Seventh DGSIC Conference 2026
Seventh Deleuze and Guattari Studies in India Collective Conference 2026
February 25-28, 2026
Culture without Organs (CWO): Machinic Thought, Transdisciplinary Assemblages, and Cartographies of Difference
Organised by
Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India
in collaboration with
Deleuze and Guattari Studies in India Collective (DGSIC)
Venue: Mulk Raj Anand Auditorium, Arts Block-I, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India.
Chief Patron
Prof. Renu Vig
Hon. Vice Chancellor
Panjab University, Chandigarh
International Advisors
Ian Buchanan, University of Wollongong, Australia
George Varghese K, President, DGSIC
Conveners
Prof. Meenu A. Gupta (coordinator)
Chairperson, Department of English and Cultural Studies
Panjab University, Chandigarh
Vice-President, DGSIC
Dr. Manoj N.Y.
Assistant Professor, Easwari School of Liberal Arts
SRM University, Andhra Pradesh
General Secretary, Deleuze and Guattari Studies in India Collective
Introduction
The Department of English and Cultural Studies at Panjab University is pleased to host the Seventh International Deleuze and Guattari Studies in India Collective Conference 2026 in collaboration with Deleuze and Guattari Studies in India Collective. This conference comprises of two events – two days international camp on the theme ‘Fabulating the New: Difference, Becomings, Multiplicities’ focusing broadly on the philosophical system of Deleuze and Guattari (25 -26 Feb 2026) and the two days international conference on the theme ‘Culture Without Organs: Machinic Thought, Transdisciplinary Assemblages, and Cartographies of Difference’ (27-28 Feb 2026).
This conference is aimed at fostering critical inquiry and transdisciplinary conversations in the domain of literary and cultural studies drawing from the conceptual repertoire of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose collaborative and individual works have catalysed novel approaches to problematize power, identity, resistance, aesthetics, and subjectivity. In an increasingly interconnected and volatile world marked by climate precarity, technological acceleration, the emergence of bioinformatic capitalism, neurocultures, bioart to CRISPR aesthetics, intermedial artworks, glitch aesthetics and AI generated literature, the domain of culture can no longer be thought of as sovereign sphere of representation or symbolic meaning, rather it becomes a Body Without Organs in the Deleuzo-Guattarian idiom. The molar register of art, literature and media (representational paradigm) has dismembered itself as the meaning has imploded and dispersed in affective, diagrammatic and algorithmic modulations; texts are rendered as multiplicities in codes or codes being expressive (as literature), narratives as algorithmic refrain dispersed in circuits of perception, glitch aesthetics challenging the semantic coherence, and posthuman milieu of synaptic wetware and synthetic syntax reassembling the human as merely a relay in the distributed network of cognition.
Within the domain of culture, indigenous epistemologies, and the lived experiences of subaltern and minoritarian communities posit fluid sites of affirmation and resistance. They are nothing but molecular insurgencies offering a minoritarian politics of performative and affirmative ‘becomings’ that challenge hegemonic structures of dominant assemblages of control. These minoritarian zones of becoming are not merely reactionary but affirmative and affective which fabulate various futurisms; the queer futures, Indofuturism, Afrofuturisms etc. The Deleuze-Guattarian conceptual toolkit grounded in difference, multiplicity, and becoming —comprising notions like rhizome, deterritorialization, assemblage, affect, machinic unconscious, and micropolitics—offers rich resources in addressing this evolving terrains of contemporary culture.
We invite academics, researchers, cultural theorists, philosophers, artists, anthropologists, digital humanists, and activists to reflect on how Deleuze and Guattari can help interpret and intervene in contemporary cultural milieu as part of the Seventh International Deleuze and Guattari Studies in India Collective conference on the theme “Culture without Organs (CWO): Machinic Thought, Transdisciplinary Assemblages, and Cartographies of Difference.
Conference Theme
This conference draws its inspiration from the radical philosophical project of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who dismantled fixed models of thought, hierarchical structures, and representational paradigms. This conference invites participants to rethink culture, knowledge, and politics not as closed systems but as assemblages in flux, animated by machinic processes, transversal flows, and rhizomatic conjunctions. The first strand of enquiry, machinic thought, foregrounds the concept of machine not as a mechanical object or metaphor but as a processual and relational logic of connection, production and transformation. From desiring-machines to abstract machines this approach problematises anthropocentric, dualist and organicist models and paradigms of thought and action. Strongly positioning on such a perspective, the conference invites machinic engagements across domains – biological, technological, ecological, aesthetic, algorithmic – those open new pathways for rethinking agency, production, desire, creativity and resistance.
The second strand of enquiry, transdisciplinary assemblages, highlights the transversality at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s method. Assemblages and multiplicities resist disciplinary or territorial closures. They form random and unpredictable connections like media with philosophy, literature with science, or aesthetics with activism. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s method, this conference encourages experimental crossings that disrupt institutional silos and generate new epistemic and affective formations.
The third axis, cartographies of difference, calls for mappings that are divergent from fixed identities and sterile representations, which, in turn, forays into a new global regime marked by diaspora, caste conundrums, colonial afterlives, and digital governance. Opposed to redundant modelings and static representations, cartography becomes an affective, generative and political act that constitutes cultures, bodies, and communities in a new manner that affirms multiplicity, relationality and emergence. How do Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts further sharpen this cartography that helps us to rethink new border regimes, algorithmic cultures, ecological breakdowns etc?
Finally, the conference, set in a region where the colonial knowledge systems intersect with millennia-old religions, philosophies, and cosmologies, Culture Without Organs, opens a space for thinking with and against dominant models of culture, knowledge and power. Without making India its exclusive object or focus, the conference will try to draw upon the generative potentials and the singular intensities of its location as part of a broader project of global thought and planetary critique.
This conference invites scholars, artists, cultural theorists, practitioners, and activists to explore the ‘changing topographies of culture’ using Deleuzo-Guattarian frameworks, aiming to map new frontiers of cultural theory and practice. It invites dialogue across cultural studies, philosophy, political theory, environmental humanities, digital cultures, and indigenous studies, asking how Deleuzo-Guattarian thought may be activated in contexts far from its European genealogies. The conference will also foreground methodological innovation, encouraging participants to see research itself as a process of conceptual experimentation—a rhizomatic unfolding of ideas, affects, and practices.
Conference Themes (not limited to those listed below):
- Desiring-Machines, Algorithmic Desire, and AI
- Smart Cities, Informal Networks, Rhizomatic Publics
- Indigenous Cosmologies and Geophilosophy
- Artificial Intelligence, Machine Thinking, and Posthuman Subjectivities
- Art as Assemblage: Sound, Performance, Movement
- Digital Rhizomes: Deleuze, Information Cultures, and the Politics of the Interface
- Global Media Cultures, Nomad Thought and Contemporary Social Movements
- Intersectional Assemblages: Caste, Gender, Queer Identities
- Deleuze in the Digital and Cinematic Imagination
- Postcapitalist Futures and the Micropolitics of Resistance
- Nomadic Pedagogies: Experimental Learning and Transdisciplinary Practice/Deleuze and Guattari in Curriculum, Theory and Critical Praxis
- Deleuzo-Guattarian reading of folklore, ritual, mythology, or traditional arts
- Indigenizing Deleuze: Comparative Philosophies and Non-Western Ontologies
- Becoming-Planetary: Posthuman Ecologies and Deleuzian Cosmopolitics
- Schizoanalysis and Everyday Culture
- Fragmented Subjectivities and Cultural Critique
- Dialogue with Indigenous and Decolonial Thought
- Commodified Desire: Algorithms, Control Societies, and Digital Assemblages
Plenary Speakers
- Daniela Angelucci, University Roma Tre, Italy
- Joff PN Bradley, Teikyo University, Japan
- Ian Buchanan, University of Wollongong, Australia
- Chun-Mei Chuang, Soochow University, Taiwan
- Gary Genosko, Ontario Tech University, Canada
- Meenu Gupta, Panjab University, India
- Jay Hetrick, University of Sharjah, UAE
- Tatsuya Higaki, Osaka University, Japan
- Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Kyung Hee University, South Korea
- Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
- Manoj NY, SRM-AP University, India
- Daniel Smith, Purdue University, USA
- Kenneth Surin, Duke University, USA
- George Varghese K, President, DGSIC
- Janell Watson, Virginia Tech University, USA
Deleuze and Guattari International Camp (Feb 25-26)
Fabulating the New: Difference, Becomings, Multiplicities
The seventh Deleuze and Guattari Studies in India Collective International Camp 2026 proposes to explore the transformative project of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari by situating their work within a broader intellectual orientation: fabulating the new! At its heart lies an engagement with difference and becoming, concepts that move beyond traditional philosophical models grounded in identity, opposition, and representation. For Deleuze and Guattari, difference is not secondary to sameness or a negation of it, but a productive force that drives thought, life, and culture towards novelty. Becoming, in turn, is the active process of transformation — an open-ended movement through which new realities, subjectivities, and modes of existence emerge.
To reconfigure thought through difference and becoming is to adopt a philosophical posture that refuses closure, rejects fixed categories, and embraces multiplicity and transformation as conditions of thought. It is a mode of thinking that resists the reduction of experience to predetermined structures and instead foregrounds experimentation, invention, and the unfolding of the new. This orientation has implications that extend far beyond philosophy, influencing art, politics, pedagogy, and social life.
Thus, DGSIC Camp 2026 will treat difference and becoming not only as abstract concepts but as generative conditions for thought and action. The lectures will situate these concepts within the broader landscape of contemporary thought, showing how they disrupt dominant paradigms and open alternative ways of thinking about identity, tradition, and change. Participants will be invited to reflect on how such a reconfiguration of thought can engage with pressing questions in our time — from cultural diversity and technological transformation to political renewal and ecological change.
In the Indian context, where plurality, diversity, and continual transformation are central concerns of intellectual and cultural life, this philosophical project offers a particularly resonant framework. It enables a rethinking of difference that does not flatten it into opposition, and a conception of becoming that affirms the generative potential of change without erasing stability. Seventh DGSIC International camp aims to offer a horizon for rethinking thought itself, situating Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy as a living resource for both theoretical engagement and practical experimentation.
How to Register?
Please go to the registration tab in our conference website and register there. Else click here.
Last Date for Registration
Early Bird Registration: 15 December 2025
Regular Registration : 07 January 2026
Conference Registration Fee
Students Delegate Fees
INR 3000 Early Bird Registration (by December 15, 2025)
INR 3500 Regular Registration (after December 15, 2025)
Faculty and Other Delegates
INR 5000 Early Bird Registration (by December 15, 2025)
INR 6000 Regular Registration (after December 15, 2025)
For International Participants
US $ 150 Early Bird Registration (by December 15, 2025)
US $ 200 Regular Registration (after December 15, 2025)
Camp Registration Fee
Students Delegate Fees
INR 3000 Early Bird Registration (by December 15, 2025)
INR 3500 Regular Registration (after December 15, 2025)
Faculty and Other Delegates
INR 5000 Early Bird Registration (by December 15, 2025)
INR 6000 Regular Registration (after December 15, 2025)
For International Participants
US $ 150 Early Bird Registration (by December 15, 2025)
US $ 200 Regular Registration (after December 15, 2025)
Accommodation Details
We are working on the budget friendly shared accommodation possibilities for outstation participants.We will keep you updated on this. Please note that the registration fee doesn’t cover the accommodation. However the participants are free to arrange for their own accommodation.
What Registration Fee entails?
Conference registration will be confirmed only upon payment of the registration fee. To begin, please complete the registration form available under the Registration tab on the conference website. Once your abstract has been reviewed, you will receive an email with a secure payment link to finalize your registration.
The registration fee for both the camp and the conference includes tea and lunch on all event days, as well as a conference/camp kit. Please note that accommodation expenses are not covered by the registration fee.
For further details please write to us at deleuze2026chandigarh@gmail.com
OurTeam
Advisory Board
Prof. YP Verma, Registrar, Panjab University
Prof. Amit Chauhan, Dean – Students Welfare, Panjab University
Prof. Rumina Sethi, Senior Faculty, Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University
Prof. Deepti Gupta, Senior Faculty, Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University
Prof. Akshaya Kumar, Senior Faculty, Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University
Prof. Satvinder Kaur, Chairperson, Department of Education, Panjab University
Prof. Amandeep Kaur, Department of Evening Studies, Panjab University
Dr. Bhawna Gupta, Chairperson, Department of Public Administration, Panjab University
Co-conveners
Dr. Swatie, Assistant Professor, Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University (Coordinator)
Dr. Kamalpreet Kaur, Assistant Professor, Guru Gobind Singh College for Women, Chandigarh
Dr. Jaidev Bishnoi, Assistant Professor, Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University
Dr. Sumandeep Kaur, Assistant Professor, Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University
About Panjab University, Chandigarh
Established in 1882 in Lahore (then part of pre-Partition India) and relocated to Chandigarh post-Partition, Panjab University is one of India’s oldest and most prestigious institutions of higher learning. The University boasts a rich legacy of academic excellence and public leadership, with alumni that include: Dr. Shankar Dayal Sharma (9th President of India), Dr. Manmohan Singh and Shri I. K. Gujral (Former Prime Ministers of India), Ms. Kiran Bedi (India’s first female IPS officer), Justice J. S. Khehar (Former Chief Justice of India) and Dr. Romila Thapar (an eminent historian) amongst others.
Spanning 550 acres in the heart of Chandigarh, the campus is a vibrant mix of lush green spaces and modernist architecture, featuring landmarks such as Gandhi Bhawan, Student Centre, Diwan Anand Kumar Hall and A. C. Joshi Library.
The University comprises 74 departments, 4 regional centres, 15 dedicated research centres and Over 200 affiliated colleges. Panjab University has been accredited with NAAC A++ grade, earning a CGPA of 3.68/4, making it one of the highest-rated public universities in the country. For more information, visit: https://puchd.ac.in/
About Chandigarh
Chandigarh, the capital of both Punjab and Haryana, is a vibrant and a well-planned city in Northern India. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s dream City, Chandigarh was designed by renowned French architect Le Corbusier in the 1950s, blending modern architecture with scenic natural surroundings. It is divided into sectors that are self-sufficient with the availability of shops, community centres, schools, and so on. The city’s picturesque Sukhna Lake and surrounding Shivalik hills offer stunning views and opportunities for relaxation and recreation. With its clean environment and excellent infrastructure, Chandigarh has become a hub for education, commerce and tourism, earning the title, “The City Beautiful”. For more information visit https://chandigarh.gov.in/
Explore Chandigarh
Sukhna Lake – A tranquil man-made lake at the foothills of the Shivaliks.
Bird Park – Next to the Sukhna Lake, it is believed that this structure would be the tallest structure of the country in the aviary domain.
Rock Garden – A surreal sculpture garden built by Nek Chand using urban and industrial waste—an iconic space of art, sustainability, and imagination.
Rose Garden (Zakir Hussain Garden) – Asia’s largest rose garden featuring over 1,600 varieties of roses, landscaped lawns, and seasonal flower festivals. February is the month of full bloomed roses.
Terraced Garden & Japanese Garden – Peaceful retreats in Sector 33 and Sector 31 respectively, offering themed landscaping and evening light shows.
Government Museum & Art Gallery – Home to a rare collection of Gandhara sculptures, Pahari miniature paintings, and modern art.
Sector 17 Plaza – Chandigarh’s central shopping and cultural hub with open-air cafés, bookstores, local brands, and evening performances.
Near Chandigarh (1–2 hour drive)
Anandpur Sahib (95 km) – One of the five Takhts (seats of authority) of Sikhism; visit the Virasat-e-Khalsa Museum, a stunning fusion of history and architecture.
Morni Hills (45 km) – The only hill station of Haryana—offers hiking trails, boating, bird-watching, and eco-tourism vibes.
Pinjore Gardens (Yadavindra Gardens, 22 km) – 17th-century Mughal-style terraced gardens—especially beautiful during evening illuminations and cultural fairs.
Extended Getaways from Chandigarh (2–5 hours)
Kasauli (58 km | 2 hours), Rishikesh & Haridwar (200–220 km | ~5 hours) , Amritsar (230 km | 4.5 hours)
Travel Tips for International Delegates:
- Chandigarh is well-connected via Chandigarh International Airport (IXC) and Chandigarh Railway Station.
- Local transport includes most Taxi rental services like Uber, Rapido and Other rental cabs.
