Phenomenology has always engaged with the pressing issues of its time. Whether epistemological or ethical, social or existential, it has been applied to critically analyze and respond to the challenges posed by scientific advancements, societal transformations, and crises of meaning. Indeed, since its inception, phenomenology has extended beyond philosophical inquiry to influence a wide range of disciplines, including psychiatry, psychology, anthropology and sociology. Historically, phenomenology has also been used to address social and political issues, engaging with topics such as race, gender, and social justice. Figures such as Fanon, Beauvoir, and Arendt employed phenomenological concepts to explore the lived experiences of colonization, gendered oppression, and totalitarianism. In this sense, there has always been a relationship of “mutual enlightenment” not only between philosophical phenomenology and empirical research but also with the pressing issues of the zeitgeist. Both empirical findings and overlooked aspects of our lifeworld have continually inspired phenomenological research on classical topics, continually renewing Husserl’s guiding motto, “Zu den Sachen selbst!” For this reason, the theme “Applied Phenomenology: Contemporary Lifeworld in Crisis” calls for an examination of how crises—epistemic, existential, cultural, political and social—disrupt and redefine the fundamental structures of the lifeworld.

Originating with Husserl, the concept of the lifeworld denotes the pre-reflective, taken-for-granted world of lived experience that underpins cognition, knowledge, and social practices. It is within this deeply layered and historically contingent backdrop that individuals co-construct meaning, establish norms, and shape their identities. Crises expose the instability of this shared world, prompting a re-evaluation of the implicit structures that underpin our experience. By focusing on the lifeworld as both a site of stability and a space vulnerable to rupture, this theme foregrounds the philosophical potential of phenomenology to address the profound transformations brought about by crises. Whether addressing issues such as ecological collapse, violence, social inequality, political polarization, or economic instability, crises in the lifeworld expose the relational and embodied aspects of existence that sustain our sense of reality and self. 

The conference therefore invites an exploration of how phenomenology can not only illuminate these ruptures but also propose pathways toward renewal, transformation, or emancipation. Applied Phenomenology as interdisciplinary research program offers a way for engaging with these challenges. By integrating phenomenological methods with empirical research and other disciplinary approaches, we can develop a deeper understanding of these crises and explore practical solutions. This conference aims to reconcile the theoretical foundations of phenomenology with its practical applications and critical potential, focusing on how applied phenomenology can function as an interdisciplinary research program to address the pressing issues of our time.

Submissions may include discussion of the following topics:

• Conceptual Foundations: Exploring how applied phenomenology can be established as a distinctive, interdisciplinary research program that addresses problems beyond the scope of any single discipline.

• Critical, Feminist and Queer Phenomenology: Bringing attention to gendered, embodied, and intersectional experiences within the lifeworld, this topic explores issues such as healthcare access, reproductive rights, gendered and sexualized violence, power, coercion and control, justice, socio-economic and racialised injustices and multiple forms of inequity.

• Epistemological Implications of the Lifeworld: Examining how phenomenology can address the crisis of knowledge and authority, challenging objectivist assumptions and offering new ways to understand and validate knowledge, especially in the face of “post-truth” dynamics. 

• Homeworlds and Alienworlds: Investigating how crises redefine experiences of belonging and estrangement, especially in contexts like migration, conflict, illness, mental health and psychopathology. This topic explores the shifting boundaries between familiarity and alienation, and the resulting impacts on identity.

• Intersubjectivity and Communal Aspects of the Lifeworld: Analyzing how crises strain social identity and our sense of belonging, prompting reflection on shared experiences and communal bonds.

• Methodological Challenges: Addressing the criticisms of applied phenomenology, including concerns about its distinctiveness and practical relevance, and exploring strategies to overcome these challenges. Examples of such strategies include integrating phenomenological methods with empirical research and other disciplines, reflecting on how applied phenomenology analyses crises across various lifeworlds and redefines these through its unique perspectives, and using alternative mediums like art, artifacts or technology to explore how such media co-constitute knowledge by shaping and being shaped by experiences of crisis.

• Phenomenology of Violence: Addressing how violence can disrupt the lifeworld, impacting bodily autonomy, social relationships, and emotional stability, with a focus on the experiences of marginalized communities and their resilience in the face of oppression and conflict.

• World-Building: Exploring how individuals and communities reconstruct meaning during crises, whether due to social upheaval, environmental threats, technological disruptions, or psychological distress, revealing the lifeworld’s vulnerability.

Phenomenology and Armed Conflict, Coercion and Violence

A special panel to be held as part of the conference is sponsored by the European Research Council project: Gender, Conflict and Coercive Control: A Feminist Phenomenological Expansion of Conflict-related Harm. 

The aim of this panel is to explore and encourage critical, feminist and applied phenomenology of violence and harm that arise in contexts of armed conflict, transition and peacebuilding. The project and this related panel will consider the potential that the theoretical foundations of phenomenology, as well as emerging interdisciplinary approaches to applied phenomenology have in expanding understanding of how armed conflicts and associated violence is lived and experienced. In particular, scholarly and applied works that advance feminist, queer, decolonial and critical phenomenological approaches to gendered violence, coercive control, peace and justice related to armed conflict are of interest. 

Abstracts are invited from across disciplines, from multiple perspectives, from practitioners and philosophers, and from postgraduate researchers. Topics that might be considered include, but are not limited to:

• Applied phenomenological approaches to justice, accountability and Transitional Justice: how phenomenology can illuminate the experience of justice, reconciliation, and healing after societal trauma, especially in cases of historical injustices, truth commissions, and post-conflict reconciliation efforts, especially in terms of diverse lived experience.

• Experiences of state and non-state actors’ political violence;

• Experiences of social control, coercive control, sexualised and wider violence, particularly in relation to gendered, racialised and wider intersectional oppressions, affect, temporality, habit, atmosphere, mood, comportment, spatiality and mobility;

• Exploring ruptures to lifeworlds and forms of world-building as a result of political violence and crises;

• Phenomenological and epistemic injustice in the study and understanding of armed conflict, peace and violence;

• Phenomenological theory and methodologies in understanding lived, embodied and habitual experience of conflict and conflict-harm; of victimhood, the body and trauma;

• Temporality in understanding experience of conflict and peace and how past and a future temporal horizons impact experience;