With Guest Editor Dr. Melissa Burchard, the Public Philosophy Journal (PPJ) is pleased to call for proposals for a Special Issue that will explore issues of trauma through the lens of public philosophy in the interest of enriching public life. In March 2019, the philosophy department at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, hosted “Philosophical Engagements with Trauma,” among the first academic conferences to focus specifically on the relationship between philosophy and trauma. In this Special Issue, we continue the work begun at that conference by creating additional opportunities to develop and engage with philosophical issues of trauma as they connect with concerns, experiences, insights, and discussions in the broader public sphere.
Questions and topics may include but are not limited to:
Research and impact: What does/can philosophy, and public philosophy in particular, add to existing studies about trauma? How can publicly relevant, accessible, philosophical analyses help us understand trauma/traumatic experiences within broader public life?
Ideas of trauma: Is a traumatic reality different from other experiences? If so, how can philosophy help to explain those differences? What are the kinds of experiences that seem to contribute to trauma?
Knowledge and discourse: How does traumatic experience support or challenge various epistemologies? How do forms of epistemic injustice (epistemic exploitation, silencing, trust injustice, etc.) obstruct identifications, understandings, and communications of traumatic events? How should/can frameworks of epistemic justice be normalized and made accessible in public discourse?
Agency and responsibility: How does trauma, especially severe and prolonged trauma, affect agency? What kinds of moral responsibility do people have, and are people capable of, under trauma, or, put differently, how does trauma influence the kinds of moral responsibility that people have or are capable of? What is owed to people who have been traumatized? What moral theories seem likely to enable us to respond well to the injuries caused by trauma, or to work to dismantle circumstances that contribute to the likelihood of trauma?
Social and political structures: How does trauma function on social levels? What are the experiences of trauma that are caused, for example, by living under racism and queerphobia? How is the experience of trauma changed when it is enacted by social institutions and when it has institutional power behind it?
Activism and outreach: What kinds of responsibility do we have to recognize the traumatic experiences of fellow members of our communities? What can trauma-informed pedagogy look like and how should/can we incorporate it in our classrooms or broader activist work? How can engaging philosophical issues of trauma for and with public communities serve as a resource for social and cultural change? How might such public-facing work help traumatized persons and allies survive, respond to, and recover from trauma?
Composers may propose text-based or multimedia projects, and proposals for collaborative projects are strongly encouraged. Selected proposals will be invited to complete the PPJ’s Formative Peer Review process, which is designed to shape submissions so that they might more effectively enrich public life and to cultivate habits of trust, care, equity, and inclusion between the participants themselves.
Learn more at https://publicphilosophyjournal.org/about/review/.
We encourage submissions from composers working within and outside of academic disciplines, as well as from those working in philosophy or other fields. Regardless of institutional, disciplinary, or organizational affiliations, composers are asked to demonstrate strong engagement with the stakeholder community to which the concern of their proposal is especially relevant.
Style and Submission Guidelines
Please submit abstracts of 250-500 words to [log in to unmask] by May 3rd, 2019.
Abstracts should demonstrate the PPJ’s style criteria:
Relevance: Does the work engage an issue of pressing concern to a particular community? How does it connect with that community?
Accessibility: Does it invite approachable conversations with a broad audience?
Intellectual Coherence: Does it employ concepts that advance and deepen understanding of the issue?
Scholarly Dialogue: Does it demonstrate awareness of and receptivity to pertinent conversations within the academy and beyond?
Composers of accepted abstracts will be asked to submit their completed projects for Formative Peer Review by July 5th, 2019. Completed text-based essays should be approximately 2000-3500 words, and they should follow the guidelines set in the Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition). For additional information about the PPJ’s style and submission guidelines, including the criteria above, please visit https://publicphilosophyjournal.org/our-guidelines/.