Sarah Sze, "Day", 2003. Offset lithograph and silkscreen. Copyright: Sarah Sze. Image credit: Sarah Sze Studio
Contagious Territories
2024-2030
Funded by the Startersbeurs
(Leiden University Center for the Arts in Society)
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Conference
On this page, all information regarding the conference "Contagion, Information, Territory"
can be found. Any news and updates surrounding the conference will be shared to this webpage
in the months leading up to the event.
If you have any remaining questions or need additional information, please reach out to contagious.territories@hum.leidenuniv.nl.
Important dates and locations
Date: 17-19 June, 2026
Location: Leiden University
Call for Papers
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Keynote speakers
Dr. Seb Franklin (King's College London)
Prof. Dr. Jasbir Puar (University of British Columbia)
Conference Information
Conference Program
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Conference Booklet
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Poster design by: Luna Konings, 2026.
Keynote: Seb Franklin
Automation's Territory: Labour, Machinery, Slavery
Dr. Seb Franklin (King's College London)
Writing on automation from a multitude of different perspectives tends to reproduce a single image of production: a flat landscape of humans and machines with interchangeable functions. This common image informs the opposite predictions of machine-enabled abundance and leisure and machine-driven mass unemployment. In this talk, I focus on the remarkably constant presence of a third figure, that of the slave, across the history of utopian and pessimistic writing on automaton. From the late 1940s to the present, automation, labour, and slavery have been invoked together in congressional hearings and parliamentary debates, newspaper and magazine articles, documentaries and news segments, trade union reports, industry conferences, technical writings, works of philosophy, and histories of science and technology. The talk asks two questions of this phenomenon, each of which attends to a different scale. What animates this compulsion, to rhetorically deploy slavery to say something about automation? And what becomes legible when the resultant rhetorical forms are read closely?
Time & Place: 18 June 2026, 10:00-11:30, P.J. Veth Building, Room 1.01
Keynote: Jasbir Puar
Living in Genocide
Prof. Dr. Jasbir Puar (University of British Columbia)
Genocide is not only about killing and extermination. It is also about forcing people to live a certain kind of life. It is this consignment—this coercive tethering of bodies and communities to lives shaped by siege, starvation, debilitation, and slow death—that conditions genocide as a way of life, as a continuum and not an event, as an accumulative process, and increasingly, as a sanctioned method of governance. This talk therefore discusses "living in genocide," and not "living through genocide" as a way of illuminating the thresholds of bio and necropolitical thought.
Time & Place: 19 June 2026, 10:00-11:30, Lipsius, Room 1.48 (only open to participants in the conference; for colleagues from Leiden who would like to join, please send an email to contagious.territories@hum.leidenuniv.nl; first come, first serve)