Upheavals Keynote Lecture "Wild Infrastructure: Movements Beyond Apocalypse"

Event Details

• Friday, November 6, 2026
  5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
  City: Peterborough
  345 Aylmer St. North
  Building: The Peterborough Public Library
  Room: Community Room
  Cost: Free

The Upheavals Conference invites the public into a conversations in cultural studies, featuring a distinguished scholar who shares influential new research and forthcoming work shaping the field of cultural inquiry.

"Wild Infrastructure: Movements Beyond Apocalypse"

Date: Friday, November 6, 2026
Time: 5:00 p.m.  
Location: The Peterborough Public Library
Speaker: Dr. Deborah Cowen, University of Toronto
Abstract: Writing in 1846, Kierkegaard contrasted the polite complacency of his present with the untamed motions of transformative times when he observed, “If one may say of the revolutionary period that it runs wild, one would have to say of the present that it runs badly.” Our times are neither polite nor complacent, and those who move against the tides of dispossession, fascism and border imperialism are not only criminalized but dehumanized as vermin, swarms, insects, and animals. This talk learns from the movements of those cast outside the normal, civilized, or human – those who cross, trespass, reassemble, or refuse the forms of circulation that sustain what Gerald Horne calls ‘the apocalypse of settler colonialism’. This is not a call for ‘wilding’ initiatives that too often resuscitate colonial conceptions of civilization with a call for more ‘inclusion’. Looking instead to India’s Cockroach Janta Party, Minnesota’s L/ICE OUT movement, and following Indigenous, Black, queer and crip ecologies and infrastructuralisms, this talk learns from those who refuse not just their own dehumanization, but dehumanization itself by assembling infrastructures that ‘run wild’.

Deb Cowen is a Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. Deb’s research explores questions of supply chains, circulation and infrastructure, attending to the co-production of race and space, sexuality and social ordering, and imperial intimacy and urban life. The author of The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade and Military Workfare: The Soldier and Social Citizenship in Canada, Deb also co-edited War, Citizenship, Territory and Digital Life in the Global City: Contesting Infrastructures, and with Katherine McKittrick and Simone Browne co-edits the Duke University Press book series Errantries.

This lecture is one of the keynote addresses for Upheavals: the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies Conference, which runs until November 7, 2026 at Trent, and features another keynote by Dr. Colleen Lye. 

Contact Info

For more information, please email bbellamy@trentu.ca