In an era marked by digital mediation, political polarization, and heightened ethical scrutiny, humour has become a high-stake cultural practice: jokes travel rapidly, provoke backlash, generate solidarity, and often become flashpoints for debates around offence, free speech, and accountability. In the twenty-first century, humour has emerged as one of the most powerful, contested, and ubiquitous modes of cultural expression. Circulating across literary texts, theatrical stages, digital platforms, popular media, and everyday social interactions, humour today functions not merely as entertainment but as a deeply performative, political, and ethical practice. Joking Matters: Humour, Ethics, and Social Difference proposes to examine humour as a critical site where questions of power, identity, embodiment, trauma, and resistance are negotiated in contemporary culture. This volume intervenes by framing humour not as a neutral, naive, or universal phenomenon but as a situated cultural act shaped by power relations. It explores humour’s dual capacity to wound and heal, to marginalize and empower, to normalize violence and to offer coping strategies in contexts of trauma, precarity, and social exclusion. In doing so, the collection contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations about affect, embodiment, ethics, and cultural labour in contemporary humanities research. This edited volume positions humour as a cultural performance—an embodied, situated, and relational act shaped by historical conditions, social hierarchies, and audience reception. Moving beyond classical theories of humour as relief, superiority, or incongruity, the collection foregrounds humour’s capacity to produce social meanings, reinforce or destabilize norms, and articulate dissent.

We are inviting ongoing scholarly conversations about affect, embodiment, ethics, and cultural labour in contemporary humanities research in the following areas:

Humour as Cultural Performance

Humour, Power, and Social Hierarchies

Comic body: excess, grotesque, abject

Stand-Up Comedy as Cultural Text

Digital Humour and Platform Performance

Cancel Culture, Offence, and Comic Risk

Gender, Sexuality, and Comic Performance

Humour, Trauma, and Dark Comedy

Indigenous and Folk Comic Traditions

Humour as Coping strategy

Nonsense Literature

Humour, Vulnerability, and Precarious Lives

Politics of Laughter: Disability, Illness, and Reclaiming agency

Humour, Memory, and Post-Traumatic Narratives

The Ethics of Satire in Polarized Publics

Humour, Censorship, and Regimes of Control

Affective Economies of Laughter

Humour, Care, and Relational Ethics

Humour Beyond the Human

Failure, Awkwardness, and Anti-Comic Aesthetics

Viral Humour, Nationalism, and Meme Cultures

Humour, Education, and Pedagogical Authority

Language, Humour, and Mediascapes

Marketability of humour

Taking a Joke: Consent, Coercion, and Comic Obligation

Consider sending your abstract of about 250-300 words with an author bionote of about 100 words to hss.cfp@gmail.com

Deadline of abstract submission: 15th March 2026

Communication of Selection: 20th March 2026

Deadline of full paper submission: 30th April 2026

For any queries, please contact hss.cfp@gmail.com

Editors: Dr. Pratyusha Pramanik, Dr. Prateek Upreti, Dr. Sakshi Srivastava, Dr. Mansi Bose (Chandigarh University, UP Campus, India)

The volume is expected to be published with Peter Lang Publishing.