Student Workshop

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How to mediate the banal?

Inspired by Heather Davis’s forthcoming piece, Banal Violence: Breathing Plastic Air, this two-day workshop—organized by grad students from the Speculative Life research cluster at Concordia’s Milieux Institute—invites participants to investigate materiality as both object and method of study. Together, we will critically engage with the question of material banality through hands-on investigation and collective creation.

Inspired by Rob Nixon’s seminal concept of slow violence, Davis switches ‘slow’ for ‘banal’, to focus the attention not only on the temporality of environmental violence, as incremental and accretive, but also on its affective and bodily registers. Toxicity scholars have shown that slow violence is both a direct experience and something needing mediation to be understood. We argue that this hard-to-perceive slow violence is even more difficult to communicate when it is also banal.

As part of our commitment to exploring creative strategies for mediating banality, we invite students, scholars, and practitioners to investigate everyday material encounters across Montreal in a workshop. Participants will collaboratively act as gatherers, employing biomaterial capture methods to identify cues of banal violence across the city. Back at Spec Life, groups will interpret their collected data using a range of methodologies familiar to different groups in the cluster, including multimodal ethnography, CLEAR Lab’s DIY microplastic forensics protocol, and microscopy/material analysis. Following this, participants will synthesize their insights through a series of speculative map-making exercises, attempting to situate their discoveries in relation to time and space. The workshop will culminate in the co-production of speculative analog and digital maps, making visible some of the manifold forms of banal violence present in the city of Montreal.

Space is limited and requires registration:

This activity is presented as part of the 2026 Interdisciplinary Encounters.

Published on April 15, 2026

Cette publication est également disponible en : Français (French)