Call for Abstracts
The Spontaneity of Freedom: Summer Workshop
We invite submissions of abstracts for the First Summer Workshop of the Spontaneity of Freedom Project. The workshop will take place on 4-5 July 2025 at University College London.
About the Spontaneity of Freedom Project:
This project investigates a familiar but under-theorized variety of freedom. Spontaneous freedom is the freedom of unplanned, unscripted, unalienated activity. It is the freedom we may feel when we set off to explore a city we have never visited before, open a sketchbook to a blank page, quit a job to take up a new vocation, join a political protest for the first time, hit the dance floor, or get caught up in the rush of romantic interest.
The focus of the project’s First Summer Workshop will be the nature of spontaneous freedom and the varieties of spontaneous experience; we also welcome papers critical of this idea of freedom or critical of some of its instances.
Abstract Submission:
We welcome submissions from any philosophical tradition, and from fields including, but not limited to, ethics; political philosophy and political theory; aesthetics; epistemology; philosophy of mind; art history; musicology; literary theory; film studies; anthropology; sociology; and psychoanalysis.
Abstracts should be no longer than 500 words and anonymised for review. They should be submitted via email to philosophy.spont@ucl.ac.uk alongside a document listing the paper title as well as the author’s name, institutional affiliation, and career stage. The deadline for submissions is 1 April 2025; selected speakers can expect to be notified by mid-April.
Contributions towards travel costs are available for speakers without access to institutional support.
We aim to make this conference as accessible as possible; speakers should please inform us of any accommodations they would need to participate fully.
The Spontaneity of Freedom 