblical sense), catastrophe, or extinction;
• Winter as a precondition for the very art or theory that would seek to overcome it;
• Winter in the university (e.g. budget cuts, debt/precarity, AI, etc.);  
• Winter in the art world (e.g. marketisation, cultural illegibility, loss of funding); 
• Winter in the culture (neofeudalism, the rise of the Far Right, the death of attention);
• Utopian visions or already existing counter-practices against winter; 
• The affects of winter: Anxiety? Depression? Frustration? Boredom? Tragic joy? 
• Memories (fond or painful) of literal winter or ‘winters’ in your life;
• How contemporary or past thinkers and/or artists face catastrophe or ‘winter’;
• The Little Ice Age and other climatic winters long predating climate change;
• Your experience of nihilism in your own work or play or other domain;
• Ways in which you have pushed back against winter—or tried;

Bring your zany, odd, weird, scary, unacceptable and uncanny ideas, ones that you would never present at the usual conferences and congresses; involve some play, and make your presentation a ‘performance’ in some way. Finally, this is a friendly space, and the event is its own goal.

References

We will gather on Saturday, August 2, 2025, around the theme “Where’s Winter?” In advance of SOT6, we will reprise the daily workshop format that worked well last summer. We will meet Monday, July 28 to Thursday, July 31 on campus, from 1-5 p.m at the Grad House, Room 108/112.

Each day, we will discuss a reading related to our theme. Next, we will write for a couple hours. Then, we will walk through the forest and chat about our writing with a different discussant each day.