The Imaginary of Disobedience

January 19, 2026
Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University, Durham NC

The Imaginary of Disobedience is a one-day workshop to be held at Duke University on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, January 19, 2026. The workshop aims to conceptualize the lineaments of dissent over the last century or so as a global phenomenon. It brings together a range of scholars and artists to explore the connections between heterogeneous sites and contexts through a culture of disobedience. With a particular focus on visual practices—especially photography—the workshop will consider how images shape, record, and reimagine histories of anticolonial and antiauthoritarian resistance.

Workshop Program

Monday, January 19

Introduction by Avrati Bhatnagar and Sumathi Ramaswamy
9:15 am - 9:30 am

Panel 1
9:30 am - 11:00 am
Chaired by Sumathi Ramaswamy

Prashant Kidambi
"Resistance and its Discontents: Vignettes from Bombay's Civil Disobedience Movement"

John and Jan French
"Fear and Lucidity Walk Hand in Hand: Photojournalists Curate an Exhibition in the Aftermath of the 1979 Metalworkers Strike in the Industrial ABC region of Greater Sao Paulo, Brazil"

Martin Berger
"The Conditions of Disobedience in US Civil Rights Protest"

11:00 am - 11:15 am
Coffee/tea break

Panel 2
11:15 am - 12:45 pm
Chaired by Gennifer Weisenfeld

Mira Xenia Schwerda
"Visions Lost and Gained: The Complex Photo Economy Surrounding ʻAbbas Aqa’s Assassination of Amin al-Sultan in 1907"

Avrati Bhatnagar
"The Aesthetics of Urban Sovereignty: Ordered Disorder and Infrastructural Disobedience in Bombay"

Tom Rankin
"Dissent and Disobedience in Danny Lyon’s Archive"

*
12:45 pm - 2:00 pm
Lunch

Panel 3
2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Chaired by Douglas Haynes

Gabrielle Moser
"Sea Roads and Seditious Subjects: Looking Disobediently at the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee’s lantern slides of British Malaya (1907-1912)"

Vazira Zamindar
"On Walking Together: Anticolonial Practice"

Wing Ki Lee
"Disobedient Imageries: Frame, Internet meme, and the generative"

*
3.30-4:00 pm
Coffee/tea break

4:00-5:00 pm
Chair: Sumathi Ramaswamy

Concluding notes and discussion