[PHILOS-L] CFP Special Issue of Psychopathology: 'Phenomenology and autism: Critical perspectives'

[Emily Hughes]

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We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Psychopathology titled 'Phenomenology and autism: Critical perspectives.'

Submission Deadline: June 30, 2026
Topic Editors: Sofie Boldsen (Jyväskyla), David Ekdahl (Aarhus) and Emily Hughes (Macquarie)

Manuscripts can be submitted here: https://go.karger.com/cfp26psp

Topic Overview:

Autism research has traditionally focused on identifying cognitive and behavioral deficits within the autistic person without sufficient regard for the nature and structure of autistic subjectivity. This approach has created a significant gap between scientific descriptions and autistic lived experience, raising doubts about whether mainstream research truly captures the realities of autistic life.  

In recent years, scholars in phenomenological psychopathology and neurodiversity studies have challenged this tendency, emphasizing the need to foreground autistic lived experience in conceptualizing autism. Phenomenological psychopathology offers rich analyses of perception, embodiment, intersubjectivity, and affectivity, while critical phenomenology of neurodiversity interrogates pathologizing frameworks and reframes autistic ways of being as difference rather than deficit.

This Special Issue seeks to foster dialogue between these perspectives: rethinking autism through phenomenology while critically exploring how autistic subjectivity may challenge and enrich phenomenological concepts. We welcome contributions that engage in conceptual analysis, empirical research, and autistic-led theorizing to illuminate autistic experiences and interrogate phenomenology’s conceptual assumptions.

Suggested topics include (but are not limited to): 

• Embodiment and corporeality 
• Intersubjectivity and social interaction (including empathy and masking) 
• Identity and selfhood 
• Affective, cognitive, perceptual, and sensory dimensions of lived experience 
• Critical phenomenology, autism studies, normativity, justice, and the neurodiversity movement 
• Development, trauma, and life trajectory 
• Sexuality and gender 
• Materiality and virtuality 
• Phenomenological research methodologies in autism studies 

Please select the option “Call for Papers: Phenomenology and autism: Critical perspectives” when submitting your manuscript and mention this Call for Papers in your cover letter. 

We look forward to receiving your submissions.

Dr Emily Hughes (she/her)

ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) Fellow in Philosophy

School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts

Michael Kirby Building, 17 Wally's Walk 

Level 2, Room 233

Macquarie University – Wallumattagal Campus, Dharug Country

NSW 2109 Australia

E: emily....@mq.edu.au

W: https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/persons/emily-hughes

 

I acknowledge that Macquarie University stands on the land of the Dharug Nation, land that was never ceded. I pay my respects to the Dharug people, the Wallumattagal clan, and their Elders past and present. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.

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