ETE — March 2018
SOT1 — June 2019
SOT2SOS — July-August 2020
SOT3WIT — August 2021
SOT4IP — August 2022
SOT5PP — August 2023
SOT6WW — August 2025
SOT7S&N — August 2026
The Summer of Theory (SOT)1 is an annual symposium that has taken place since 2018. It brings together artists, researchers, and researcher-creators to think experimentally about theory, play, creativity, politics, society, and culture. SOT has no single theory of theory. But if experimental thinking means anything here, it means theory unbounded by standard notions of applicability and unrestricted by deductive logic — a striving toward an open experience of thinking. The SOT draws participants from the local community (academic and non-academic alike), from across Canada, and internationally (Brazil, France, New Zealand, Poland, the U.S.A.).
The SOT is an extracurricular and liminal space — an “undercommons” in the sense of Moten and Harney2 — a retreat from the demands of the neoliberal academy and a reclamation of the free thinking that once justified the liberal arts. The purpose here is to make your own academy, adrift from institutional requirements, even as the SOT institutes its own unfolding logic. The event is its own end: not a line on a CV, but a gathering of friends.
The “summer” in SOT carries its full semiotic weight: leisure, play, holiday, récréation — a break from or return to the mundane, depending on your point of view. Presenters are invited to do two things: to play with concepts, theories, and projects in ways they normally wouldn’t in an academic setting; and to attend to the form of their presentation, not just its content. The SOT rules always apply:
- Bring your weird ideas — the ones you’d never present at the usual venues.
- Presentations must involve some form of performance or play.
- The event is for its own sake.
- Since 2020, you are also allowed to be stupid. Benevolent deceit, concealment, trickery, and lies are welcome.3
Ultimately, SOT is about friendship, play, and the conviction that scholarship can be creative and that art can be research4 — and that the most interesting work happens somewhere between those two artificial extremes.
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- All the SOT pages can be found in the website menu of https://seismopoetics.info/.
- Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013).
- Inspired by TS4 (2016), whose call invited presenters to make up a lie somewhere in their presentation.
- On research-creation as a methodology, see the SSHRC definition of research-creation.