I am looking forward to participating in the panel for the Universities Art Association of Canada Conference 2026, Debt (and/as) Archive. Chaired by Julia Polyck-O’Neill, with panelists Trevor Stark and Paula Dykstra. The 3-day conference is hosted by the Faculty of Fine Arts and the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University this year, and convenes over 378 speakers and 77 sessions, offering a national forum to engage with urgent questions in art, culture, and society. See the PDF for the conference schedule-at-a-glance and detailed information about sessions and events running October 13–15, 2026.
The following panel description is written by Dr. Julia Polyck-O’Neill:
In ‘No Archive Will Restore You’ (2018), Julietta Singh describes the experience of graduate student researchers “plummeting deeper and deeper into debt, which is in a sense its own hellish kind of archive”. McKenzie Wark, citing David Graeber’s ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’ (2014) in her book ‘Capital is Dead’ (2019), posits that nothing goes undigested by capitalism’s machine: “Not just our labor, not just our leisure—something else is being commodified here: our sociability, our common and ordinary life together, what you might even call our communism”. This panel invites scholarly and creative presentations that critically explore the relations between the relentless, systemic pressures of debt under late capitalism the archive, memory, and/or the historical cultural record. How is a poetics of debt (or other financial records, predicaments, data) and/as archive explored or made manifest in art and media?
Universities Art Association of Canada Conference 2026
October 13–15, 2026
Concordia University, School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design
1515 Ste-Catherine St. W., Montréal, Quebec
Panel chaired by Dr. Julia Polyck-O’Neill | View Panel Description
Panel Session: Thursday, October 15, 2026 | 1:30–3:00PM, B8, EV 3.711
