Kinds of Agency Graduate Conference

The Kinds of Agency conference invites interdisciplinary exploration of the many forms and manifestations of agency. From intentional action and communication to moral responsibility, autonomy, and selfhood, agency is central to our understanding of human cognition and behavior. Yet it is increasingly clear that agency is not a singular phenomenon: it may be distributed, embodied, emergent, nonhuman, or collective. Our aim is to foster cross-disciplinary discussions on various types or kinds of agency that have intrigued philosophers, cognitive scientists, linguists, neuroscientists, and developmental, comparative, and evolutionary psychologists, among others.

We welcome papers on topics including, but not limited to:

·       Agency in language, thought, and action

·       Developmental and evolutionary roots of agency

·       Nonhuman and artificial agency (e.g., animal cognition, AI systems)

·       Collective and distributed agency

·       Agency, autonomy, and normativity

·       The phenomenology of agency and selfhood

·       Agency and expression in social, cultural, or political contexts

Submission Guidelines
We invite abstracts – roughly 1,000 words, excluding references – of short papers, suitable for a 30 min presentation, by graduate students and postdocs. Presenters will be asked to send a recording of their talks a week in advance. The videos should not exceed 20 mins to allow for 10 min discussion. The papers should be relatively accessible to a cross-disciplinary audience and avoid overly technical discussions of ‘in-house’ issues/debates.

Submission Deadline: December 14, 2025

Notifications by: January 17, 2026

Abstracts should be prepared for blind review and include the title of the paper; they should make clear both the topic and the main arguments of the paper.

Abstracts should be submitted through the following form:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScAeRKJZAzldrdDBU5Ul44NYa7U8MzBNOf89hMC7cYVUE808Q/viewform