Call for Papers
Open calls
Springer · Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture
Phenomenological Bioethics: Agency, Intersubjectivity and Lived Experience
An edited collection from the Center for Phenomenological Bioethics. Volume editors: Fantini and Ferrarello.
We invite 500-word abstracts for chapters to be published in this edited collection. Phenomenological bioethics approaches moral problems in medicine and the life sciences from the standpoint of lived experience, embodiment, and intersubjectivity, rather than through the top-down application of abstract principles (Ferrarello 2026; Svenaeus 2018; Toombs 1992; Carel 2016). Within this field, agency plays a crucial role in how patients, families, and clinicians make decisions under the support or the constraint of others. Illness, treatment, and care rarely leave agency intact: a diagnosis can reorganise a person's sense of what she can do and who she is, and the clinical encounter distributes decision-making across bodies, institutions, and relationships. Agency is thus not an isolated capacity for autonomous choice but something situated, embodied, and mediated by intersubjective relations and by conditions of vulnerability and dependence that medicine both responds to and produces (Young 2005).
Understood in this way, agency in health care cannot be separated from the question of personhood. To consent, to refuse, to be cared for, or to depend on others is always to do so as someone — a self constituted through the body, through time, and through relations with caregivers. On a phenomenological account, personhood is not a status secured by the possession of rational capacities, and therefore lost when those capacities falter; it is an ongoing, embodied, and relational achievement that illness, disability, and dependence can unsettle, diminish, or reconfigure (Leder 1990; Svenaeus 2000). This matters directly for bioethics: how clinicians and institutions recognise or fail to recognise personhood shapes informed consent, capacity assessment, end-of-life decisions, and the everyday moral texture of care. Phenomenological bioethics offers not an alternative set of principles but a different point of departure, one that makes the ethical salience of agency and personhood visible in the clinic before any normative decision is taken.
The volume explores how agency and personhood are constituted, experienced, and negotiated in health and illness, in relation to oneself and to others. We welcome submissions from scholars and practitioners around the world, with particular encouragement to early-career scholars and to members of groups underrepresented in academia. While we prioritise contributions grounded in phenomenology and its critical developments (feminist, critical, queer, and post-phenomenological), we also welcome first-person phenomenological accounts that reflect philosophically on the lived experience of illness, care, and medical decision-making. First-person contributions are expected to move beyond autobiographical narration towards explicit conceptual analysis.
Topics include, but are not limited to
- Agency, informed consent, and shared decision-making in clinical care
- The lived experience of agency in illness and treatment
- Personhood, capacity assessment, and contested decision-making
- Agency and intersubjectivity in the practitioner–patient encounter
- Vulnerability, dependence, and care as conditions of agency
- Personhood at the margins: dementia, disorders of consciousness, and the end of life
- Agency, mental illness, and coercion in psychiatric care
- Chronic illness, disability, and the reconfiguration of the acting self
- Meaning-making, moral experience, and the ethics of everyday care
- Caregiving relationships and the distribution of agency among patients, families, and clinicians
The papers should engage with classical philosophical phenomenology, lived experience, and/or contemporary phenomenological accounts, and should bear on questions of health, illness, or care. Interdisciplinary contributions and contributions from clinicians are warmly welcomed.
Submission guidelines
Timeline
- Abstract deadline30 October 2026
- Notification of acceptance15 November 2026
- Full chapter submission (flexible)15 June 2027
- Expected publication1 December 2027
Submissions and further inquiries should be sent to phenobioethics@gmail.com.
Springer · Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture
Phenomenological Bioethics: Mental Health and Perinatal Care
An edited collection from the Center for Phenomenological Bioethics & NoBumpNoCare. Volume editors: Miglio, Nanni, and Ferrarello.
We invite 500-word abstracts for chapters to be published in this edited collection. Phenomenological bioethics approaches moral problems in medicine and the life sciences from the standpoint of lived experience, rather than through the top-down application of abstract principles (Ferrarello 2026; Svenaeus 2018; Toombs 1992; Carel 2016). On this view, pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood are not simply occasions for applying norms of autonomy or beneficence: they are transformative processes that reconfigure the subject's relation to her own body, to others, and to the world (Ferrarello 2025b; Young 2005). Phenomenological bioethics therefore offers not an alternative set of principles, but a different point of departure — one that makes the ethical salience of experience visible before any normative decision is taken.
We welcome submissions from scholars around the world, with particular encouragement to early-career scholars and to members of groups underrepresented in academia. While we prioritise contributions grounded in phenomenology and its critical developments (feminist, critical, queer, and post-phenomenological), we also welcome first-person phenomenological accounts that reflect philosophically on lived experiences of mental health and perinatal care. First-person contributions are expected to move beyond autobiographical narration towards explicit conceptual analysis.
Topics include, but are not limited to
- Phenomenological accounts of mental health in reproductive processes
- Feminist, intersectional, and critical perspectives on perinatal care
- Chronic illness, pregnancy, and parenthood
- Postpartum depression and psychic distress during pregnancy and early parenthood
- How social and gender norms affect the mental health of mothers, fathers, gestating people, and families
- Contemporary technologies in reproductive practices: medical technologies and mental health
- Practitioner–patient encounters, empathy, obstetric violence
- Reproductive loss: miscarriage, stillbirth, and perinatal bereavement
- Infertility, assisted reproduction, gamete donation, and surrogacy
- Birth trauma and post-traumatic experience
- Neonatal intensive care, prematurity, and mother–infant separation
- Breastfeeding, the lactating body, matrescence
- Disability, technology, and prenatal diagnosis
- Racialised disparities in obstetric care and epistemic injustice in maternal narratives
- Womb technologies and ethical implications
- Fatherhood and its becoming
- Trans and non-binary gestation
- Pharmacological decision-making in pregnancy and lactation: risk, uncertainty, guilt
- Figures of care: midwives, doulas, informal caregivers
- Abortion as lived experience
Submission guidelines
Timeline
- Abstract deadline30 October 2026
- Notification of acceptance15 November 2026
- Full chapter submission (flexible)15 June 2027
- Expected publication1 December 2027
Submissions and further inquiries should be sent to nobumpnocare@gmail.com.
International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine · First Issue
Fanon and Phenomenological Bioethics: Trauma, Care and Contemporary Forms of Colonization
An edited collection from the Center for Phenomenological Bioethics. Volume editors: Baglieri and Ferrarello.
This special issue aims to explore the intersection of Frantz Fanon's revolutionary ideas and the field of bioethics, focusing on trauma, colonial violence, and the ethical implications of marginalization. Fanon's work provides a rich philosophical framework to examine mental health, care, and liberation within bioethical contexts. By engaging with Fanon's psychoanalytic and phenomenological insights, this issue will offer new perspectives on contemporary bioethical dilemmas, particularly in relation to marginalized populations, mental health care, and decolonial approaches to healing. In collaboration with the International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine, this issue also welcomes contributions that connect Fanon's insights to contemporary forms of colonization of the embodied lived experience and in clinical and technological contexts of care.
The special issue will appeal to scholars and practitioners in bioethics, philosophy, psychiatry, trauma studies, postcolonial studies, and those interested in the intersections of health care and social justice. It is also intended for clinicians and mental health professionals seeking new approaches to trauma-informed care for marginalized populations. This issue will be a significant contribution to the growing literature on decolonial bioethics and the ethical responsibilities of care in contexts of social and political oppression.
Topics include, but are not limited to
- Readings of Fanon, contentions about his work, and their implications for bioethics and psychiatry
- How Fanon's works may enhance a more equitable and accountable bioethical understanding of mental health
- The possible relationships between trauma, body, and whiteness
- How Fanon's theses may dialogue with feminist and intersectional bioethical accounts
- The implications of Fanon's recognition of his own "situated knowledge" as a non-white practitioner for contemporary bioethical discourses
- How Fanon's critical psychiatry can inspire and inform other decolonial practices of care and therapeutics (e.g. in Indigenous communities healing from and resisting neocolonial regimes)
- Fanonian perspectives on bioethics and mental health care for displaced populations
- Situating and defining the complex relationship between Fanon and critical psychiatry, for example between his work and the growing corpus of Mad Studies
- How transgenerational memory of colonial trauma informs contemporary psychiatric understandings of inherited or collective trauma
- The ethical risks of algorithmic and technological tools now used in psychiatric diagnosis and care, read through Fanon's analysis of the racialized gaze
- How Fanon's analyses can be extended to technologies, AI, and the digital world as contemporary forms of colonization
Submission guidelines
Timeline
- Abstract deadline30 October 2026
- Notification of acceptance15 November 2026
- Full article submission31 May 2027
- Expected publication15 November 2027
Submissions and further inquiries should be sent to phenobioethics@gmail.com.
Call for Technology · Showcase & Study
Philosophy, Well-being, and the Tools of Everyday Life
What happens when philosophy meets technology and well-being? Wonderful new ideas emerge to improve our lives. The Center for Phenomenological Bioethics invites philosophers, developers, and practitioners to share software, apps, and experience-based programs that bring philosophical knowledge to bear on human well-being — tools inspired by phenomenology, existential thought, ethics, or the broader continental and analytic traditions.
We are especially interested in projects that support philosophical counseling, self-reflection, emotional and existential well-being, or ethical decision-making in everyday life.
From the proposals we receive, the Center will:
- Host a showcase of selected projects;
- Feature and advertise the strongest ones on our website;
- Explore, with interested creators, an academic article examining how these tools function and what results they produce.
How to propose your project
Timeline
- Proposal deadline31 October 2026
Proposals and further inquiries should be sent to phenobioethics@gmail.com.
Open full flyer ↗
