Circuit Breakers

Symposium Dates: March 12–13, 2026

In contemporary neoliberal media ecologies, technologies are designed for seamless, efficient, scalable, and automated governance. These imperatives—rooted in platform capitalism, platform imperialism, and the extractive logics of coloniaity/modernity—obscure the frictions, breakdowns, misuses, and refusals that emerge from communities who must adapt, repair, or reimagine systems to survive. LET’S DISMANTLE TOGETHER! 

Circuit Breakers turns toward practices that interrupt these imperatives: improvised infrastructures, disobedient designs, communal repair, Indigenous technological sovereignty, queer glitch, and feminist refusal. This year's symposium activates the interdisciplinary strengths of the PhD Program in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital media in media studies, rhetoric, and critical making to examine sites of interruption not as failures but rather as openings onto modes of existence, world-building, and knowledge production.

We see malfunctioning, disrupted, or broken circuits as productive sites of critical inquiry for community-oriented care. Circuit Breakers embraces disruption as method, interruption as critique, and failure as insight. Drawing on the work of Ernesto Oroza on technological disobedience and Garnet Hertz on critical making, this year's symposium examines technologies that intentionally resist normativity, refuse use cases, or subvert dominant discourses. Building on this disobedience, we look to the work of Walter Mingolo to imagine Technologies of Otherwise—a critical interrogation of chrononormativity in technology. By centering broken infrastructures, misalignment, and dysfunctional prototypes, we foreground the epistemological value of failure: what technologies cannot do reveals the limits of their imaginaries and opens space for plural futures.

We center pluriversal epistemologies—Indigenous, Afro-descendant, feminist, queer, disability-led, undocumented, and migrant knowledges—as foundations for disruptive technicity, not as “alternatives.” We value praxis that foregrounds relationality, reciprocity, resistance, and care. We invite you to interrogate together: What becomes possible when the circuit breaks?