Journal: Psychopathology
Submission Deadline: June 30, 2026
Autism research has traditionally focused on identifying cognitive and behavioral deficits within the autistic person without sufficient regard for the nature and structure of autistic subjectivity. This approach has created a significant gap between scientific descriptions and autistic lived experience, raising doubts about whether mainstream research truly captures the realities of autistic life.
In recent years, scholars in phenomenological psychopathology and neurodiversity studies have challenged this tendency, emphasizing the need to foreground autistic lived experience in conceptualizing autism. Phenomenological psychopathology offers rich analyses of perception, embodiment, intersubjectivity, and affectivity, while critical phenomenology of neurodiversity interrogates pathologizing frameworks and reframes autistic ways of being as difference rather than deficit.
This Special Issue in Psychopathology seeks to foster dialogue between these perspectives: rethinking autism through phenomenology while critically exploring how autistic subjectivity may challenge and enrich phenomenological concepts. We welcome contributions that engage in conceptual analysis, empirical research, and autistic-led theorizing to illuminate autistic experiences and interrogate phenomenology’s conceptual assumptions.
Suggested topics include (but are not limited to):
- Embodiment and corporeality
- Intersubjectivity and social interaction (including empathy and masking)
- Identity and selfhood
- Affective, cognitive, perceptual, and sensory dimensions of lived experience
- Critical phenomenology, autism studies, normativity, justice, and the neurodiversity movement
- Development, trauma, and life trajectory
- Sexuality and gender
- Materiality and virtuality
- Phenomenological research methodologies in autism studies
Please select the option “Call for Papers: Phenomenology and autism: Critical perspectives” when submitting your manuscript and mention this Call for Papers in your cover letter.
Article publication is subject to rigorous peer review in line with the journal's editorial policies. Please refer to our author guidelines for further details about the publication conditions.
As a hybrid journal, Psychopathology supports Open Access publications. Corresponding authors can publish Open Access articles at no or reduced cost if they are associated with or employed by one of these universities/institutions.