THEME

The ability for phenomenology to centre embodiment in philosophical analysis has been a significant draw for theorists and practitioners—increasingly in transdisciplinary areas, such as health and medical humanities. Phenomenology also continues to offer rich approaches to lived time, to history and normativity, and to generative accounts of culture and ethics—from conceptualising the dynamics of time-consciousness through to critical interventions on contemporary issues.

That phenomenology can span, integrate, trouble, unsettle, and renew our understanding of these experiential structures—embodiment and history—speaks to the exciting philosophical dialogues within the field today.

This year, speakers are gathering in Bristol—a place reckoning with its own complex history and identity—to address some of these questions, including papers on:

·         Phenomenology of history (historical memory, collective responsibility and personal guilt, time and timeliness, forgiveness, post-conflict trauma, transitional justice, responsibility for the future, etc.)

·         Embodiment and normativity (gender, sexuality, race and racialisation, age, disability, colonial legacy, norms and movements, resistance and hesitation)

·         Personal history and embodied health (medicine, medical humanities, physiotherapy, maternity, disability, end-of-life, etc.)

·         Lived history and policy (education, environment, law, economics, politics and international relations, science and technology, etc.)

·         History and Theory of Phenomenology (perception, the body, emotion and affect, ethics and morality, existentialism, philosophy of religion, phenomenological theology, philosophy of technology, etc.)