We are pleased to announce the 2025-26 UTM-JHI Seminar:
OUGHTISM… I WOULD PREFER NOT TO
Multimodal Seminar Series
February 5 to 8, 2026
Blackwood Gallery, CDRS, e-gallery, MiST Theatre (UTM)
Organized and hosted by Christine Shaw
“Oughtism is my name for the ways we are trained, habituated, conditioned, and rewarded to think along dominant lines of production. How we 'ought' to behave. A tendency towards the already known. A regulatory refrain that whispers how bodies ought to look like, ought to behave like. Oughtism is neurotypicality in its production of embodied relations of normopathological repetition; it is the sweeping regime of the obvious, a vocation of lines and their secretions, a rush to solutions. […] In these moments of wars, angry lines, and angrier flames, may we be visited by outstretched arms and offending requests to toss away the crippling fixation with neurotypical goals.”
— Báyò Akómoláfe, “Oughtism”
The four-day seminar OUGHTISM… I WOULD PREFER NOT TO will deepen interdisciplinary conversations of neurodiversity, disability, creative practice, and collaborative methodologies. The Seminar will explore autistic politics and perception, distantism, the empathy epidemic, choreographies of neurodiversity, Protactility, and other modalities that refuse neurotypical logics.
OUGHTISM is presented in conjunction with STIM CINEMA, an exhibition and moving-image installation by the Neurocultures Collective and Steven Eastwood. STIM CINEMA is supported by the JHI Program for the Arts and presented by the Blackwood Gallery, UTM.
