Bodies of Culture: Somaesthetic Explorations  

The body is an essential feature of our human existence, necessary for our survival and central to our humanity, even though our bodies come in somewhat different sizes, shapes, and colors. The human body is clearly a physical thing but also clearly something more: an embodied subjectivity or soma that is shaped significantly by culture. Cultural differences shape the body in different ways, not only in terms of our somatic conduct and experience but also, at times, in its physical form: the ways our bodies are attired, groomed, and adorned, and even in their dimensions and powers. The soma’s size and strength change with changes in the material culture of how it is nourished and cared for and how it cultivates or exercises itself. Bodies of Culture: Somaesthetic Explorations will examine, through a somaesthetic lens, the different ways that different cultures shape somatic experience. This includes the ways different cultures conceive of the human body and how they value it, care for it, and represent it in the arts. It also includes the ways culturally related somatic differences impact the relations between different cultures. The range of differing cultures to consider is broad: religious and secular cultures, national, international, and cosmopolitan cultures, and cultures of different historical periods, different disciplines, and different linguistic traditions.

The conference is open to contributions from diverse disciplinary perspectives in the humanities (including medical humanities), social sciences, and the arts. Selected papers may be developed for publication in  or in an edited volume based on the conference papers to be published in the Brill book series .

This conference is a collaborative project between The Center for Cosmopolitan Culture and FAU’s Center for Body, Mind, and Culture. The FAU Center’s program committee will do the job of selecting the proposals for presentation and organizing the program. But you should submit your proposal here through the CCC’s website:��. ��

The proposal should contain your email address, the title of your paper and an abstract (250-450 words), and a CV. The deadline for submission of abstracts is August 18, 2026. Notifications of acceptance are planned for September 18th, 2026.

The organization of the twelfth edition of the Iberian Meeting on Aesthetics invites researchers in philosophical aesthetics and in related disciplinary areas to submit proposals for papers. The submission of abstracts will be open until April 1st.

Dates & Venue
The Meeting will take place on October 22, 23, and 24, 2026, with institutional hosting by the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Porto, Research Group Aesthetics, Politics and Knowledge (APK).

Theme: Modalities of Attention: Contemplation, Critical Virtues, and Agency

One of the problems of our contemporary world is that of attention: paying attention to things requires time and energy, resources increasingly mobilised almost exclusively for consumption or incessant productivity. The sweeping technological and cultural transformations we face — or are imposed upon us — are accompanied by equally profound changes in how we attend, how we experience things, and even how we conceive of and value attention and experience themselves. This concerns our practical life, as much as it does aesthetic theory.

Although contemporary aesthetics goes beyond the experience of art, encompassing our relation to a degraded natural world and to an everyday life that is ever more massified, gentrified, and touristified, attention is the knot in which all these strands converge. Thus, a fundamental and enduring value of at least some works of art lies in their capacity to show us new ways of attending to things and of reconfiguring our experience of the world.

As a philosophical concept, aesthetic attention has been the object of debate and, in particular, of incisive criticism across various traditions of thought. Whatever perspective we adopt on the nature of aesthetic value and its role in human well-being, what we attend to, and how we attend, will continue to be a decisive aspect of what it means to be the subject of a life.

We invite researchers in aesthetics and the theory of the arts to submit proposals for papers within the following thematic lines:

THEMATIC LINES

1. How art teaches us to see and to listen: aesthetics and the education of the senses.
2. Attention as action: authorship, interpretation, and completion.
3. Affective attention: the role of emotions in aesthetic experience.
4. Attention and memory: the role of memory in aesthetic experience.
5. The prosaic and the mundane: aesthetic attention beyond art.
6. Aesthetic attention and the environment: from contemplation to the construction of nature.
7. Architecture, urbanism, and aesthetic attention: life in cities and the experience of dwelling.
8. Aesthetic attention in education: philosophical perspectives.
9. Technology and politics: challenges to aesthetic attention, from hyperconnectivity to AI.
10. From aesthetic attention to critical attention: whatever became of the philosophy of art criticism?
11. Aesthetics and virtues: contemporary aretaic perspectives on attention.
12. From Critical Theory to the present: the political dimension of aesthetic attention.
13. Popular culture: from collective protest to memes.
14. Digital art and new media: dispersion, fragmentation, and recentring.
15. Aesthetics and epistemology: are there collective forms of aesthetic attention?
16. Transcultural perspectives: aesthetic attention in non-Western contexts.

ABSTRACTS

Document 1: anonymous

• Title of the proposal
• Abstract (maximum 500 words)
• Bibliography (maximum of five references)
• Five keywords and the thematic line to which the proposal is assigned

Document 2: non-anonymous

• Title of the proposal
• Brief biographical note of no more than 200 words

Instructions for sending:
Both documents (Word) will be named with the title – or a part of it – plus its corresponding numbering (Example: Title_1 and Title_2, depending on whether it is anonymous or not) and will be sent to the following e-mail address: encontroibe.porto@letras.up.pt 

Important information:
The selection will be made taking into account the scientific quality and the relevance to the theme of the Meeting.
The presentation time for each paper will be 20 minutes, plus 10 minutes for discussion.
The official languages will be Portuguese, Spanish, and English.

IMPORTANT DATES

• April 1: Deadline for submission of abstracts
• From May 15: Acceptance reply
• May 30 – June 30: Speaker registration
• July 15: Program announcement
• Until September 30: Attendee registration
• October 22-24: Congress date

See the full and find the information in and .

Guest editors: Giulio Sacco (University of Turin), Iris Vidmar Jovanović (University of Rijeka), Marco Viola (Roma 3 University)

Emotions and Fiction: Philosophical and Psychological Puzzles

Feeling emotions for fiction is a common experience. However, it raises a number of questions which, since the 1970s, have been at the center of the debate in the analytic philosophy of art. Why do events that we know to be fictitious elicit emotional reactions in us? Are they genuine emotions, i.e., analogous to the ones of our daily life, or do they have different features? Is it rational to feel emotions towards fiction? And why do we seek for fictions capable of eliciting emotions that we try to avoid in real life, such as fear, grief, etc.?

These issues, addressed by philosophers since antiquity, are defined as paradoxes: “paradox of fiction”, “paradox of horror”, “paradox of tragedy”, etc. Contemporary philosophers of art have confronted such paradoxes – which we could label as puzzles of emotions in fiction – by raising questions about the status of fictional entities which elicit emotions, the nature of emotions for fiction and their value in our daily life.

This Special Issue of Rivista di Estetica aims to analyze the importance of these paradoxes (or puzzles) for our understanding of the emotions, both from a philosophical and psychological perspective. What the paradoxes of emotions for fiction tell us about the rationality (or irrationality) of affective states? Are they related, and if so how, to the so-called “recalcitrant emotions” (i.e., the emotions that contradict one’s better judgments)? How can pleasant and unpleasant emotions coexist in our appreciation of fiction, and what is the link between pleasure and pain in our affective life? Are emotions universal or cultural-dependent?

The organisers encourage authors from different fields (philosophy and psychology of emotion, philosophy of art, theoretical philosophy, moral philosophy, etc.) to submit their contributions on the following and related topics:

• What is the nature of emotions for fictional characters and events?
• Is there a difference between these emotions and those we experience in real life?
• Why do we seek for unpleasant emotions in fiction?
• Do these experiences provide us with valuable insights for developing our philosophical and psychological theories of emotion?
• Is it still important (and, if so, why) to reflect on the paradoxes of emotions in fiction?
• How should we account for the emotions of sympathy towards anti-heroes?
• What are the mechanism that fiction has at its disposal to arouse and manipulate spectators’ emotions?
• What is the link between imagination and fiction?
• Can our emotions for fiction contribute to one’s self-knowledge?

Confirmed Invited Authors

• Alfred Archer (Tilburg University)
• Pia Campeggiani (University of Bologna)
• Stacie Friend (University of Edinburgh) & Alex Grzankowski (Birkbeck College, University of London)
• Derek Matravers (The Open University)
• Andrea Scarantino (Georgia State University)
• Matthew Strohl (University of Montana)
• Fabrice Teroni (University of Geneva)

Deadline for manuscript submission: April 1,^st 2025

Mail to: redazionerivistadiestetica@gmail.com

Articles must be written in English, and should not exceed 40,000 characters (not words!), notes and blank spaces included.

To submit your paper, please .

Please note: when asked “What kind of file is this”, select the relevant CFP.

Weds 6 March, 5pm, Jarman Studio 5 (Teams link )

‘YouTube Video Essays and Aesthetics: Communication, Narrative, and Arthood’,��, University of Warwick

Abstract: This paper will examine some reasons why we might wish to call (some) YouTube videos audiovisual artworks and analyse a selection of YouTube video essays through this lens. Following a path familiar from early defences of the moving image as art, it concentrates first on demonstrating the potential of user-generated YouTube videos to create audiovisual narrative. However, whereas foundational definitions of narrative film as a distinctive artform needed to answer accusations that movies offered mere recordings of dramatic performances, defining the narrative potential of YouTube videos apparently requires answering a different accusation: that they offer mere recordings of��communication. Using concepts drawn from the philosophy of art, narratology, and film studies, this paper proposes a distinction between audiovisual mediated communication and audiovisual narration, suggesting that many YouTube videos represent the latter. It goes on to demonstrate some of the platform’s narrative potentials, primarily via examples drawn from the genre of the YouTube video essay. This genre frequently offers interesting experiments with YouTube’s narrational conventions, especially the platform’s seemingly most characteristic (and straightforwardly communicative) aesthetic device: direct address. Examples of direct address being employed to create conventional and unconventional aesthetic effects will be compared and contrasted, and used to explore where the boundaries might lie between using YouTube for communication, narrative, and art.

Weds 13 March, 5pm, Jarman Studio 5 (Teams link to follow)

 ‘Cringe Overhang: the Perlocutionary Effects of Cringe Comedy’,, Victoria University of Wellington.

Abstract: Cringe comedy can make people so uncomfortable, the cringe continues even after the comedy has stopped. This paper explains this effect, which I call “cringe overhang.” If audiences weakly connect to the characters, they laugh. If audiences strongly connect, they have a negative emotional response – say, struggling to watch, or wanting to leave the room.��Peep Show��(Clarke 2003-2015) is a perfect cringe comedy case study: shot from the point of view of its two main characters, it also presents their inner monologues, allowing for their embarrassment to be felt�����Ի���“thought” by the viewer. Firstly, I argue cringe comedy jokes are illocutionary acts designed to provoke laughter through second-hand embarrassment. Secondly, I acknowledge that these jokes don’t always produce the desired perlocutionary effect of laughter – sometimes the joke is unable to cut through the embarrassment, merely leaving the viewer in a state of discomfort. Thirdly, drawing on the benign violation theory of McGraw and Warren (2010), I explain that the surplus of embarrassment is due to maximising the violation in the comedy while adding comparatively little benign sentiment. Finally, I argue that cringe comedy’s funniness is reliant on its������������of social psychological distancing. By leaving no room between the viewer and the character, embarrassment is maximised, the comedy is less benign (i.e. a stronger violation)�����Ի���more polarising as a result. This explains i) why cringe comedy produces a comedic “overhang” in some viewers, where they continue to cringe even after the comedy has stopped, and ii) why cringe comedy produces a laughter response in some audiences, and stress responses in others.��

Alexander has��toured widely as a stand-up comedian for over a decade ���Ի���has featured on TVNZ’s��Breakfast, TV3’s��The Project, and PRIME TV’s��Back Benches; and in��The Wall Street Journal��(US). He has spoken about philosophy of comedy at conferences in New Zealand, Australia, the USA, Belgium, and Croatia. His paper on cringe comedy received the DANYS Award at the 2023 International Society of Humor Studies conference, the ISHS’s premiere graduate student award recognising excellence and promise in the field of humour studies.��

Monday 18 March, 6pm, Lupino Cinema (in-person event)

Screening and discussion of , with , University of Exeter. A collaboration with the .

Summer term – dates TBC

, University of Kent, on��Rineke Dijkstra, Vulnerability, and Trust
, Stanford University, on Boiled Frog Fictions

Weds 30 November, 4pm, Jarman Studio 5��(+ Teams link to follow).

In this paper I examine the changes wrought to women’s/lifestyle media during the coronavirus pandemic. Closely analysing several issues of Grazia UK from the first UK lockdown, I argue that the societal and affective disorientation of the  pandemic allowed this magazine to do genuine political work – critiquing the government, advocating for non-capitalist subjectivities and forms of community work – which is normally absent from such publications due to their imbrication in commercial logics and industries. At the same time, fashion was reframed as a tool to navigate the affective uncertainties of the pandemic, offering levity (comfort, play) and escape (dreaming of better days to come) which shows us how closely woven fashion is with affect and mood. 

Teams link available for those wishing to join online to follow. If you plan to attend in person, please let Murray Smith know, as space is limited:��mss@kent.ac.uk

Sponsored by the ������Ƶ Connections grant. 

In analytic philosophy recently, there has been a shift of interest towards political culture. Topics like ideology, propaganda, persuasion and epistemic injustice are now central themes within Anglophone epistemology and political philosophy. These approaches, gathered around the field of “political epistemology”, now acknowledge that contingent cultural influences play a key role in political reasoning, knowledge formation and emancipation.  

We propose that the philosophical study of such phenomena can be productively approached through a conversation with work in aesthetics and philosophy of art.  

For instance, feminist and anti-racist aestheticians have long pointed out how oppressive stereotypes inhere in dominant cultural categories. Other philosophers of art have reflected on the distinction between cognitively valuable art and propaganda. Aesthetical analyses of political art, metaphor, cultural appropriation, unethical art also bear similarities to the epistemologists’ concern with how ideas spread within a political space. 

Bringing together aestheticians, epistemologists and political philosophers, some questions this conference will pose include: 

• What role can art play in political discourse? 
• Is there a cognitive distinction between (mere) propaganda and (valuable) political art? 
• Are flawed ideologies best repaired by cultural expression? 
• What role do narrative, metaphor, imagination or aesthetic experience play in political discourse? 
• How do new forms of deception (e.g. deep fakes) relate to visual culture studied in aesthetics (photography, painting)?  
• How do debates about free speech, blocking and partisan epistemology relate to cultural expression? 

Confirmed speakers include Gemma Bird (Liverpool), Sarah Fine (Cambridge), Rachel Fraser (Oxford), Thi Nguyen (Utah), Paul Taylor (Penn State), Lauren Ware (Kent) and Regina Rini (YorkU). 

Call for papers 

We are now accepting submissions for papers to be presented at the conference. We invite philosophers of any specialisation to submit a 250 word abstract of a paper for presentation at the conference. Submissions are not blind, and we encourage experimental submissions from philosophers with previous interest in either aesthetics or political epistemology, who wish to think across these disciplines; as well as from graduate students working in the area. Please include your name, affiliation, and contact details with your submission.  

We will not be running parallel sessions, so presentations will be full papers (30 minutes) with Q&A. The deadline for submissions of abstracts is 1 December 2022.  

We aim to inform you of the outcome soon afterwards. The conference will be hybrid, and we may have money available to go towards speakers’ travel expenses, so we encourage submissions from speakers who wish to attend in person. The conference will abide by SWIP good practice guidelines. 

Please send your abstracts to:��livpolaesthetics@gmail.com��

Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest, Hungary, 11-13 May 2023

EVANET – Everyday Aesthetics Network and the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest (MOME), warmly invite paper proposals for the three-day international conference ‘Designing Everyday Experience’. Celebrating the 25th anniversary of MOME’s doctoral school, the event will offer an opportunity for those with an interest in the philosophy and aesthetics of everyday life and design to share and discuss work, in the hope of furthering dialogue in this area.

Keynote Speakers: Michalle Gal (Shenkar College), Ben Highmore (University of Sussex) and Yuriko Saito (Rhode Island School of Design)

Conference Outline

In 1952, the Italian architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers used the motto “from the spoon to the city” to express the pervasiveness of architectural design, spanning from the very small scale of everyday tools to the much larger scale of urban spaces and environments. Inspired by this famous motto and its symbolic value, the conference aims to extend the notion of design to the whole realm of our everyday life, encompassing the various objects, spaces, and practices of our everydayness, and questioning how these may contribute to shaping our habits, tastes, behaviours, and lifestyles. Just as we design the tools that help us in the various tasks of our daily lives, so we design public and private places in the city to be used by the locals and enjoyed by the visitors. Similarly, in contemporary art, artists design, set up, and install spaces so that they yield a certain aesthetic experience for the visitor. In all these instances, more than as a profession with specific rules and know-how, design is understood as an act of planning and shaping that can apply to any object of our daily experience.

On this basis, the conference draws on three specific axes of design:

Objects and Tools. This most traditional notion of design has to do with the creation of functional as well as purely aesthetic artefacts, such as works of art and decorative items. Objects and tools are either understood as physical or digital entities, including those that are either permanent or temporary.

Environments and Spaces.  In this second sense, design relates to a variety of activities ranging from architecture, urbanism, and environmental planning – not excluding virtual environments – to the practices of renovating and repurposing spaces, reconfiguring locations for purposes of tourism, exploiting lands for real estate speculation interest, or occupying areas for growing social cohesion, ecological improvements, and environmental art. 

Habits and Practices. Design refers here to how we shape our lives to achieve certain goals: the routines and habits we develop in everyday life and how they help determine our identity and our relationship to the world.

Abstracts are invited in all areas related to the aesthetics and philosophy of design, broadly construed. Submissions dealing with the future challenges of design in everyday contexts are particularly welcome. New, complex, uncertain scenarios are awaiting us. How are we to design our future everyday life experiences?

Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following issues:

• Objects and Tools

• How can objects of design help us shape our everyday habits and routines by corralling our behavioral patterns? How can designers create objects’ affordances to conform to users’ needs?
  • How do power relations define the standards of everydayness through designed objects and tools?
  • What is the specific contribution of art objects in shaping and defining our everydayness?
  • How can we aim for a balance between usability, aesthetic values and low environmental impact when designing new objects?
  • How will new communication tools change our everyday experience? To what extent will the developments of virtual environments (metaverse, AltspaceVR etc.) affect our everyday lives? How do relate everydayness and hyperobjects?

• Environments and Spaces
• How can we design environments/spaces (cityscape, soundscape, parks, places for sightseeing, skywalks) with the aim of triggering a specific aesthetic experience (sublimity, picturesque, etc.)?
• Atmospheres of everyday environments: how to conceptualize the natural and artificial components of atmospheres felt in designed environments on various scales?  
• How can art shape our aesthetic appreciation of a space? In particular, what underlies the aesthetic experience of art forms such as installation art and environmental art?
• What is the relationship between the city and new urban technologies (smart cities, IoT, integration of water retention parks), mobility (integrated transport system, cycle paths, on time measurement of traffic peaks), and the design of sustainable architecture?
• How will climate change contribute to re-designing our experience of the natural and built environment?

• Habits and Practices

• What is the contribution of routines in building our experience of the world? What role do habits play in supporting, regulating and enabling our aesthetic life?
• How do practices such as industrial, digital, and urban design, fashion, and clothing extend or narrow the everyday experiential spectrum? How do professionals and consumers/prosumers participate in these dynamics through routine transactionality?
• How do expert and lay activities, habits, and routines take part in shaping our design landscapes? What kinds of dynamics prevail between the roles of professionals and consumers/prosumers?
• Can artistic practices help promote pro-environmental social behaviors and habits? Can they help us develop aesthetic sensitivity that makes people more respectful towards the environment in which they inhabit?
• How are we to rethink some of our most controversial social practices and lifestyles (tourism, traveling, food consumption, cloth) to make them more sustainable?

• Cross-cutting Methodological Issues:

• What is the theoretical nexus between design and everydayness?
• Where is the fine line between the ordinary and the extraordinary in a design culture?
• How should we conceive of the relationship between the philosophy and aesthetics of everyday life and design?

Important information:

The conference will be structured around plenary sessions, with the contributed papers selected by a blind peer-review process. Contributed papers will be scheduled for a 25-minute presentation plus a 15-minute discussion.

Please submit long abstracts in English of 800-1000 words (references included), prepared for blind refereeing, by using the . Abstracts should state the position defended or the issue discussed and indicate the outline of the argument.

Steering Committee: Elisabetta Di Stefano (University of Palermo), Lisa Giombini (Roma Tre University), Adrián Kvokačka (University of Prešov), Bálint Veres (MOME, Budapest).

Scientific Committee: Elisabetta Di Stefano (Palermo University), Lisa Giombini (Roma Tre University), Rosa Fernández Gómez (University of Málaga), Jessica Hemmings (Gothenburg University), Attila Horányi (MOME), Gioia Laura Iannilli (Bologna University), Anna Keszeg (MOME), Adrián Kvokačka (University of Prešov), Sanna Lehtinen (Aalto University), Giovanni Matteucci (Bologna University), Max Ryynanen (Aalto University), Dan Eugen Ratiu (Cluj-Napoca University), Márton Szentpéteri (MOME), Bálint Veres (MOME).

Organising committee: Ildiko Csoregh (MOME Doctoral School), Julia Gáspár (head of office, MOME Doctoral School), Anna Keszeg (conference secretary, MOME), Bálint Veres (head of organizing committee, MOME)

Deadline for submissions: December 31st, 2022

Communication of acceptance: February 10th, 2023

The language of the conference will be English.

The conference will be held in person. We will monitor the development of the pandemic, and more reliable information will be provided in the upcoming months.

Registration Fee: Participation in the conference is subject to a registration fee. Bank account details to pay the conference fee and deadlines for registration will be provided in due course.

For further information, please contact: design.conference.2023@gmail.com

Confrmed Keynote Speakers:

Tom Geue (University of St Andrews)
Nicholas Thoburn (University of Manchester)

Hosted by the , University of Warwick, UK.

20 – 21 May 2022

Organised by , , , and 

The figure of the author is almost a ‘universal’ category, which, ‘enduring profound social and economic transformations’, can be easily exportable through ages (Netz, 2020: 100). Since classical times, the author’s name has had a canonical force that still exerts its own fascination in contemporary literatures and scholarly debates. Romanticism constructed the author as an ‘original genius’, an exceptional individual who is ‘solely responsible’ for the creation of an ‘unique work’ (Woodmansee, 1984). Conceived as the ‘origin’ of the work, the modern author was subsequently recognized as the private owner of the work. Following American New Criticism, French Structuralism and Post-Structuralism have famously made an array of critiques against the ‘name’ and the ‘function’ of the romantic/modern author. Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968) and Foucault’s ‘What is an Author?’ (1970) question the ‘cult of the author’ and the meaningfulness of the interpretive category of the ‘author’ as such. Since the 1960s, increasing attention has been paid to the written artifact, copying techniques and mechanisms of re-appropriation, and complex webs of intertextualities. Yet nearly all contemporary literatures and arts are constructed around authors’ names, the myth of their originality, and the liberal conception of these authors as private owners of their work. The individual author’s name, biography, personality, and geniality are strongly promoted in the academy, the editorial market, the art and film industry, and the media (for the centrality of the power of authorial names in contemporary debates, see Carla Benedetti, 1999). Furthermore, producers of literature and knowledge (writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians, academics) must adopt strategies of self-promotion or self-branding in order to receive institutional recognition of their own name and work (Lee Wong, 2017).

Recent scholarship has demonstrated how alternative models of authorship may influence critical approaches, modes of production and reception of texts. New critical interests across different disciplines, ranging from Literature, Philosophy, Translation Studies, Poetry and Performance Studies, Visual Culture and Fan Cultures, have addressed the study of anonymous and pseudonymous texts, practices of collaborative and participatory authorship (such as fan fiction), co-authorship, as well as communal and collective modes of ownership of the work in question. These approaches challenge the centrality of authorship in the production, reception, and consumption of texts/works in several ways as well as the contemporary conceptualisations of literary, philosophical, and artistic canons.

The conference will attempt to deconstruct the politics and power dynamics of the author’s name by discussing issues of anonymity, pseudonymity, and ownership across disciplines. It aims to ask what new ways of interpretation may emerge in the absence (whether ‘intentional’ or ‘accidental’, ‘primary’ or ‘secondary’) of a named author and of a secure historical context of textual production and circulation. Furthermore, it aims to investigate how anonymity and pseudonymity influence the readers’ reception. Anonymous and pseudonymous texts have long been at the margins of classical scholarship, but they have recently witnessed a rehabilitation in scholarship (Peirano, 2012; Geue, 2019; Kayachev, 2021; Geue, 2021). Authorial names prove crucial for establishing the literary canon and for the circulation of literature in classical times (Netz, 2020). As recent studies have emphasised, however, anonymous and pseudonymous texts challenge traditional ways of reading classical literature and raise new important methodological and theoretical questions about issues of originality, authenticity, aesthetic value, and the validity of literary canon (Kayachev, 2021).

We also wish to critically reflect on the status of the modern author as the individual owner of their work. As Saint Amour (2011) notes, modern writers became increasingly aware of their role as holders of copyrights and have expressed this issue within their own literary production. However, it is only with the influence ofappropriation practices during the 20th century (in the form of re-mixing, assembling, re-writing, sampling, non-creative writing, creative plagiarism) that the individual author challenges their status as the exclusive creator, and, therefore, the private ownership of their work. The author as ‘remixer’ and an ‘un-original’ genius (Perloff, 2010; Goldsmith, 2011) becomes, instead, an ‘appropriator’ of words/images/sounds made by others. Drawing on post-structuralist philosophy and conceptualist poetry, contemporary critics and writers attempt to reconceive the property regime of the author by proposing an aesthetics and ethics of ‘disappropriation’ (Rivera Garza, 2015). By disappropriating their own property, the author affirms the ‘communal being’ (Thoburn, 2016) and the collective and ‘transindividual’ roots of all literary, artistic, and intellectual creation. Understood as collective and communal property (Ostrom, 2015; López Cuenca, 2014), the work challenges the liberal conception of intellectual property as well as conventional copyrights inscription, commonly known with the phrase ‘all right reserved’ (Vaidhyanathan, 2001). Instead, the ‘copyleft’ work is meant to be Open Access and to circulate freely within the community (Lawrence Lessig, 2004).

Against this theoretically and methodologically diverse background, this interdisciplinary conference aims to bring together thought-provoking and critical presentations addressing the various forms in which the critique of authorship becomes pertinent in scholarly, political, social, cultural, and linguistic debates. We invite abstracts for 20-minute papers from scholars at any career stage, but are particularly interested to hear from postgraduate and early career researchers.

Suggested areas of focus may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Theoretical, philosophical and methodological perspectives on and approaches to authorship and
  diachronic shifts in scholarly debates;
• The extent to which different forms of authorship may spur new perspectives on the consumption
  of literature, philosophy, and art;
• ‘Un-original’ practices and examples in literature, visual arts, philosophy, film studies and
  translation studies (creative plagiarism, appropriation techniques, re-mixing, assembling, etc.);
• Examples of transgressive collective pseudonyms and anonyms in the (post)modern age;
• The property regime of the author, copyrights versus copyleft debate;
• Models of collective, multiple, collaborative, distributed and co-authorship;
• The politics of anonymous and pseudonymous authorship; ‘intentional’ or ‘accidental’, ‘primary’
  or secondary’ anonymity and pseudonymity;
• Methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives on anonymous texts and
  pseudepigrapha; problems of contextualisation, transmission and reception; questions of
  authenticity, originality and intentionality;
• Invisibility, betrayal, fidelity, the translator as author;
• Audience’s responses to different modes of authorship;
• Authorship in the digital era, contested modes of digital authorship.

Important Information:

This two-day conference will be held in a hybrid format to allow in-person and online attendance. Please express your preferred mode of attendance upon abstract submission.

Submitting your abstract:

• There is no registration fee
• Interested participants are requested to submit the following information to authorship2022@gmail.com by 12th March 2022:
  • your name and
    institutional affiliation
  • A title and 300-word abstract
  • A 150-word biographical statement
  • Your preferred mode of attendance (online or in person)
• Proposals should
  be submitted in the English language.
• We will inform you by 19th March 2022 whether your proposal has been selected.
• Please feel free to contact us via email for further information or with any queries at authorship2022@gmail.com

Submissions must be long abstracts (800-1200 words in length) presenting not only the main ideas and claims of the��paper, but also the arguments in favour of them. They encourage the presentation��of submissions in English, but submissions in other major European languages��will be considered equally. Full paper submissions will not be accepted, ���Ի���submissions are limited to one per person. Please, do not exceed the word��limit.

Please use the PDF-file format for submission and render your text completely anonymous (metadata included) to allow for blind refereeing. To submit your long abstract, please use the  (first-time users will be asked to register with EasyChair). 

The deadline for submissions of long abstracts and panel proposals is��15th January 2022. They aim to inform you about the result of our selection process by the end of February, depending on the number of submissions.

Call for Panel Proposals 

The European Society for Aesthetics also invite submission of panels, which can be dedicated to a specific topic or a recently published book, relevant within the field of aesthetics. Panels should include up to four people whose names should be acknowledged. Panel proposals will be evaluated on all or nothing basis. In addition to being included in a panel proposal, you are also permitted to submit a long abstract of a paper for consideration.

To propose the panel, please follow the same procedure as described above.

The 2022 Fabian Dorsch ESA Essay Prize Contest Announced 

The European Society for Aesthetics awards an essay prize for PhD students and early career scholars (max. three years from the doctorate) in connection with its yearly conference. Former winners of the prize are not eligible to participate. The prize consists of stipend of 500€. The winning essay will be considered for publication in the journal . 

All submissions to the prize must be in English. The selection of the prize winner will be broken down into two stages. First submissions should be made by following the general call of the ESA 2022 conference and all submissions will be considered for presentation at the conference. Please place “(Essay Prize)” after the title of your submission in EasyChair to indicate that you want your submission to be considered for the prize. After the first round of reviews, selected authors will be asked to submit a full conference paper (max. 5,000 words, including bibliographies and footnotes) by April 15^th, 2022. The recipient of the prize will be selected from this group. We aim to announce the winner by May 10th, 2022.

The ESA Essay Prize is named after a co-founder and the first secretary of The European Society for Aesthetics,��Fabian Dorsch��(1974 – 2017). Its former winners include��Servaas van der Berg��(2017),��Mark Windsor��(2018),��Irene Martínez Marín��(2019),��Jeremy Page��(2020) ���Ի���Nemesio G. C. Puy��(2021).

Upcoming Conference

The ESA Conference 2022 is to be held on��28–30 June 2022��at Estonian Academy of Arts (Põhja puiestee 7) in��Tallinn. If the COVID-19 pandemic and related travel restrictions do not allow in-person meeting, the conference will move online or to a hybrid mode. The conference is co-organised by the ESA and the Estonian Academy of Arts. Conference fee is 40€ for students and 80 € for academics.

The keynote speakers:
Professor��Emmanuel Alloa��(University of Fribourg)
Professor��Jacques Rancière��(University of Paris VIII)
Professor��Virve Sarapik��(Estonian Academy of Arts)

We hope to re-schedule this event and will share the plans as they take shape.