Madison, WI | October 15-17, 2026

ASAP/17: University of Wisconsin, Madison

Wednesday, October 14 – Saturday, October 17, 2026

Deadline for Posting Panel/Seminar CFPs: March 13, 2026

Deadline for Finalized Submissions: April 27, 2026

Submit panel, roundtable, seminar, or workshop proposals on Ex Ordo.

Collectivity, assembly, gathering, communing, organizing. These have long been central terms in the vocabulary of cultural politics, from the most progressive to the most conservative, from the most liberal to the most fascist. As we confront environmental disaster, the resurgence of authoritarianism on a global scale, the deepening precarity of everyday life, and the psychic toll of perpetual crisis in the contemporary, our ability to “get together” depends on sites of public assembly, but it also relies on other things behind the scenes: techniques of  repair and endurance; a politics of staying intact, individually, socially, and institutionally; an art of “getting it together.”

To “get (it) together” requires balancing the urgent demand for collective action against the slow, uneven work of psychic, bodily, and relational survival within systems that continuously fracture and privatize our capacities for care. How do art and cultural production help us not only assemble but to persist, heal, organize, and reimagine in the face of exhaustion, violence, and systemic disintegration? How might creative practices make affective, material, and ideological infrastructures legible, ones which sustain or erode our capacities for relation, resistance, and renewal? “Get it together!” is a command issued out of frustration, a response to the failure to cohere, organize, and act. Where from our collective and critical communities do we see these calls to collect ourselves, the calls for getting it together now? 

We encourage papers that answer, complicate, and push against these questions about the social function of aesthetics, and to consider how the conference location of Madison, Wisconsin, and the Midwest more broadly, participates in engaging with these questions. As the site of hotly contested swing elections, defiant resistance against ICE agents, and protests against police brutality and the ongoing genocide in Palestine, the Midwest spatially captures how “getting it together” and “getting together” are contingent upon one another.

This year’s ASAP conference invites contributions that interrogate the entanglements of politics and aesthetics in the present, and the urgency of addressing their entanglements. We seek explorations of how art mediates between the inner life and the political world: how creative forms can simultaneously contest and paradoxically entrench structures of domination (neoliberalism, racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, imperialism, the carceral and border regimes) and cultivate forms of consciousness, care, and collective resilience that exceed them; how aesthetics can evince a longing not only for an “otherwise” but a longing (even if futile) that art can help us get it together.

We ask:

• What artistic or cultural innovations make visible the work of maintenance, resistance, and repair, whether of selves, communities, institutions, or ecosystems?
• In the spirit of the liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, how might aesthetic practice model forms of solidarity that are not only oppositional but also sustaining, tender, and infrastructural? What happens when we center emotional regulation, trauma, embodiment, and healing as political concerns rather than as private or therapeutic ones, and how are political practices therapeutic ones and vice versa?
• How can the language of “getting it together” be mobilized as critique, as refusal, or as a radical practice of hope?
• Where, in the arts, do we see models for change and doing things differently? 
• In the arts of the present, where do we see the potential for movement, for swings in perspective or alignment that might reverse the present precarity of artists, the arts, and the society which both represent? How do art workers and administrators attend to political organizing and political organizations? 

We call for artists, scholars, art workers and practitioners to consider how art not only reflects the world’s fragmentation but also rehearses the acts of coherence, care, and collective imagination through which another world might be built. We equally call for artists, scholars, art workers and practitioners to consider the inverse of the utopian and/or future-orientations, but instead consider the present and recent past critically and without the imperative of political amelioration.

We invite proposals, due March 28, from scholars, artists, writers, curators, activists and other practitioners whose work addresses and expands upon the study, collection, exhibition, teaching, and writing of art and culture. Panels and seminars that consider a range of disciplines and methods, and that speak across (non)traditional institutional or intellectual divides, are especially encouraged. Panels and seminars are encouraged to engage our theme, but participants are welcome to submit other proposals which contribute to our broader project of exploring the arts of the present, including but not limited to questions posed in the ASAP mission statement.

ASAP/17 requires all proposed sessions to be pre-constituted and to take one of the following forms:

• Panel with 3-4 presenters, in addition to a session chair
• Roundtable with 5-6 presenters, in addition to a session chair 
• Seminar with 7-12 presenters, in addition to the organizer(s) (will run for 2 sessions for a total of 3 hours)
• Workshops, including performance or creative/practitioner-led sessions

We affirm ASAP as a unique space for nurturing students and contingent scholars. Panel and roundtable organizers are encouraged, and seminar organizers are required, to submit calls for papers on our website one month before final submission. We will prioritize accepting sessions that boast a diversity of career stages. 

Beyond pre-constituted sessions, we will host papers-in-progress workshops for graduate students, in which students will pre-circulate work and receive substantive feedback in conversation with members of the ASAP Motherboard and tenured scholars of the larger ASAP membership. 

We will follow this schedule:

• Friday, March 13, 2026: Deadline for session organizers to post a call for panel, roundtable, and seminar participants on Ex Ordo. This is encouraged for panels and roundtables, but required for seminars. Organizers can set their own deadlines, included in their call, for abstract submissions, but we encourage a date of one month later, on Friday, April 13. 
• Friday, April 27, 2026: Deadline for session organizers to submit fully constituted panel, roundtable, or seminar proposals; deadline for workshop proposals.
• Friday, May 24, 2026: Notifications of acceptance for all proposals. 
• Friday, June 1: Deadline for graduate students to apply for papers-in-progress workshops. 
• Friday, June 29, 2026: Final schedule announced.

Accommodation information to follow. For all other conference-related questions, please e-mail .