A new interdisciplinary space for researching the conditions of responsibility
The Journal of Responsibility Culture is an emerging interdisciplinary scholarly initiative developed within RESC to investigate how responsibility is formed, exercised, influenced and transformed across contemporary societies.
Its starting point is simple:
Responsibility does not begin with accountability. It begins with the conditions that make responsible agency possible.
Responsibility is often examined after an action has occurred: through accountability, compliance, liability, ethical evaluation or the attribution of consequences.
Responsibility Culture shifts the perspective.
It asks what happens before and while decisions are made: how individuals and collective actors develop the capacity to recognise their responsibilities, exercise judgement, preserve sufficient autonomy and understand the consequences of their actions for others.
Responsibility is not exercised in isolation.
It develops within cultural environments, social relationships, families, educational systems, organisations, institutions and increasingly technology-mediated contexts.
These environments shape how individuals understand authority, autonomy, obligation, influence, power, participation and the consequences of their decisions.
The Journal of Responsibility Culture will investigate these conditions and the relationships between them.
Its focus is therefore not responsibility as an abstract moral category, but responsibility as a socially embedded, culturally situated and evolving capacity for agency.
The Journal will encourage research around several interconnected questions.
These questions define an interdisciplinary research space rather than a single disciplinary field.
The Journal does not seek to replace existing approaches to ethics, accountability, governance or compliance.
It introduces a complementary question:
What conditions need to exist for individuals, organisations and institutions to exercise responsibility before responsibility has to be attributed to them?
This question opens a space between individual agency and collective structures, between autonomy and influence, between cultural context and universal social consequences, and between human judgement and technological mediation.
This is the research space that the Journal of Responsibility Culture intends to develop.
Responsibility has consequences across societies, while the conditions through which it is understood and exercised differ across cultures and contexts.
The Journal will therefore encourage international, interdisciplinary, comparative and cross-cultural research, bringing different academic traditions into dialogue.
It will form part of the wider RESC research environment together with RESC Lab and the RESC International Conference, connecting conceptual development, experimentation, scholarly publication and international dialogue.
Call for Papers forthcoming.