Otherness (online)

Dear All,

Although submissions to our conference are officially closed, unforeseen circumstances required us to transfer the SoPheRE Conference on Otherness to an online format. While we regret not being able to meet everyone in person this year, this transition also creates an opportunity to broaden the scope of our discussions and accept a limited number of additional papers.

We therefore invite new abstract submissions (maximum 500 words), formatted for anonymous review. Abstracts must be written in English and sent [email protected].

We will review submissions on a rolling basis and aim to communicate decisions within approximately one week of receipt. The submission period will remain open until our online capacity is full or till the end of September, at which time we will need to finalize the conference program.

The original Call for Papers can be found here:

Keynote speakers:

Michael Barber (Saint Louis University): “The Question of the Ideology of Religious Experience and the Other: Essence, Social Science, and Verstehen”

Peter Costello (Providence College): “Marked By the Other: A Reading of Husserl and Genesis” 

Joseph Rivera (Dublin City University): “Where to Experience the Other: A Critical Reading of Michel Henry” 

Michael Staudigl (University of Vienna): “Barbarians, Cannibals, Terrorists: A Tropological Phenomenology of Otherness” 

We welcome additional submissions on Otherness in religion, including, but not limited to, questions such as:

• How do we encounter Otherness in organized religious communities, New Age movements, and non-dual spiritual traditions?
• What can be done to overcome age-old hostilities between different churches and denominations? How does Otherness affect religious rituals and rites?
• How can we phenomenologically reconcile—or should we reconcile—the diversity of soteriologies, conceptions of life after death, forms of religious experience, and varieties of mysticism?
• Does Otherness play a role in the constitution of religious beliefs, or are such beliefs primarily shaped by already established doctrinal frameworks?
• What is the role of Otherness in catholicity, in the transmission of religious forms, and in processes of religious syncretism?
• Does Otherness participate in the constitution of limit-experiences?
• How does the constitution of human Otherness differ from that of Divine Otherness? How do different conceptions of reality across religious traditions affect these distinctions?

With regard to Otherness in social and societal contexts, we welcome phenomenological reflections on both contemporary and historical issues. We are particularly interested in contributions that apply phenomenological methods to the understanding of social diversity, conflict, migration, exclusion, inclusion, and related topics.

We look forward to receiving your submissions.

The Organizers: Olga Louchakova-Schwartz (UC Davis), Martin Nitsche (Czech Academy of Sciences), Mary Shahanan (Atlantis Technological University), Tareq Ayoub (Western University Canada).