Abstract This poster presentation will share the initial outcomes of Necessary Confusion, a four-year artistic research project exploring how non-resolution-oriented approaches to confusion can function as a framework for making access in post-secondary education.

Confusion tends to engender discomfort, worry, inefficiency, and disruption wherever it occurs. Because of this, confusion is generally treated as a problem that can—and should—be resolved. This “resolution-oriented” approach is shared across a wide variety of disciplines (medicine, pedagogy, communication studies, etc.) and is prevalent in everyday life. This ubiquity of resolution-oriented approaches has resulted in much of the existing language for confusion prefiguring it as a problem.

In working towards a non-resolution-oriented approach to confusion, Necessary Confusion has first aimed to explore what expansive forms of language (verbal, visual, performative, etc.) are needed to describe confusion without prefiguring is as always already a problem. By combining queer/trans and crip theoretical frameworks with artistic research and participatory action research methodologies Necessary Confusion has begun to develop expansive languages that capacitate non-resolution-oriented approaches to confusion.

The presentation will give an overview of the expansive language developed in the scope of this project through three recent project outcomes: "Sustainable Resistance/Resistance without Protest" (2024-25), a workshop and follow-up essay; "A Place Out of Time" (2025), a theater performance and text-based artwork; and "Inadmissible on Medical Grounds" (2026), a zine and sticker series. Collectively these projects have built verbal, visual, pedagogical, and performative forms of language for confusion that coalesce around themes of looping, slowness, il/legibility, vignetting, and relationality. These themes and forms of language will serve as groundwork for developing confusion as a framework for access.