interfaceing 2025
Embodied Experience, Emotions, and Creativity
Conference Date: September 17-19, 2025
Conference Place: Doğuş University, Istanbul, Turkey
Abstract Submission Deadline: July 30, 2025
Organisation: Barış Çoban (Doğuş University, Turkey) & Charlène Clonts (Kyushu University, Japan)
The complete Call for Papers can be found here.
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INTERFACE invites scholars, practitioners, and artists to the 2025 INTERFACEing conference to explore the dynamic interrelations between embodied experience, emotions, and creativity across disciplines. This gathering aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue spanning literature, linguistics, media, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and the arts.
The conference theme is grounded in phenomenology and the thought of the rhizome, emphasising embodied perception and nonlinear models of creativity. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, we aim to understand perception as an active, bodily experience that shapes consciousness and our engagement with the world. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “phenomenal field” underlines how the self and the world are entangled through lived, embodied interactions. This embodied perspective is further expanded by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idea of the “rhizome” – a non-hierarchical model that views reality as a network of ongoing, interconnected processes. Their theory invites us to rethink identity, creativity, and perception as fluid, relational, and emergent, challenging traditional dualisms and fixed structures.
In this light, creativity and emotions are not just abstract outputs but lived, embodied engagements with the world. Art, literature, media, and performance are thus understood both as expressions and as sites of embodied experience. Artists like Paul Cézanne, for example, demonstrate through their techniques how perception is bodily situated and subjective. Similarly, contemporary studies investigate the impact of emotional regulation, interoception, and somatic practices on creativity and resilience. Recent research supports the idea that practices integrating body and mind, such as meditation, movement therapy, and performance art, not only enhance emotional regulation but also foster creative capacities and well-being. These embodied practices are increasingly used across educational, clinical, and artistic settings to promote holistic human flourishing.
The conference also welcomes explorations of the “affective turn” in contemporary theory, as introduced by Clough and Halley (2007). This approach highlights how affect–preconscious bodily intensities shape human experience and social relations. It foregrounds bodily forces and emotional responses as central to cognition, social behaviour, and creativity. As technologies mediate more aspects of life, how affect and embodiment are shaped by digital and biotechnological systems also become crucial areas for investigation.
Topics for consideration might include (but are not limited to):
- The affective turn about creativity and embodied cognition
- Intersections between somatic practices and emotional resilience
- Artistic or media practices that embody or theorise perception
- The role of mindfulness, interoception, and body-based therapies
- The impact of digital technologies on affect, body, and creativity
- Cross-disciplinary methods for exploring embodied experience
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Proposals for panels (instructions here) or individual papers of 25 minutes or less (instructions here) should be submitted to both Prof. Charlène Clonts (clonts.charlene.248@m.kyushu-u.ac.jp) and Prof. Barış Çoban (bcoban@dogus.edu.tr) by July 30, 2025.
The papers should be presented in any of the following languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Italian.
The conference will take place on September 17-19, 2025 at Doğuş University, Istanbul, Turkey. It is organized as a physical face-to-face conference; however, it will also be possible to present and participate remotely.
Papers presented in the conference can be submitted for publication in the Special Topic issues of INTERFACE to be published in 2026 (subject to double-blind peer review).
INTERFACE would like to thank Trier University (Centre for Advanced Studies "Poetry in Transition”), Kobe University (Graduate School of Humanities), and Seoul National University (Institute of Classical Studies) for their kind support and co-operation in organizing this conference.