Confirmed contributors
Classical phenomenology has largely operated on the assumption of a stable and intact relation between subject and place, taking emplacement as a relatively secure horizon of experience. Yet this assumption can no longer be taken for granted. The contemporary world is marked by pervasive forms of displacement: climate-induced loss of habitable lands, forced migration due to war and famine, urban eviction, infrastructural collapse, and the gradual erosion of social and cultural homeworlds. Under these conditions, phenomenology is called upon to reconsider its own foundational presuppositions and to interrogate displacement as a feature of lived experience that manifests diversely across differently situated subjects. This special issue takes up this task by approaching displacement as a phenomenon sui generis and by examining how the politically constituted destabilization of the subject–place relation transforms the horizon of experience and action of many subjectivities.
Displacement, as understood in this issue, does not simply denote movement from one location to another. Far more than mobility or migration—terms that primarily describe spatial relocation—displacement designates a transformation in the subject’s relation to place itself. It names both the structural condition of being removed, excluded, or dislocated and the lived experience of finding oneself “misplaced” or “out of place.” Displacement thus concerns a modification of orientation, belonging, and self-relation: it signals a disturbance in the taken-for-granted alignment between subject, body, and world.
The issue invites contributions to engage with displacement across the interrelated dimensions of experience, politics, and imagination, understood not as distinct dimensions but as overlapping fields of inquiry. From the perspective of lived experience, displacement may be explored in terms of its impact on the bodily “I can(not),” habituality, (dis)orientation, affectivity, and spatial and temporal organization. How are familiarity, trust, and belonging reconfigured when the grounds of everyday life become fragile, suspended, or estranged? What does it mean to inhabit a situation in which one’s own emplacement becomes questionable? From a political perspective, displacement raises questions concerning borders, property, citizenship, human rights, infrastructures, climate justice, and democracy. How can phenomenology articulate the entanglement of subjective experience with socio-historical and institutional frameworks without collapsing one into the other? How do relations of power, domination, and/or exploitation shape our experience of place and thus displacement? What methodological adjustments are required for a phenomenology attentive to power, structural asymmetry and relations of domination? Finally, the dimension of imagination opens inquiry into the constitutive role of the non-actual in situations of displacement. Memory, anticipation, narrative reconstruction, and future-oriented prefiguration shape how loss is negotiated and how new forms of belonging and community are envisioned. Imagination may be analyzed as a generative force of resistance, critique, and world-making in situations where the subject–place relation has been destabilized.
Contributions may address these dimensions individually or in combination, and the issue remains open to further conceptual approaches that advance a classical, critical or political phenomenological understanding of displacement. Contributions to the special issue must be submitted to displacement2027@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is June 1, 2027. The issue particularly welcomes submissions from scholars belonging to groups historically underrepresented in philosophy, including scholars of color, scholars from the Global South, and scholars with refugee or displaced backgrounds.
The preferred language for this issue is English, but papers in German, French, and Italian will also be accepted. Submitted papers must follow the publication ethics and the author guidelines of Metodo. All contributions will undergo a double-blind peer-review process.
If you have any questions, please get in touch with the editors michaela.bstieler@unisg.ch and marco.cavallaro@unikoeln.de.