This symposium invites contributions that explore the many dimensions of risk in processes of personal and collective transformation. By bringing perspectives from across different academic disciplines into dialogue, the symposium aims to deepen our understanding of how risk shapes, constrains, and enables the processes through which individuals and societies undergo profound change.

Location: Campus Issy-les-Moulineaux, Faculté de Droit de l’Université Catholique de Lille  

Dates: 14-15 December 2026

Argument

Change is fraught with risk. Human beings are compelled to transform, individually and collectively; yet, unable to predict the downstream consequences of many forms of change, each successive human generation, and each individual human person, must learn to manage the innumerable risks inherent in living in a dynamic and largely unknown world. Moreover, religious and philosophical traditions offer competing accounts of risk (what is dangerous, what threatens, what renders a person vulnerable) with each advancing its own promises of safety. Metanoia thus unfolds within a contested landscape of rival claims, in which individuals and societies must navigate among incommensurable visions of danger and flourishing, without any overarching epistemic standpoint from which to adjudicate between them or decisively determine their relative claims to truth.¹ As Emmanuel Mounier observed, “sacrifice, risk, insecurity, rupture, and excess are the inescapable fate of a personal life.”² Such risks are especially acute when transformation concerns our most fundamental commitments: beliefs about ultimate values, the nature of reality, and the forms of life we take to be worth living. Processes of personal conversion and wider social transformation — whether religious, ethical, or political — expose individuals and communities to multiple, overlapping forms of formal, existential, ontological, and political risk. These include risks to physical safety, where transformation provokes hostility or persecution; risks in the form of rights violations of rights, where individuals are obstructed from or punished for pursuing their transformations; and risks to social cohesion, where established norms and institutions are unsettled or overturned. Yet beyond these more familiar dimensions lie less visible but equally significant forms of risk which we particularly invite contributors to examine: epistemic, ethical, psychological, and normative.

Epistemic risk concerns the hazards inherent in believing, knowing, and judging.  As William James articulated, the pursuit of truth and the avoidance of error are distinct and sometimes competing imperatives: "We must know the truth; and we must avoid error — these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commitment, they are two separable laws."^[1] To cross the threshold of transformation is to risk being wrong—to adopt false beliefs or misrecognize reality. But to refuse change is no safeguard: one may equally fail to grasp what is true. Metanoic change thus confronts individuals with an inescapable dilemma. At every moment, one must decide whether to commit, suspend judgement, or revise one’s stance, knowing that each option carries its own epistemic exposure. Conversion, in this sense, is not a single leap but an ongoing condition of revisability.

Ethical risk by contrast, concerns the possibility of acting wrongly while taking oneself to be acting rightly. In some respects, this constitutes an extension to epistemic risks because it involves what we know or believe to know about morality and virtue. What interests us here are not the narrow epistemic questions about the causal consequences of such and such an action. Rather, we understand ethical risk in the context of metanoia to refer to the possibility of unwittingly embarking into a misguided form of life, all the while thinking that one was changing for the good. Paul Ricoeur defines ethics as “aiming at the good life, with and for others, in just institutions.”^[2] To reorient one’s practices—to adopt new disciplines, renounce familiar attachments, or redirect one’s desires—is to risk moral error at a deep level. One may come to embody commitments that are not only mistaken but ethically deficient, all the while understanding them as improvements. This dimension of risk is particularly salient for the study of metanoia, as it foregrounds the inseparability of belief and practice, and the ways in which transformation is lived out through concrete forms of action.

A further dimension of risk concerns the psychological dangers associated with new states of consciousness and the emergence of unconscious material. Across psychodynamic traditions, such processes are understood as potentially destabilizing, insofar as they may disrupt established psychic equilibria and expose individuals to experiences that exceed their capacity for integration. In analytical psychology, Carl Jung’s notion of ego inflation highlights the risk that encounters with archetypal or “numinous” contents lead to misidentification, grandiosity, and impaired judgement.^[3] More broadly, methods that accelerate access to unconscious material may bypass the gradual work of psychic integration, increasing the risk of disorganization. Metanoia thus involves not only epistemic and ethical exposure, but also the possibility of psychological imbalance or fragmentation.

Finally, risk acquires a normative dimension when its management and control become institutionalized as dominant models of conduct, shaping expectations about how individuals and organizations ought to behave. It is in this sense that Ulrich Beck characterizes contemporary “risk society”: a form of reflexive modernity in which the anticipation and management of risk have become a dominant rationality, continually reinforced by scientific and technological developments.^[4] As this rationality expands, it tends to overshadow alternative value systems while reshaping behavioral norms across multiple domains. This shift is evident, for example, in the field of mental health. Drawing on the work of Robert Castel, one can observe how therapeutic aims have, in part, been displaced by diagnostic logics oriented toward the identification and management of “at-risk” populations.^[5] A similar transformation is described by Malcolm Feeley and Jonathan Simon in the field of criminology, where the ideal of rehabilitation has progressively given way to strategies focused on assessing and managing the risk of recidivism, often through increasingly technical means.^[6] More broadly, Beck interprets these developments as symptomatic of a weakening of collective structures and solidarities. In their place there has emerged an individualized discourse of risk, in which persons are increasingly expected to anticipate and manage their own exposure (to unemployment, illness, or insecurity, etc.) often with limited institutional support. From this perspective, an important task is to examine, across different fields, the transformative effects of this managerial normativity: both to better understand the new configurations of personal and collective risk it produces, and to explore whether alternative forms of meaning—whether new or inherited—might counterbalance or limit the potentially iatrogenic effects of this prevailing form of instrumental rationality.

Taken together, these perspectives suggest that risk is not incidental to metanoia but constitutive of it. To change is to enter into conditions of uncertainty that cannot be fully resolved in advance; but to remain unchanged is equally to assume a different, no less consequential, set of risks. The study of metanoia therefore demands sustained attention to the tensions between action and hesitation, commitment and revision, transformation and stability.

This symposium invites contributions that explore the many dimensions of risk in processes of personal and collective transformation. Possible themes include, but are not limited to:

1. the epistemology of conversion and belief revision
2. ethical risk and the formation of ways of life
3. risk, vulnerability, and embodiment in transformative practices
4. political and social risks of collective transformation
5. the role of risk in accounts of transformation in the domains of sexuality and gender identity
6. economic conceptualizations of risk in the areas of business, management, and finance
7. environmental risk; either in a historical perspective of industrialization or in prospective analyses of “green” transitioning
8. the risks associated with the development of AI and/or our limited ability to assess such risks
9. narratives of risk in religious, philosophical, and artistic traditions
10. methodological risks in the study of metanoia itself

By bringing perspectives from across different academic disciplines into dialogue, the symposium aims to deepen our understanding of how risk shapes, constrains, and enables the processes through which individuals and societies undergo profound change.

Costs

There is no registration fee. The Center may provide a limited number of bursaries to cover the costs of travel and/or accommodation.

Submission Instructions

We welcome submissions from scholars across all disciplines (philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, psychology, law, theology and religious studies, and beyond) as well as practitioners working in relevant settings such as schooling, psychotherapy, pastoral ministry, prisons, visual, literary, and performative arts, and others. 

Please submit your proposals via email to: centerformetanoiastudies@gmail.com

• 500 word proposal submission deadline: Monday, June 15^th, 2026
• Full paper submission deadline (for accepted proposals): tbc

Symposium committee 

• Carol Bakhos, UCLA
• Laurent Chabert, Université Catholique de Lille
• Kate Cooper, Royal Holloway
• Alexis de La Ferriere, Royal Holloway
• Ruth Harris, Oxford
• Karim Houfaïd, Étincelle Théâtre Vincent Forray, Sciences Po Paris
• Pieter Francois, Oxford
• Nacèra Kainou, Artist in sculpture 
• Charles Mercier, Bordeaux 
• Gauthier Simon, Université de Bordeaux 

The symposium is co-organized by the Center for Metanoia Studies and the C3RD (Centre de Recherche sur les Relations entre les Risques et le Droit), with support from the Chair of Transitions at IAS UM6P and Future Science. 

Notes

^[1] William James, “The Will to Believe” (1896), in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green, 1897).

^[2] Paul Ricoeur, “Éthique et morale” (1990), in Lectures 1: Autour du politique (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 258–70.

^[3] Carl Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953 [1928]).

^[4] Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage, 1992).

^[5] Robert Castel, La gestion des risques : de l’anti-psychiatrie à l’après-psychanalyse (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1981), 115.

^[6] Malcolm Feeley and Jonathan Simon, “The New Penology: Notes on the Emerging Strategy of Corrections and Its Implications,” Criminology 30, no. 4 (1992): 449–74.