BRIDGS' Guns in Society Symposium
Call for Papers for 2027
America is a Gun Culture: The Third Annual BRIDGS Guns in Society Symposium
February 25-26, 2027
Arizona State University Downtown Campus
Phoenix, Arizona
America doesn’t have a gun culture. It is a gun culture. Framing gun culture in this way asks us to consider the pre-eminence of guns in US society as a shared–if also complex and contradictory–experience, even as our social worlds become ever-more fragmented. Guns penetrate how we work and play, with whom we build intimacy and how, how we imagine the future–and more. Indeed, while gun scholars have extensively interrogated how the politics of firearms shape a uniquely American experience of safety and security, the politics of protection simply cannot exhaust the social life of guns in American society. People in the US do not solely experience guns in the terms laid out by the gun debate; instead, we often find ourselves surprised by where and how guns appear–even as we adjust to the “new normal” of guns everywhere.
In the third annual BRIDGS Guns in Society Symposium, we invite you to consider guns as a fundamental feature of life in the US (and beyond), rather than a subculture that can be opted out of or a debate that can be adjudicated. Reflecting this theme, the symposium will feature findings from the BRIDGS Initiative’s American Gun Experience data infrastructure project, a first-of-its-kind comprehensive database of interviews with people in the US about their experiences with guns over the life course.
We are particularly interested in research that expands existing scholarship on guns to interrogate the uncanny, unexpected or simply underappreciated ways that guns bind and divide us including but not limited to guns as instruments of violence versus protection. We are particularly interested in submissions in the social sciences and humanities that explore:
- Innovative disciplinary and methodological approaches to the study of gun culture, especially in relation to family, markets, leisure, work, and inequality
- Methodological reflections on researcher positionality vis-à-vis the categories of scholar, survivor, and owner
- Historical continuities spanning the divisions of familiar periodizations of US gun culture
- Consequences of gun violence or gun ownership not captured in quantitative data
- How gun leisure shapes attitudes and expectations regarding gun ownership and gun violence
- How guns create a shared national repertoire of meaning-making through vernacular, mediated representations, and other cultural forms
- The relationship between state and private violence and the intersections among military, police, and citizen gun cultures
- The role of non-gun owners in US gun culture
Previous symposiums
February 2026 Keynote Address
February 27, 2026
Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson
Michael and Denise Kellen ’68 Associate Professor in the
Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College
“We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance”
Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence and Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary.” In We Refuse, historian Kellie Carter Jackson looks beyond this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women and with emphasis on gun ownership. The dismissal of “Black violence” as an illegitimate form of resistance is itself a manifestation of white supremacy. Force—from work stoppages and property destruction to armed revolt—has played a pivotal part in securing freedom and justice for Black people for centuries. But force is only one tool among many. Carter Jackson examines other, no less vital tactics that have shaped the Black struggle, from the restorative power of finding joy in the face of suffering to the quiet strength of simply walking away.
Download printable flyer (.PDF)
About the ASU BRIDGS Initiative
BRIDGS is an ASU initiative, founded in January 2024, aimed at supporting boundary-spanning social science and humanities research on guns in order to forge a forum for those across the debate to engage, learn, and elevate through research initiatives and public outreach. Learn more about BRIDGS, including the American Gun Experience Project, the BRIDGS Fellowship, and the Guns Unpacked Podcast at the BRIDGS website.