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This symposium seeks to explore further how we think, work, and be together amidst ongoing conditions of endings.

Ends Collaborative Performance Research calls for participation in a performance studies symposium at the University of Antwerp from 28 to 30 October 2026. We begin with a shared premise that we are living through durational end times - not for the first time, and not for all equally. The world ends - again and again - across scales of ecology and climate, ideology and action, extraction and collectivity, the planetary and the immediate. We might ask whether the metanarrative of finitude is an historical constant. Has the end always loomed ever so close to us as it does today? There is something absurdly performative in the idea that humans can now calculate our own extinction better than at any other time in our history just as we also fail to avoid it. We pin our end to the planet’s, only to realize that we, like everything else, share different ends. We are interested in how performance troubles and resists such ends and also how it facilitates and accelerates such conditions. A key aspect of this gathering is to consider how we might cultivate practices of cooperation, share knowledge generously, and foster sustainable modes of research grounded in reciprocity, attentiveness, and mutual care.

Important Dates

• End of early-bird registration fee: 31 August 2026
• Registration deadline: 30 September 2026
• Conference dates: 28–30 October 2026