Application Deadline

November 6, 2026

Institution or Organization

BRIDGS Initiative for Gun Studies at Arizona State University

Location

Phoenix, AZ

Website

https://bridgs.asu.edu/symposium

Salary or Compensation

None, some graduate student travel funding available

Description and Requirements

Call for Papers for 2027

America is a Gun Culture: The Third Annual BRIDGS Guns in Society Symposium

February 25-26, 2027
Arizona State University Downtown Campus
Phoenix, Arizona

America doesn’t have a gun culture. It is a gun culture. Framing gun culture in this way asks us to consider the pre-eminence of guns in US society as a shared–if also complex and contradictory–experience, even as our social worlds become ever-more fragmented. Guns penetrate how we work and play, with whom we build intimacy and how, how we imagine the future–and more. Indeed, while gun scholars have extensively interrogated how the politics of firearms shape a uniquely American experience of safety and security, the politics of protection simply cannot exhaust the social life of guns in American society. People in the US do not solely experience guns in the terms laid out by the gun debate; instead, we often find ourselves surprised by where and how guns appear–even as we adjust to the “new normal” of guns everywhere.

In the third annual BRIDGS Guns in Society Symposium, we invite you to consider guns as a fundamental feature of life in the US (and beyond), rather than a subculture that can be opted out of or a debate that can be adjudicated. Reflecting this theme, the symposium will feature findings from the BRIDGS Initiative’s American Gun Experience data infrastructure project, a first-of-its-kind comprehensive database of interviews with people in the US about their experiences with guns over the life course.

We are particularly interested in research that expands existing scholarship on guns to interrogate the uncanny, unexpected or simply underappreciated ways that guns bind and divide us including but not limited to guns as instruments of violence versus protection. We are particularly interested in submissions in the social sciences and humanities that explore:

• Innovative disciplinary and methodological approaches to the study of gun culture, especially in relation to family, markets, leisure, work, and inequality
• Methodological reflections on researcher positionality vis-à-vis the categories of scholar, survivor, and owner
• Historical continuities spanning the divisions of familiar periodizations of US gun culture
• Consequences of gun violence or gun ownership not captured in quantitative data
• How gun leisure shapes attitudes and expectations regarding gun ownership and gun violence
• How guns create a shared national repertoire of meaning-making through vernacular, mediated representations, and other cultural forms
• The relationship between state and private violence and the intersections among military, police, and citizen gun cultures
• The role of non-gun owners in US gun culture

Application Instructions and Contact

Apply via link on website. Please reach out to BRIDGS Associate Director alex.t.young@asu.edu with any questions.