THEMES

MAIN CONFERENCE THEME

‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions and Sociality’ builds upon the themes and contributions of our 2020 online conference ‘Engaged Phenomenology’, and is an invitation for phenomenologists and practitioners to critically reflect on how lived experiences regarding embodiment, emotions and sociality are incorporated into their work. It encourages people working through phenomenological approaches to more explicitly consider the socio-political realities and power relations which inevitably frame experience – whether writing from first-hand experience, citing case studies, undertaking qualitative research, or engaging with communities. Taking stock in this way raises questions of methodology and ethics, of course, but can also more radically point towards the transformative potential within phenomenology to address and democratise the conditions of possibility for both theory and praxis. Complementing applied and critical phenomenology, engaged phenomenology appeals across disciplines and beyond the academy. Its focus on relational lived realities speaks to a variety of contexts (e.g., healthcare, medicine, education, design, art, performance, psychology, architecture, community spaces, etc.).

We propose that ‘Engaged Phenomenology’:

> heeds the situatedness of lived experiences across diverse cultural and environmental lifeworlds

> invites us to hold this notion of plural lifeworlds together with wider phenomenological questions about lived possibility, power relations, and the condition of having and being in a lifeworld which feels open to us and to which we are open

> challenges assumptions around narrativity and privileged articulacy in phenomenological methods, embracing new ways of listening and attending to people’s lived experiences in their specificity and relationality

> is mindful of how experience is lived through constellations of relations with others, rather than only seeking individualised (depoliticised) first-hand accounts

> considers the transformative potential of research participants sharing their experiences in meaningful ways, rather than merely assessing their ‘utility’ in academic terms.

The theme of the BSP 2022 Annual Conference is by Jessie Stanier, Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. For more information on what engaged phenomenology is, see her recent article "An Introduction to Engaged Phenomenology".

SPECIAL PANELS THEME ONE

SHAME AND MEDICINE: 

‘PHENOMENOLOGY AND SHAME EXPERIENCES’

The aim of these panels from the Shame and Medicine research project is to encourage an engaged phenomenological approach to considering shame in its various forms, and how it relates to and effects features of lived experience such as embodiment, affective life, consciousness, sociality, intersubjectivity, intercorporeality, health, among others.

Shame is commonly considered to be a negative self-conscious emotion that arises when we are concerned with how we are being judged by others as a result of some transgression, mistake or mishap. Shame experiences are intensely personal and individual, while simultaneously only having meaning within social and political contexts. Shame has been called the ‘master emotion’ and a ‘keystone affect’, with many philosophers, sociologists and psychologists seeing shame as centrally significant for understanding subjectivity, identity and social relations. Shame has been called a chameleon emotion, as it takes many forms, while often remaining unspoken, invisible or underground, leading to challenges in understanding and researching shame in lived experience.

Nonetheless, phenomenology has had a long interest in shame and its connections to embodiment, self-awareness, ethics, subjectivity, and racialised and gendered experience. The work of phenomenologists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Max Scheler, Simone de Beauvoir and Franz Fanon, all reflect on shame in lived experience. More contemporary writing from phenomenological thinkers such as Dan Zahavi, Bonnie Mann, Lisa Guenther, Luna Dolezal, Alessandro Salice, among others, continues to point to the significance of shame for identity, subjectivity, sociality, and in critical phenomenology, in experiences of oppression and marginalization.

SPECIAL PANELS THEME TWO

IMAGINING TECHNOLOGIES FOR DISABILITY FUTURES: 

‘PHENOMENOLOGY, DISABILITY, AND TECHNOLOGY’

The aim of these panels from the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project is to encourage an engaged phenomenological approach to disability, which considers how disability and embodiment is experienced in relation to a wide range of technologies that may shape, enhance or modify aspects of disabled lived experience.

The classical phenomenology of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger or Sartre tends to bolster a relatively robust distinction between modes of thought, embodiment and action that are normal and abnormal, pathological and healthy, and disabled and non-disabled. The ‘abnormal’ modes are often called upon to illuminate the tacit structures of so-called ‘normal’ experience which might otherwise be taken for granted. Nevertheless, these early phenomenological descriptions of embodiment and being-in-the-world also imply understandings of the body and self as open and relationally constituted, and agency as something achieved with technology beyond the boundaries of the skin – consider Merleau-Ponty’s account of the blind man incorporating his cane into his body schema. The phenomenological openness and malleability of the lived body, along with its inherent relationality to its lived environment, have significant ramifications for ideas of normalcy, ability and disability.

Contemporary phenomenology has an enduring interest in themes pertinent to considering the lived experience of disability, such as embodiment, normalcy, health and illness, and the use, or incorporation, of technology into the lived body. For instance, Don Ihde posits a postphenomenology to encapsulate that our embodied perception and action are overwhelmingly, and constitutively, technological. However, contemporary feminist and critical phenomenologists such as Sara Ahmed, Joel Michael Reynolds, Margit Shildrick, Gail Weiss, Andrea Pitts, Corinne Lajoie, Kim Q. Hall and Christine Wieseler, amongst others, have also reflected critically on phenomenology’s ideas of normalcy, normativity, and its use of disability as a tool for illuminating taken-for-granted structures of nondisabled experience.

Works spanning prosthesis use, cognitive disability, chronic illness or reflections on gender and race, not only explore possibilities of using phenomenology to understand experiences of disability and technology use, or the structural discrimination of certain body-subjects; additionally, increased attention to disability can re-shape and advance phenomenological perspectives on embodiment, being, and action. As new technological developments in prostheses, computing, robotics, smart drugs, implants, exoskeletons, among others, are shifting the landscape of disability futures, and with a growing sense that human life in a broad sense has always been technological, the aim of the “Phenomenology, Disability and Technology” special panel series is to further extend work in contemporary phenomenology, and explore themes relevant to disability and technology through an engaged phenomenological framework.