Upcoming conference in Copenhagen: Second-Person Engagement and Group Identification (Copenhagen, November 29-30 2018)
At the end of November, there will be a two-day international conference organized by the Center for Subjectivity Research. The conference Second-Person Engagement and Group Identification will focus on theoretical and empirical perspectives on two research domains that have been extensively explored in recent years. Briefly put, the overarching question of the conference is this: what is the relationship between the you-perspective and the we-perspective?
On the one hand, an increasing number of philosophers and psychologist have investigated the role of second-person engagements in how we understand other people. Although there is a broad consensus that relating to a ‘you’ is different from relating to a ‘she’ or ‘he’, it has proven challenging to pinpoint what precisely this distinctiveness amounts to. On the other hand, some strands of research on group identification and collective intentionality have investigated the relationship between individual or I-intentionality, and collective or we-intentionality, understood as the capacity to share mental states with other people, and thereby adopt a group- or we-perspective. Although the topics of second-person engagement and group identification point to pivotal structures of human sociality, their interrelations remain largely unexplored.
We are happy to have an exceptional line-up of invited keynote speakers from developmental psychology and philosophy: Malinda Carpenter (University of St. Andrews, UK), Daniel Dukes (University of Amsterdam, NL), Naomi Eilan (Warwick University, UK), Arto Laitinen (University of Tampere, FI), Henrike Moll (University of Southern California, US), Vasudevi Reddy (University of Portsmouth, UK), and Philippe Rochat (Emory University, Atlanta, US). In their talks, they will address a variety of topics that bear directly on the conference theme. Those topics include social learning, mutuality, shared experiences, intimacy, emotional engagements, and second-personal reasons. There will be two talks by CFS members. In their joint talk, Patricia Meindl and Dan Zahavi will discuss the nature of the we by drawing on the work of Husserl, Buber, and Young. In my own talk, I will address the much discussed, but still little understood phenomenon of triadic joint attention, by drawing on philosophical and psychological literature. I will attempt to show how bringing the second-person perspective into the picture can make an important difference for research on joint attention, as well as illuminate the relationship between joint attention and the we-perspective.
The conference is free of charge and open to everyone, but prior registration is required. More information is available on the conference website: https://cfs.ku.dk/calendar-m…/2018/second-person-engagement/
Come join us!