Announcements

CFA and CFP:  “Affective Lives: Autotheoretical Experiments” (Special Issue of Passion: Journal of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions)
 
Guest Editor: Dr. Ruth Rebecca Tietjen (R.R.Tietjen@tilburguniversity.edu) 
 
Timeline
  1. Expressions of interest and abstracts: I plan to organize an online workshop (in October 2025) where drafts can be presented and discussed. Please indicate your interest in contributing to the Special Issue by the end of April 2025 by submitting: (a) An abstract of no more than 500 words; (b) A brief, informal description of your background and/or interest in autotheory; (c) Whether you are interested in contributing to and participating in the online workshop.
  2. Full papers (maximum 9,000 words) are due by the end of January 2026; they will undergo a blind peer-review procedure (for details, see here). Note that it is also possible to submit a full paper without having expressed prior interest.
 
Description: This Special Issue of Passion – the open-access journal of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions (EPSSE) – provides a platform for creative autotheoretical explorations of various affective phenomena and conditions.
 
Memoir and autotheory have always been central to writings from marginalized perspectives. Examples include the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean Améry. More recent examples include the writings by Annie Ernaux, Édouard Louis, and Didier Eribon, as well as Susan Brison’s “Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of the Self,” and Ann Cvetkovich’s “Depression: A Public Feeling.” As Lauren Fournier explains in her book “Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism,” autotheory integrates so-called subjective modes of writing and presentation, such as autobiography and memoir, with theory and philosophy. It often does so in a performative way, committed to the aim of social criticism. As such, autotheory is unique in that it allows for the exploration of lived experiences – particularly of suffering and marginalization – through an autobiographical lens, while simultaneously acknowledging and uncovering social structures underlying these experiences that render them not just personal but also profoundly social and political.
 
Despite its impact on decolonial, feminist, and queer writing, the methods of memoir and autotheory have remained at the margins of academic philosophical writing. While they have gained more attention in mainstream philosophy in recent years, most writing and discourse remain detached and impersonal. This is also true within the philosophy of emotion. While interest in affective phenomena is often grounded in our lived and embodied experience, the philosophy of emotion is still frequently practiced and presented in a seemingly detached and impersonal way.
 
Not so in this Special Issue that invites you to take seriously the personal, embodied, social, political, and performative nature of our affective lives. Committed to anti-oppressive and liberatory ideals, it offers both new and established voices a creative space to explore affective lives through an autotheoretical lens that integrates the personal with the theoretical.
  1. In terms of form, all contributions should employ autotheoretical methods and modes of presentation; this is a collection of autotheoretical essays, not of essays about autotheory. Taking seriously the critical and explorative nature of autotheory, this Special Issue offers you the creative freedom to experiment with new forms of expression.
  2. In terms of content, the Special Issue seeks to do justice to our affective lives in all their plurality, variety, and ambiguity, acknowledging the violence, cruelty, and injustices of our world while also celebrating life’s fragile pleasures, joys, and beauties.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. The more passion, the better. 
 
Link to CFA and CFP on PhilEvents with a pdf version of the call and updates in case there are any.

 

 

Call for Papers: Cinema and Emotion

Passion: Journal of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions invites submissions for a special issue on the topic of Cinema and Emotion.

Appearing in Pierrot Le Fou (1965), the American filmmaker Sam Fuller summed up cinema: a film is like a battleground, he says. It has love, hate, action, violence and death. In one word, emotion.

The importance of emotion for understanding cinema is well recognised. Carl Plantinga (2008) sums it up in five points. 1. A pleasurable affective experience is one of the primary motivations for film viewing. 2. Emotions provide narrative and character information and are necessary to fully understand a narrative film. 3. Emotions and affects, whether pleasurable or not, are a central element of the phenomenological experience of the cinema. 4. Emotions are intimately tied to cognitions, and for this reason affective experience, meaning, and interpretation are firmly intertwined. 5. Emotions as experienced in films have powerful rhetorical functions and contribute to a film's ideological effects.

The reverse relationship between cinema and the philosophy of emotion is also likely true. The study of cinema can be an important avenue for coming to a deeper philosophical understanding of emotion and affect. Cinema is a natural laboratory, in a sense, for the induction, evocation, and manipulation of almost all emotions and affects. We can use film to study particular emotions, or to test, or even help develop, philosophical hypotheses about emotion. Studies of cinema and studies of emotion illuminate each other.

We seek papers that explore either side of this relationship (or both).

Topics of Interest

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Exploration of the intersection between philosophy of emotion and cinema studies.
  • Cinematic presentation of a specific emotion (e.g. remorse) and its philosophical implications.
  • Study of specific films and the philosophy of emotion.
  • The role of emotional engagement in the viewer's interpretive process.
  • The intersection of emotion, affect, and ideology in film narratives.
  • Comparative studies of emotional experiences across different genres or cultural contexts.
  • The impact of technological advancements on the portrayal and perception of emotion in cinema.
  • Analysis of how mood, emotion, and atmosphere interact in film.

Submission Guidelines

Abstract submissions of between 300 and 500 words due April 30th 2025.  Completed papers due October 31st 2025.  Papers should follow the journals submission guidelines: https://passion-journal.org/author-guidelines, with a maximum word length of 9000 words.

Please send expressions of interest with an abstract to Damian Cox, Bond University (dcox@bond.edu.au) by 30th April, 2025.

 
 
Call for Papers: Faces of Affective Injustice Special Issue
 
Philosophers of emotion and affectivity have recently begun to explore the idea that there may be distinctive forms of injustice related to affectivity. This has involved coining the term “affective injustice” to investigate how individuals and groups can be harmed as affective agents and the role affectivity may play in different forms of oppression.
 
As feminist philosophers have emphasised, our affective lives are regulated through emotion regimes and social norms, and are sites of oppression and silencing — but also, potentially, resistance and liberation (e.g., Collins 1993; Hochshild 2019; Lorde 1997). Taking up these insights, recent work on affective injustice has thematized the lack of uptake and silencing of anger (Srinivasan 2018; Whitney 2018, 2023), affective stereotyping (Cherry 2023), the dangers of enforced emotional regulation (Archer & Mills 2019), taxonomies of affective injustice (Pismenny et al, 2024), ecological accounts of its perpetuation (Krueger 2023; Osler et al., 2024), analyses of emotion regimes (von Maur 2021), and critical considerations of the conceptual pay-off (or lack thereof) of the very idea of “affective injustice” (Stockdale 2023; Slaby 2024). 
 
This growing body of work points towards a potentially fruitful way of understanding various forms of emotional wrongs, and provides a theoretical framework for work in the ethics and politics of emotions. However, little work has so far been done to provide a principled way of understanding what makes something affectively just or unjust (although see Gallegos 2022). In addition, much of the current discussion is focused on one specific emotion (anger), while this concept might also help us understand ethical and political issues related to other emotions such as hope, gratitude and contempt, as well as other affective states such as moods.
 
This special issue seeks to further our understanding of the multifaceted nature of affective injustice. Possible topics for exploration include:
 
  • Exploring affective injustice in relation to emotional states other than anger, such as gratitude, hope, contempt, and pride
  • Affective injustice and moods
  • Affective injustice in online environments
  • Affective injustice and mental health
  • Affective injustice and social-economic class
  • Affective injustice and heteronormativity
  • Affective injustice and colonialism
  • Affective injustice and gaslighting
  • The relationship between affective injustice and other forms of injustice, such as distributive injustice, epistemic injustice, and aesthetic injustice
  • Critical and historical engagements with the concept of ‘affective injustice’  
  • Limitations of the notion of affective injustice 
  • Affective justice and affective liberation 
 
Confirmed contributors: Eleanor Byrne, Myisha Cherry, Francisco Gallegos, Federica Gregoratto, Carme Isern Mas, Imke von Maur, Jan Slaby, Shiloh Whitney, and Michalinos Zembylas
 
Submissions: 6,000 - 9,000 words in length (excl. references) and submitted via the journal’s submission system here
 
Deadline for submissions: 30 September 2025
 
Editors: Alfred Archer, Lucy Osler, and Joel Krueger
 

Special Issue Call For Papers: Feminist Philosophy of Emotions 

 

Editors: Laura Silva, Federico Lauria, and Arina Pismenny 

 

Following the excellent pre-conference workshop on Feminist Philosophy of Emotions in Lisbon 2024, the call for papers for the special issue on this topic is now open! This special issue aims to explore critical/feminist approaches to the philosophy of emotion. Our guest editors invite contributions that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

 
  • Embodiment and gendered emotional experiences
  • Power dynamics and emotions
  • Feminist critiques of traditional theories of emotion
  • Emotional labor and affective injustice
  • The epistemic role of emotions under conditions of oppression
  • Ethical implications of feminist perspectives on emotions
  • Political implications of feminist perspectives on emotions 

Submission deadline: 1 May 2025