What Are You Resisting Without Saying So?

This workshop constitutes a large-scale enactment of resistance that situates resistance within temporal, spatial, and embodied dimensions, while simultaneously exceeding fixed identities and positional frameworks. Taking seriously the statement that this conference is itself an act of resistance, the project creates conditions in which participants do not merely discuss resistance but inhabit it—individually, relationally, and collectively—through subtle, distributed creative practice. Drawing on the notion of Everyday Resistance, the work unfolds through quiet interventions embedded within the thresholds and transitional moments of conference life. Hundreds of bookmarks, each bearing a reflective question on the front side (one of the 50 questions, varied) and a poetic prompt on the back side (same for all bookmarks: Trade this question with a stranger), are placed throughout the conference site: at entrances, near registration tables, along walking paths, and outside panel rooms. These bookmarks are not formally introduced; they are encountered. They circulate hand to hand, detaching from origin and accumulating relational residue. Rather than performing resistance, they seed it—inviting private reflection, ethical attention, and fleeting moments of connection that exceed spectacle. The project also integrates its title—What Are You Resisting Without Saying So?—as a large-text question situated along a public path. Visible yet unannounced, it operates as another embedded intervention, positioning the conference environment itself as a field of inquiry. The workshop culminates in a live activation at the closing event. At each table, participants gather the bookmarks that have traveled with them and collectively select one question for focused discussion. The question becomes a shared site of investigation: Where has it been? What has it unsettled? What forms of resistance has it revealed, complicated, or refused? There are no definitive answers. Instead, participants inhabit the question together, transforming it from a rhetorical gesture into a temporary research node within an intergalactic researcher–resister community. Before departing, participants are invited to trade the question(s) that have followed them one more time, allowing circulation to continue beyond the temporal confines of the conference. In doing so, resistance resists closure. It remains relational, unfinished, and continuously negotiated. By distributing agency across temporal, spatial, and social registers, this project cultivates a dynamic research-practice assemblage in which resistance is not only theorized but lived, exchanged, and carried forward—within the conference and beyond.