second issue “On Strike“
ephemer. Journal for Performance and Theater Research is seeking a co-editor for its upcoming issue On Strike. We are looking for conceptually engaged scholars or artists who approach striking as an aesthetic act of refusal that reworks the conditions of the political, preferably from decolonial, queer-feminist, and/or crip perspectives.
In an “age of heat“ (Steyerl 2025), defined by social acceleration (Rosa 2005; 2016) and increasingly automated creativity, where labor, affect, and attention are continuously economized, the act of striking gains new aesthetic and political urgency. Within the late-capitalist 24/7 regime—in which, as Jonathan Crary (2013) shows, even sleep is subsumed as a productive force—the desire for livability is bound to the very conditions of its depletion, a paradox that Lauren Berlant (2011) terms cruel optimism. Against this horizon of exhaustion and overexposure, to strike emerges as a counter-gesture that interrupts the temporal and affective rhythms through which life becomes intelligible within the metrics of productivity. On Strike asks how performance, protest, and artistic practice might extend the strike beyond its economic frame without losing its material and historical force. To strike, in this sense, is less an act of cessation than a mode of interference—one that unsettles the affective and temporal infrastructures through which labor and value are mediated and sensed. Emerging as a queer and crip-temporal tactic with decolonial inflections, striking redirects energy and attention, suspends futurity as a normative horizon, and invites a reimagining of the conditions under which human and more-than-human bodies dwell.
This practice articulates itself through a network of micropolitical, affective, and choreographic operations: in the sit-ins and school strikes of Fridays for Future; in the feminist mobilizations across Latin America—from Ni Una Menos to the transnational 8M movements; and in the general strikes and protests in Italy in the autumn of 2025, where resistance to the violence in Gaza was enacted through targeted interventions in infrastructural systems—by blocking ports, transport arteries, and supply chains, by halting the logistical rhythms that structure global everyday life. Such interventions can be understood as aesthetic-political practices that unsettle the affective and material circuits through which social and political life are co-constituted.
At the center of these operations stands the body. The radical act of sitting—from the Greensboro sit-ins (1960) to Black civil rights activist Rosa Parks’s refusal to relinquish her seat on a Jim Crow bus, a gesture that quite literally unsettled the spatial order of racial hierarchy—marks a postural politics of stasis: an embodied critique that does not merely remain still but reconfigures the political and affective coordinates of visibility, belonging, and motion. Within the framework of choreopolitics (Lepecki 2012), the body appears as a site of double tension: simultaneously a medium of capture and a locus of refusal. In Singularities (2016), André Lepecki describes the ongoing inscription of political, economic, and colonial power relations into bodily movement as a form of “body snatching”—a violent appropriation that folds the body into neoliberal logics of mobility, visibility, and productivity. Yet this very analysis also gestures toward another horizon of the political—one that does not reside in movement itself, but in the potential reconfiguration of its conditions and of the rhythms and frictions through which motion becomes possible. Striking, in this sense, is not a movement of non-movement but a counter-movement: a corporeal intervention that undermines the biopolitical grids of Western kinetics and productivity. In the perspectives of Judith Butler (2015), Erin Manning (2007), and Jasbir Puar (2017), the body emerges as an affective assemblage whose micropolitics of posture, stasis, and sensation can transform relations of power—a movement that is, at once, potentially decolonial insofar as it may interrupt the inscription of the political into the flesh itself.
From queer and crip-theoretical perspectives, striking can be conceived as a temporal practice of incapacitation—a deliberate slowing down of those rhythms that define productivity, mobility, and linear time as the norms of the livable. Within the logic of crip time (Kafer 2013) and in resonance with Freeman’s (2010) critique of chrononormativity, stopping becomes an act: a disruption that reorients the relation between capacity, efficacy, and presence. Here, striking refuses not only labor but the very premise of the “able” body. In José Esteban Muñoz’s (2009) disidentificatory utopia and Lee Edelman’s (2004) negation of reproductive futurism, the politics of refusal becomes legible as a temporal strategy—as a practice that suspends linear time, progress, and futurity, articulating resistance through delay and non-progression.
If queer and crip temporalities of striking articulate refusal in time, Moten and Harney’s (2013) notion of the undercommonstranslates this temporality into a shared, collective practice of withdrawal and reappropriation that reconfigures the social under altered conditions. This dynamic finds its limit—and its intensification—in the hunger strike, which Velasquez-Potts (2019) conceives as a corporeal politics of incapacitation. Here, the exhausted, starving body becomes the site of a paradoxical agency in which physical depletion turns into performative force. Within the threshold between vulnerability and resistance, an aesthetics of de-capacity takes form—one that locates the political not in decisive action but in the endurance of affective duration.
Nicholas Mirzoeff’s (2023) concept of white sight extends the logic of striking towards the politics of the senses. White sight operates not as an individual act of seeing but as a technopolitical infrastructure of whiteness—“a set of infrastructures, centered first on the statue and state, backed up by statute, and later on the imperial screen” (1). To strike white sight, then, is to unsettle the scopic regime that sustains the colonial production of the visible. In this gesture, feminist and Black radical traditions coalesce in a sensorial politics that renders perception itself strikeable, aligning with Édouard Glissant’s (1990) call for a right to opacity—the right to be perceptible yet unassimilable. In contemporary encampments and university strike movements, such practices manifest in gestures of not-listening, silence, and the refusal to enter discourse. These moments of acoustic striking—of withheld conversation and desynchronized listening—undermine the liberal imperative of mutual understanding and reconfigure the political as a zone of opacity, affective dissonance, and shared stillness.
Ultimately, the semantic field of strike also encompasses the blow—the moment of performative violence that erupts within aesthetic form. In the artistic interventions of the 1980s, within the contexts of Cuba’s rectificación and Brazil’s abertura, to strike was conceived, in Aldo Damian Menéndez’s words, as “a way of manipulating or altering reality violently to give it another meaning” (quoted in Bishop 2024, 132). Here, striking becomes a performative manipulation of reality in which aesthetic form and political force converge. Between withdrawal and impact unfolds the resistant, choreographic, and transcorporeal potential of striking: to hold still and yet to hit, to pause and yet to move bodies, affects, and meanings.
about ephemer
ephemer is a multilingual journal committed to cultural and linguistic diversity in academic discourse. To ensure accessibility and intellectual richness, all articles will be published in the language preferred by the author and, where applicable, accompanied by an English translation.
Each issue will feature:
- Four peer-reviewed scholarly essays
- Two contributions from the field of artistic research
call for co-editors: role and application requirements
We are seeking a co-editor for this issue who will work closely with the editorial team in shaping the volume and identifying suitable contributors. Applicants should submit the following documents:
- An abstract (2,000 words) outlining their vision for the issue On Strike, including key thematic and methodological considerations.
- A brief CV, including a list of the applicant’s four most recent publications (preferably peer-reviewed), a record of the last five academic presentations given, and the applicant’s current academic position.
ephemer will be published by Böhlau Verlag in both print and open-access formats. All articles will undergo a rigorous peer-review process, and the editorial team will be supported by an international advisory board.
submission deadline & contact
Submissions should be sent by January 31, 2026 to
ephemer.office@kunstuni-linz.at.
For further information contact us by email.