Call For Papers for special panel for the 2022 British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference
Location: University of Exeter, UK, in-person and virtual (hybrid)
Date: Tuesday 30 August – Thursday 1 September 2022
CFP deadline: Thursday 31 March 2022 (midnight UK).
The “Phenomenology and Shame Experiences” Call for Papers invites abstracts to be considered for a special panel for the 2022 British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference on the theme of Engaged Phenomenology II.
This panel is sponsored by the Shame and Medicine Project and the aim of the panel is to encourage an engaged phenomenological approach to considering shame in its various forms, and how it relates to and effects features of lived experience such as embodiment, affective life, consciousness, sociality, intersubjectivity, intercorporeality, health, among others.
Shame is commonly considered to be a negative self-conscious emotion that arises when we are concerned with how we are being judged by others as a result of some transgression, mistake or mishap. Shame experiences are intensely personal and individual, while simultaneously only having meaning within social and political contexts. Shame has been called the ‘master emotion’ and a ‘keystone affect’, with many philosophers, sociologists and psychologists seeing shame as centrally significant for understanding subjectivity, identity and social relations. Shame has been called a chameleon emotion, as it takes many forms, while often remaining unspoken, invisible or underground, leading to challenges in understanding and researching shame in lived experience.
Nonetheless, phenomenology has had a long interest in shame and its connections to embodiment, self-awareness, ethics, subjectivity, and racialised and gendered experience. The work of phenomenologists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Max Scheler, Simone de Beauvoir and Franz Fanon, all reflect on shame in lived experience. More contemporary writing from phenomenological thinkers such as Dan Zahavi, Bonnie Mann, Lisa Guenther, Luna Dolezal, Alessandro Salice, among others, continues to point to the significance of shame for identity, subjectivity, sociality, and in critical phenomenology, in experiences of oppression and marginalization.
Submitting Abstracts:
For the “Phenomenology and Shame Experiences” Special Panel we welcome abstracts from multiple perspectives, from practitioners and philosophers (including both the European / Continental and Anglo-American / Analytic traditions), and from postgraduate researchers. Topics that might be considered include, but are not limited to:
To submit an abstract, please use the BSP Conference Online Abstract Submission System (which opens 29th January 2022) and select the option: “Submit single paper to special panel: Phenomenology and Shame Experiences (Shame and Medicine Project)”
Selection process:
