Collective Karma and Phenomenologies of World-Making

This roundtable asks how karma-informed phenomenologies of world-making might reframe existing conversations about structural violence, collective responsibility, and the shared creation of just and plural worlds. The six panelists engage Buddhist karmic frameworks as resources for understanding how collectives – communities, institutions, movements, pilgrims, memorializers, consumers – participate in the ongoing making/unmaking and maintenance of shared worlds. Scholars working at the intersection of Buddhist philosophical and practice traditions, critical social analysis, social organizing, phenomenology, and ethnography broadly engage questions to consider how inherited karmic formations unfold prereflectively to naturalize structures of harm and constrain our collective imagination; and what forms of practice, memorialization, or political and community organization demonstrate the possibility of karmic transformation at a more expansive scale.