Annual Conference

July 22-26, 2026 at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (UCCS)

This year, the SPCW we will be considering the theme, “Responding to the Contemporary World: Wrong Answers Only.”

Call for Abstracts is open until February 6, 2026.

The phrase “wrong answers only” emerges from internet culture as a playful gesture of irony—an invitation to respond to familiar questions in unexpected, subversive, or humorous ways. Yet beyond its meme-life, the phrase raises a deeper philosophical provocation: What does it mean to respond “wrongly” in an age already structured by mistrust, crisis, and rupture? Can “wrong” responses illuminate what is overlooked, destabilize what is assumed, or open new paths of thought and practice? In a time of fractured institutions, competing claims of truth, and the sedimentation of modernity’s remnants, we ask whether wrong answers might paradoxically serve as generative calls toward beauty, reconciliation, or new guardrails for ethical-social-political life. To answer wrongly might be to resist the false clarity of ready-made analyses, diagnoses, and solutions, to dwell in the ruptures that shape our age, and to risk alternative visions—wise and otherwise.