The Pilgrimage Phenomenology Project
CALL FOR ESSAYS
The new book project with the working title, Pilgrimage Phenomenology: Narrating Being, Becoming, and Belonging highlights the value and power of phenomenology as a paradigm for pilgrimage studies.
Pilgrimages are journeys the narrator considers special, meaningful, and often transformational. They commonly involve traveling to historically or spiritually significant places. They may be in-place journeys, such as a labyrinth, garden, museum, or park. They may be metaphysical travel into consciousness, imagination, or spiritual and eternal worlds.
Phenomenology is a research approach that seeks to describe its subject or phenomenon from the perspective of those who have experienced it. The phenomenological approach emphasizes subjective narratives about one’s lived experiences, memories, and the narrator’s constructed interpretations and meanings. It prioritizes experiential and inductive processes for meaning-making and knowledge construction, rather than a priori assumptions or expectations.
In Pilgrimage Phenomenology, the concept of pilgrimage extends beyond its traditional religious meaning of traveling to a sacred site; it can represent a metaphor for life itself, portraying existence as a journey toward a greater purpose, understanding, or destination. This broader understanding of pilgrimage encompasses themes of exile, sojourning, and the quest for a homeland, all of which speak to deeper human experiences of alienation, searching, and belonging.
Pilgrimage phenomenology is a narrative form in which the author witnesses the self as a protagonist in the pilgrimage. The narrator is simultaneously experiencing, enacting, and making meaning of the pilgrimage. As in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, phenomenological narratives are "Tales of best sentence and most solaas," full of mirth, pleasure, morality, bewilderment, grief, curiosity, questions, mystery, and beyond.
This volume will include first-person pilgrimage narratives, interviews/conversations among contributors, and reflective essays. The autoethnographic narratives are curated to illustrate and model story-telling and meaning-making using various flavors of autoethnographic and phenomenological writing. Interviews, conversations, and reflective essays extend pilgrimage studies and scholarship toward co-witnessing, collaborative meaning-making, and co-construction of knowledge.
Pilgrimage Phenomenology’s editorial-design team invites scholars, students, and writers working within the humanities & the arts, human & social sciences, Indigenous, mystical, or spiritual wisdom traditions, and other pilgrimage studies related disciplines to submit proposal abstracts (maximum 300 words) for original first-person phenomenological accounts of their introduction/entrance into pilgrimage. The following questions are suggested for author-narrators to contextualize their autoethnographic essays on their entrée into pilgrimage and/or pilgrimage studies.
What brought you to pilgrimage (or pilgrimage studies)? What “called” you to pilgrimage?
Describe the experiences in the pilgrimage(s) that were significant, special, or importantly memorable. Include details of what happened, your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in the experience(s).
Please share your reflections, insights/revelations, and thematic meanings made.
Potential keywords/themes: transformational journeying, transcendence, embodiment, synchronicity, communitas, being and becoming, liminality, the collective we, epiphanies, peace, gratitude, intersectionality, the Gestalt, trauma (ancestral, collective, personal), identity, dignity, humanness, alienation and exile, bearing witness, activism, agency/empowerment, empathy, joy, solidarity, clairsentience, healing journeys, violence/non-violence/ahimsa, purpose, consciousness, suffering, eco-consciousness, metaphysical, Weltangshaung (world-view), civil rights/human rights.
CONTACT INFORMATION:
For more information, see: Call for Essays • Essay Proposal Form • Instructions for Authors
To submit proposal abstracts, CLICK HERE. [Due: December 15, 2024]
To send email to the editors, click on a link below:
pilgrimagephenomenology@gmail.com
Editorial Team: