Call for contributions
Endangered conceptual worlds
International Forum on Artistic Research | 17th SAR Conference
23-26 June 2026, University of Galway, Ireland
Deadline for submissions: 1 March 2026
This year’s International Forum on Artistic Research explores how artistic research engages with endangered conceptual worlds and minoritised languages. It considers precarious forms of knowledge as epistemic resources and practical potentials; cultural sedimentations shared between generations and across contexts that provide unique ways of making and being in the world.
These forms of knowledge are often complex yet fragile, dominated, exploited, and threatened. The drive of platform capitalism to optimise human behaviour for economic ends, the homogenising forces set free within synthetic realities and the pressure of aesthetic and narrative standardisation have put the very idea of diversity and creativity at risk — not only theoretically and politically, but practically.
However, conceptual worlds and minoritised languages sustain and provide valuable counter-models to the all-encompassing tendencies of maximisation, simplification and instrumentalisation. They counteract the algorithmic and affordance-driven flattening of linguistic and cultural heterogeneity; they have become emblematic of what is at stake in broader struggles over which forms of knowledge are valued, and why.
By opening horizons within and across academic disciplines, institutional and non-institutional environments, artistic research is uniquely positioned, not only to explore and celebrate the value of non-hegemonic knowledges and languages, but also to take a stand on broader, emergent divisions in this world.
Embracing the anti-hegemonic potential of endangered conceptual worlds and minoritised languages, the 2026 Forum challenges the isolation of artistic research. It does this by highlighting its connectivity, unpacking its conceptual foundations and exploring how it can be transposed and translated into other contexts.
The 2026 International Forum on Artistic Research will explore and discuss artistic research in all its diverse forms as well as its untapped potentials within the dense social, cultural, and political contexts in which it operates. It provides an extraordinary opportunity to rethink the relationship between cultural heritage and creativity, while thoroughly investigating the impact of colonial and extractivist legacies on contemporary artistic practices.
Themes
The 2026 International Forum on Artistic Research calls for contributions within and across the multiple modalities of artistic research. Proposals are invited on the following themes:
- Making seeable and sayable: artistic research in the interplay of power and language
- Demonstrating the peculiar role of situated knowledges in artistic research
- Outlining the impact of arts-based insights from within minoritised language communities
- Discussing the capacities of endangered conceptual worlds to generate distinctive forms of innovation
- Exploring the ineffable: artistic research and endangered arts practice beyond the verbal
- Dance, movement, and gesture as minoritised or endangered embodied knowledges
- Minoritisation and endangerment in visual, sonic, and digital cultures
- Subjugated knowledges, coloniality, and unsayability
- Resilience, resistance, revival: artistic research strategies in relation to minoritised languages
- Investigating oral traditions and vernacular arts
- Exploring intersections between oralities and literacies
- Promoting experimental art practices and artistic research methodologies
- Artistic Intelligence: experimenting with collective agency and the production of newness and novelty
- Reflecting on artistic research in the face of synthetic and post-synthetic realities
- Revisiting digital arts practices against the current urgencies of epistemic sovereignty
- Building capacities to work with polylocal knowledge systems in independent digital infrastructures