Description
"Intersubjectivity in (inter)action: a multisensorial phenomenon"
In their everyday life and experience, individuals engage in various interactions with the world and with other people. As the global situation with the coronavirus pandemic has shown us, these interactions, even when taking place remotely, are a social necessity. Whatever shape or form these interactions take, there is an intersubjective dimension at play. Even though many Human Sciences researchers aim at objectivity when analysing human behaviour, it seems essential to grasp that we live in a subjective world. Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity are indeed fundamental notions that can help shading light on our understanding of individuals’ (inter)actions, whatever our field of study is (Linguistics, Education, Human geography, Economics, etc.).
The notion of intersubjectivity refers to the idea that other individuals can reveal themselves necessary for oneself to find their voice and place in this ever-changing world. Each of an individual’s experiences from the most mundane to the most complex ones involves a negotiation between their perceptions, their history, their values and those of the people they interact with. These negotiations are not only verbally conducted but also bodily expressed through multisensoriality (all senses are at play when interacting with people, objects and surroundings), translating into multimodal communication (such as gestures, facial expressions, etc. and even emojis, memes, videos, etc.).
Therefore, it seems necessary to take the intersubjective dimension into account when studying any kind of human actions and practices (social, educational, artistic, professional, economic, institutional, etc. either offline or online). Intersubjective phenomena can indeed be observed in the way people interact with others, experience their environment, make decisions, learn, create, etc.
In this course the notion of intersubjectivity, as a multisensorial phenomenon, will be scrutinised through the lens of Phenomenology and its legacy on the study of Human (inter)actions (Conversation Analysis, Phenomenological Geography, Phenomenon- based Teaching and Learning, Phenomenology of Technology, etc.).
Since studying intersubjectivity, and its embodied nature, is most effective through the observation of individuals’ everyday co-experiences of their environment, the workshop will place emphasis on the use of multimodal data (video recordings, images and photographs, interviews, digital discourse and interactions, etc.).
Upon completion of this PhD course, participants will:
Be familiar with the history and the meaning of the concept of intersubjectivity and the phenomenological roots leading to the study of human (inter)actions;
Better understand the fundamental concepts related to intersubjectivity (Self and Other; perception and sensoriality; experience; etc.) and the emerging ones (digital ontophany (Vial, 2012), phenomenotechnics of Otherness (Ibid.), etc.);
Be able to apply the phenomenological methodology upon their own empirical data and analyse intersubjective phenomena.