Reconceptualising Resistance

Summary

Multiple and intersecting crises – climate collapse, rising authoritarianism, escalating social inequalities, wars, and pandemics – have renewed attention to the necessity, urgency, and meaning of resistance. Contemporary forms of resistance range from high-visibility actions (attacking artworks, blocking motorways) to covert support networks (providing safe abortions, trans healthcare, or alternatives to corporate infrastructure) and collective power strategies (blockades, strikes, cyberattacks). Some movements focus on direct action and provocation (sabotaging pipelines), while others engage in everyday resistance (rejecting capitalist work culture) or build alternative institutions.

However, resistance itself is a vague term, used within a variety of domains and disciplines, and across empirical, theoretical, and normative registers. Does this disciplinary fragmentation limit our ability to recognise and comprehend forms of resistance today? This project delivers an expanded concept of resistance developed through a collaborative engagement between disciplines, scholars, and practitioners. In dialogical workshops, focusing on emergent meanings and forms of resistance, visibility, and legitimacy, this project will develop new frameworks for understanding and evaluating contemporary resistance, as well as a range of outputs, including an interdisciplinary master’s programme. Through these collaborations, the project will establish Durham as a global hub for resistance research, ensuring that academic inquiry remains practically relevant to challenging injustice.

Ambition

This project allows for a truly collaborative, interdisciplinary conversation around the concept of resistance, at the same time informed by contemporary empirical research and aware of normative and theoretical considerations.

Resistance as a term is employed in a variety of disciplines as well as public discourse, crossing empirical, theoretical, and normative boundaries. This is at the same time a strength and a weakness: it allows capturing different forms and sites of resistance, but risks losing analytical usefulness. The usual approach to such vague terms is to constrain the definition (i.e. prescribe how the term should be used academically) to allow branching off into multiple meanings within disciplines, fields, and subfields; or to dispense with the term altogether. This prevents mutual benefits of shared insights that can only be achieved through open-minded long-term engagement, which would equally be attentive to both lived experience on the ground, and different academic perspectives.

The aim of 'Reconceputalising Resistance' is to create an infrastructure for this kind of engagement. Through open conversations, workshops, comprising both academics and practitioners, it creates the space to explore the lacuna between empirical approaches, theoretical considerations , and normative framings. It will generate interdisciplinary synergies by organising discussions around open questions where ideas, concepts and experiences can be shared, evaluated, and stretched, without the habit or pressure of occupying disciplinary or theoretical positions.

Term:

Michaelmas 2026

Activities and Events:

Will be add in due course.