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:
- Shame in lived experience
- Shame and social relations
- Shame and embodiment
- Chronic shame
- Shame and affective injustice
- Shame and trauma
- Online shaming
- Shame in social media
- The politics of shame
- Shame and social justice
- Shame in gendered experience
- Shame in minority experience
- Cultural variations in shame experiences
- Shame and stigma
- Shame in healthcare and medicine
- Shame in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis
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:
- The deadline for the submission of abstracts is Thursday 31 March 2022 (midnight UK).
- Abstracts will be blind peer reviewed by members of the BSP conference committee from the BSP and University of Exeter
- Each year, we receive more abstracts of quality than for which we are able to provide space. From the shortlist, the review team selects what they believe to be the best of these for presentation during the event, with an eye to the aims and objectives of the conference, the society and its co-organisers.
- We intend to inform participants if they have been successful on or around Saturday 30 April 2022. Due to the quantity of abstract submissions, while we notify everyone on the outcome of their submission, we do not supply individual feedback on those which are unsuccessful.