CFP: NSSR Philosophy Graduate Conference on Violence

The annual Philosophy Grad Conference has a long standing tradition at The New School and beyond. It seeks to foster an environment for exchange, critical engagement and mutual inspiration.

Violence might be justified, unjustified, liberatory and uplifting, and murderous. Violence might be constitutive or destructive of subjectivity, and community, be it personal, regional, or global. Violence might be needed to disclose the truth, to counter concealing tendencies that might themselves be violent. Violence may be ‘in’ words, ‘in’ guns and bombs, or fists; it may be local and concentrated or macroscopic and diffuse; it may be slow and ‘hidden’, and not perpetrated by a specific subject, but rather a decentralized network.

How, then, should we respond to violence, either witnessed or experienced? How do our current responses function and why? Can we ‘overcome’ violence?  Or is it rather to be ‘channeled’ or ‘managed’? Is the juridical and institutional system and its monopoly of violence adept to deal with violence? How can we reimagine violence and our response to it? How might we speak about violence? What discourses take up, form, modify, and enable violence? Which words can - or should - a ‘we’ use to describe, justify or criticize violence? 

Lastly, what role does, can, or should philosophy play? How do philosophy and violence relate to one other? Is philosophy inherently violent in its generalizations, conceptualizations, and its abstractions; in its attempt to wrench truths from illusions? Is there non-violent philosophizing?

This conference will center research whose aim is to elucidate, complicate, critique, comment, struggle with, reason with, reject, or problematize the notion of violence.  

We welcome submissions on any subject relating to the topic of violence, with a specific focus on submissions from philosophy, the humanities more broadly, the social sciences,  theology, and various strands of ‘critical theory’ (from Queer Theory, to Critical Race Theory, to Critical Animal studies, Dis-ability studies, Indigenous thought,  Decolonial and Latinx thinking, and beyond).

Submission Guidelines

The conference is going to be held in person on March 20-22, at The New School For Social Research on its New York Campus. 

If you have any questions regarding accommodations, be they financial or otherwise,  please contact us.

Please submit an abstract, prepared for anonymous review, in .pdf format with 5 key words. Abstracts should be no longer than 500 words.

They should be submitted by January 10th 2025 to the following email address [email protected].

Please indicate in the body of the emailyour name, affiliation(s), and year of study. 

Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions or concerns regarding accommodations, or anything else.

Notifications of acceptance follow by January 24th 2025.