Call for Papers Chiasma #7 “Ethics”
Chiasma: A Site for Thought is pleased to invite submissions for its seventh issue, on theoretical and philosophical investigations into the concept of ethics. ‘Ethics’ bleeds into our colloquial discourse, arising in everyday life through discourse on a multitude of interests: Contemporary news media is forever obsessing over the ethics of events—including but not limited to the preponderance of military weaponry (c.f. Drone strikes) and general war, economic and political decision making, religious observation and debate, and (above all else) celebrity gossip. Conceptual investigations into the ethical have even re-entered popular culture with the popularity of the television show The Good Place which asks the question: “who died and put Aristotle in charge of ethics?” before moving on from Hellenic ethics to the Enlightenment philosophy of David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and continuing on to the existential philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. This issue aims to investigate not only these threads of the ‘ethical’ within the Occidental canon, but to extend this discourse to the diversity of theoretical possibility in the area of ethics. Ethics is applicable to almost any school of thought, and no matter which philosophical school one subscribes to, one must reflect on the ethics of their investigation.
Topics might include, but are not limited to:
- Queer Theory and Ethics: queer phenomenology, psychoanalytic readings of queer culture, AIDS activism and awareness, reproductive futurism, the ethics of cruising, the queer art of (ethical) failure.
- Ethics vs morality: ethics as action/ethics as act, ethics as pragmatics vs. morality as, maxim/rule, implying a material(ity) of the ethical.
- The ethics of phenomenology: ethical embodiment, the ethics of investigating lived experience.
- Decolonial ethics: post-colonial, Indigenous Critical Theory, Critical Race Studies, multiculturalism, globalisation, separatism, anthropology.
- Feminist ethics: engagement and criticism of ‘traditional’ ethical stances, a feminist ethics of care, intersectionality and ethical approaches to difference
- Trans* ethics: embodiment, acceptance, nonbinary attitudes & visibility, relation to feminist and queer ethics/philosophy, and representation/aesthetics.
- Ethics and politics: conflict between them, are they distinct? Does ethics obscure the question of politics, or “what is to be done?”
- The ethics of various forms of Non-ethics: non-philosophy, psychoanalysis.
- Exploring vitalist ethics of creativity/play, ethics and aesthetics, culture industry and ethical consumption.
- Ethics and nonhuman life, environmental ethics, posthuman.
- Technology and ethics: how emerging technologies force us to reconsider what is (or is not) ethical.