CFP: Negative Social Action: Silence, Salience, and the Politics of Absence

DEADLINE for Abstract Submission: 25 October 2026

Language is the specifically human alternative to physical violence. As speaking animals, human beings are capable of inflicting harm through words alone, and this capacity has driven scholars across philosophy of language, linguistics, and related disciplines to investigate verbal violence and hate speech: if we can do things with our words, then we can also do harm with them (Austin 1962; Langton 1993; Maitra and McGowan 2012; Kukla 2014; Bianchi 2018; Langton 2018).

Yet what is said is only part of the picture. What happens when harm is produced not by what is said, but by what is left unsaid, unanswered, unnoticed, or absent? Silence is commonly understood as the mere absence of speech, a neutral gap in communication, or simply the failure to act. However, scholars across different disciplines have increasingly challenged this conception, arguing that silence and related forms of communicative absence are active, socially structured, and consequential phenomena (Maitra 2007; Langton 2007; Kurzon 2011; Schröter 2013; Tanesini 2018; Klieber 2024). Silence can communicate, subordinate, exclude, and harm (Bird 2002; Langton 2007; Maitra 2009; Klieber 2024); it can be strategically deployed to maintain ambiguity or plausible deniability (Anthonissen 2008; Schröter 2013, 2019, 2022), or emerge from socially organised patterns of inattention that marginalise certain voices, perspectives, and experiences (Fricker 2007; Dotson 2011; Pohlhaus 2012; Medina 2013; Smith and Archer 2020).

This workshop takes as its starting point two converging lines of inquiry. The first concerns silence as a communicative act: a socially embedded practice capable of conveying meaning, performing social functions, and shaping relations (Langton 2007; Schröter 2013; Tanesini 2018; Klieber 2024). The second concerns what we call the politics of absence: the socially structured forms of inattention, non-response, and selective salience through which collective patterns of noticing and overlooking are produced and maintained (Watzl 2017; Wu 2024; Kaeslin 2024; Caprioglio Panizza 2022).

By bringing these perspectives into dialogue, the workshop extends questions traditionally associated with philosophy of language and communication studies towards philosophy of mind, ethics and moral philosophy, and philosophy of perception. Taken together, they point towards a broader theoretical framework centred on negative social action: socially significant actions performed not through explicit speech or overt intervention, but through absences, omissions, silences, failures of uptake, and organised forms of non-attention.

We want to investigate cases in which harm is produced through what remains unsaid, unacknowledged, unanswered, unnoticed, or excluded from personal and collective awareness. Such harm frequently operates indirectly and diffusely, with a high degree of deniability (Maitra 2007; Zerubavel 2006; Saul 2018). Rather than treating silence and inattention as passive phenomena, the workshop examines their role in producing social meanings, epistemic environments, political realities, and forms of harm.

We ask how absences communicate, how they shape what becomes collectively visible or invisible, and how responsibility should be understood when harms arise not from what someone does or says, but from what is omitted, neglected, or left unnoticed (Ayala-López and Vasilyeva 2016; Smith and Archer 2020). We also welcome empirical work examining how patterns of silence, non-response, and inattention shape collective responses to harmful speech, including their effects on perceived social norms and the recognition of harm (Zapata et al. 2024).

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