Moral Injury and Recovery in Religion, Society, and Culture Unit

This unit invites individual paper, paper session, and roundtable proposals that engage with the concepts of “moral injury” and recovery in light of AAR’s 2025 presidential theme of freedom.  Religious scholars, theologians, philosophers, and other humanities scholars have created a substantial body of interdisciplinary literature in the past two decades around moral injury and this unit continues to develop and explore that corpus as well as to encourage and facilitate its growth in new areas, from new perspectives, and through new approaches.  

Papers and proposals that explore moral injury in contemporary conflicts, through analyses of particular theological, philosophical or clinical works, or through the lens of current or recent situations are always welcome.

For the 2025 in-person meeting in Boston, we will explore the ways in which moral injury points to both our inter-connectedness as well as the ways in which our individual consciences condition our senses of responsibility, accountability and response.  We will thus welcome paper proposals on moral injury in three broad clusters.

1.  Migration and Refugees - As James Baldwin once wrote, “the wound is the wound upon the recognition that one is regarded as a worthless human being.”  A race-based or nationality-based experience of wounding so characterized is deeply resonant with the concept of moral injury.  Given the past and present failures of governments and institutions to act in moral ways, we invite papers that explore these aspects of moral injury in topics that may include:

• Experiences of racism and racial violence in the United States 
• The normalization of racist political discourse in armed conflicts and politically volatile situations -  particularly light of conflicts in Gaza, Syria and elsewhere
• The concept of ‘receptive,’ or ‘betrayal-type’ moral injury and structural systems and injustices
• The experience of moral violation or intersectional/intraethnic harms against marginalized groups
• Social engagement in anti-racism as a potentially morally injurious event for activists

2.  How research into MI in non-military settings helps understand Military MI – The past decade has seen significant research on moral injury in diverse settings:  healthcare, corrections and law enforcement, veterinary practice, etc…  Much of this research has helped find both distinctive ways MI manifests in those settings as well as how it bears similarities to what military members and veterans experience.  We therefore invite papers exploring aspects of this, including:

• Core aspects of MI revealed across its observation in different contexts
• Aspects of military MI that are perhaps revealed anew through expanding contextual research
• Ways in which religious language, theology and doctrine help to provide ‘connective tissue’ of conceptual frameworks

3. Healthcare – The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson brings into focus many of the difficult moral tensions surrounding death and failings present in the American healthcare system.  The situation also illuminates the increasingly unequal experience of care between those who can afford care and those who cannot, as well as deep moral questions about our societal structures and the nature of systemic violence and how acts of political violence arise.  Moral injury may be seen as a helpful conceptual lens to analyse these issues.  Thus, we invite papers that explore these topics, which might include:

• The moral tensions certain caregiver commonly experience in this system
• The ways in which narrative medicine, as a category, may offer a way to both name injustices and inadequacies as well as glimpse hope or freedom enacted within systems
• The difficult parsing of agency, responsibility, guilt, accountability, blame and justice therein

4.  The Silencing of the Academy – In the current political era in the United States, educators find themselves under escalating political and legal pressures to conform to standards that violate their own moral consciences, and in many cases, that challenge their own commitments to empirical truth and historical consensus.  Thus, we invite papers that explore the ways in which moral injury is experienced in these environments.  Potential topics might include:

• Betrayal and the identity of educators in the system of increasingly mandated norms
• The silencing of teachers on topics of race, sexuality and justice
• Experiences of exclusion with the politicization of science, history and the “American experience”
• “What’s right” and the tensions between commitments to students, oneself, and broader society
• A growth in solidarity movements as being representatively constitutive of moral action or recourse