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 2026 presidential theme of the future.  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 2026 in-person meeting in Denver, we will explore the ways in which moral injury points to our inter-connectedness, the ways in which our individual consciences condition our senses of responsibility, accountability and response, and the ways in which the concept is evidence that we might envision a hopeful future for humanity after all.  We will thus welcome paper proposals on moral injury in four broad clusters.

1.  Epistemic Injustice – Since British philosopher Miranda Fricker brought the term into modern parlance, epistemic justice has been used to describe the ways in which societies implicitly grant privileged groups credibility in describing their own experiences, while implicitly denying that same credibility to marginalised groups.  Moral Injury illuminates some of the consequences of epistemic injustice, and particularly given the tendency of governments and institutions to propagate it, we invite papers that explore these aspects of moral injury in topics that may include:

• Experiences of racism and racial violence
• Xenophobia and its propagation
• The experience of moral violation or intersectional/intra-ethnic harms against marginalized groups
• Critique of MI in combatants as counter to societal/moral/political values
• The stigmatisation of morally injured veterans through pathologisation

2.  MI and the US Experience – This year marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  The concept of moral injury emerged from the US context, and though it is not uniquely American, this country’s nature, structure, and history as well as its ethical, religious, legal, and moral frameworks, may produce distinctive moral injuries. We therefore invite papers exploring aspects of this, including:

• The experience of war and the loss of social trust
• Oppression, Marginalisation and moral injury
• Justice in the aftermath of Presidential Pardons
• Armed Rebellions and Insurrections

3. Wrestling over the concept of Moral Injury – In 2025, there was an effort to ensure that there is a formal definition of ‘moral injury disorder’ included in the next iteration of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).  This raises renewed questions about the benefits and detriments of pathologizing the term, particularly in light of Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon’s articulation of MI as ‘inherent political critique’, and may also reinvigorate debate about how we define and contextualise moral injury itself. Thus, we invite papers that explore these tensions, which might include:

• What’s at stake in the definitions and conceptual ‘home’ for the term
• Benefits of interdisciplinary work on MI
• MI’s capacity to encompass and illuminate difficult distinctions around agency, responsibility and blame

4.  Moral Injury and Imagining a Hopeful Future – With the rise of authoritarianism around the world, dystopian visions of the future are increasingly popular.  However, as US Army psychiatrist Dave Grossman notes, the inherent human resistance to killing others (that often manifests after the fact as MI) is evidence that ‘there may be hope for us after all.’  How does the presence of MI in different contexts suggest that dystopian visions might not be what the human future looks like?  Potential topics might include:

• Authoritarianism and resistance
• Embodied approaches, practical and theological visions of a hopeful future
• Climate and Ecological Stress
• Refusing orders on moral grounds as praxis of moral hope