Principal Lecturer in Philosophy, Director of Programmes, History, Politics and Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK; President of the British Society for Phenomenology, UK. [In-person at BSP|2025|UCD]

Shit Happens! The Excremental Ends of the World

Michel Serres has exposed the ontological consequences of the anthropocentric systems of appropriation – economic, ecological, and excremental – that fracture the cohesion of the lifeworld. His argument raises two vital questions: What becomes of a world where the trace of ownership is indistinguishable from its ruin? What futures are possible when our most enduring possessions are the waste we leave behind to rot?

I will argue that the lifeworld’s disintegration under ecological catastrophe reveals its prior entanglement with systems of excremental domination. Rather than a neutral background for experience, the lifeworld is a contested terrain shaped by power, pollution, and possession, which it is necessary to think of as a site of rupture, responsibility, and reconfiguration in the Anthropocene.

Keith Crome is President of the British Society for Phenomenology, and Director of Programmes for the Department of History, Politics & Philosophy at the Manchester Metropolitan University. He has published work on the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard. Hs current research interest is focussed on the relationship between play and education.

Assistant Professor of Applied Philosophy at the Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics and a Fellow of the Danish Institute for Advanced Study at University of Southern Denmark, Denmark. [In-person at BSP|2025|UCD]

After the Crisis: A Phenomenology of Human Contingency, Particularity, and Difference

In 1900, Edmund Husserl founded phenomenology with the grand philosophical ambition of providing a coherent and metaphysically sound foundation for mathematics and logic. Over the following decades, this ambition grew to rival those of René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, or G. W. F. Hegel—culminating in Husserl’s last major work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, with a vision of phenomenology as the philosophical foundation for all scientific inquiry.

Looking back, it’s easy to assume that this grand philosophical ambition, like so many of those before it, went unrealized. But the truth, as always, is more complex. Phenomenology may not have provided the foundations that Husserl envisioned. But why, then, has it had such profound and lasting influence across so many scientific disciplines and fields of study? In this presentation, I argue that much of this influence is owed to a curious transformation of the field: In disciplines such as psychiatry, anthropology, and sociology, phenomenology has been transformed into an approach to studying human contingency, particularity, and difference—not just the essential or universal structures of subjectivity long studied by philosophical phenomenologists. Drawing on examples from a range of disciplines, I show how this transformation of phenomenology’s aims and subject matter have contributed to its proliferation across the sciences, and consider what philosophers might learn from these developments.

Anthony Vincent Fernandez is Assistant Professor of Applied Philosophy at the Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics and a Fellow of the Danish Institute for Advanced Study at University of Southern Denmark. His work focuses the use of phenomenology in disciplines outside of philosophy, including psychiatry, nursing, anthropology, and sociology. In this vein, he conducts theoretical, methodological, and empirical research, with a current focus on the development of qualitative research methodologies. He is currently writing a new book about how phenomenology is understood and used by researchers in the psychological, social, and health sciences, as well as in art and design. He is also co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology and associate editor of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

Queen’s National Scholar in Political Philosophy and Critical Prison Studies, Queen’s University, Canada. [Online at BSP|2025|UCD]

Towards a Decolonial Phenomenology of the Lifeworld

The Two Row Wampum is a 1613 treaty between the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and Dutch traders. Two rows of purple beads on a white background express a commitment to mutual respect and non-domination that has long since been betrayed by European colonizers. What would it take to reactivate the potentiality of the Two Row Wampum today, not as an agreement in the distant past but as an invitation to participate in building a lifeworld based on peace, friendship and respect? My reflections on this question are shaped by Anishinaabe legal scholar Aaron Mills’ account of the lifeworlds of law and Edmund Husserl’s late phenomenology of the lifeworld.

Lisa Guenther is Queen’s National Scholar in Political Philosophy and Critical Prison Studies at Queen’s University in Canada. She is the author of Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives (2013) and co-editor of Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration (2015). From 2012-17, she facilitated a discussion group with men on death row in Tennessee called REACH Coalition, and she is currently a member of the P4W Memorial Collective Advisory Board. Guenther teaches philosophy classes at Collins Bay Institution through the Walls to Bridges Program. She is working on a book entitled, No Prisons on Stolen Land: A Critical Phenomenology of the Carceral-Colonial World.

Associate Professor, Erasmus School of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. [In-person at BSP|2025|UCD]

‘Wanna live like common people’? Common Sense in between lived normality and social norms

Much like the term ‘common’, the term ‘normal’ is often used to express what is socially acceptable within a given context. These established social norms usually present themselves as timeless and self-evident, but they very often have a contingent and fragile genesis, emerging from a state where they are questioned and contested before finally being established. This dynamic state can be phenomenologically described as lived intersubjective normality — an ongoing, interactive process of making and unmaking normality, that is, common sense. This paper uses Husserl’s approach to perceptual normality and its intersubjective dimension and relates it to Arendt’s account of common sense, to show the difference between an account of intersubjective normality and one of already established social norms. Viewed phenomenologically, intersubjective normality is neither a statistical average nor an already established norm, but something people do together. This more dynamic and interactive concept of normality helps us to critically reflect on the conservative and excluding (mis-)usage of ‘common sense’, for example, in populist politics, and to imagine broader and more inclusive usages. This is a first step toward enabling intersubjective processes of common-sense making, that is, to providing public places and opportunities where people with differing perspectives, bodies, and social backgrounds can meet at eye level.

Maren Wehrle, is Associate Professor in Practical Philosophy, Erasmus School of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Before she was post-Doc and lecturer at the Department of Philosophy (Husserl Archives) at KU Leuven, Belgium. She studied (German Literature, Historical Anthropology, Philosophy) and earned her doctorate in Philosophy in Freiburg, where she worked as a student and research assistant at the Husserl Archives Freiburg. Her areas of specializations are Phenomenology, Philosophical and Historical Anthropology, Feminist Philosophy and Cognitive Psychology. Her research and publications focus on topics like attention, embodiment, habit, gender, norms, and normality.

Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, Columbian College of Arts & Sciences, The George Washington University, Washington DC, USA. [In-person at BSP|2025|UCD]

Curating Embodied Resistance Through Social Media: The Role of Virtual Audiences in the Fight for Social Justice

This chapter discusses Judith Butler’s account of the political power of street protests as intercorporeal performative actions that enact “the collective will” of the people in light of Sara Ahmed’s and José Medina’s reminders of how frequently performatives become nonperformatives when they don’t receive proper uptake. While the number of people who turn up in the streets to march for social justice is the primary barometer that is used by journalists, reporters and supporters to assess its success, it is the political impact the protest has (or fails to have) over time, that is the truer measure of its performative power. Drawing upon recent work in critical phenomenology and feminist technoscience, this chapter argues that virtual audiences can serve as epistemic activists by assuming responsibility for how social justice protests are portrayed and disseminated through social media. What voices are being amplified as one clicks on items in one’s daily newsfeeds, as one “likes” and shares posts with others? This is an urgent ethical question that demands to be addressed given the ever-growing power online audiences have, simply through the touch of their fingers on phone or keyboard, to increase or decrease a social protest’s transformative effects.

Gail Weiss is Professor of Philosophy and Interim Director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at George Washington University. She has previously served as Executive Co-Director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existentialism (SPEP) and as General Secretary for the International Merleau-Ponty Circle. Her previous monographs include Refiguring the Ordinary (Indiana U. Press: 2008) and Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (Routledge 1999) and she is currently completing a monograph entitled Existential Ambiguities: Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty. In 2020 she coedited 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology (Northwestern University Press) with Ann V. Murphy and Gayle Salamon and she has edited several other volumes on Merleau-Ponty and embodiment including Intertwinings: Interdisciplinary Encounters with Merleau-Ponty (SUNY Press: 2008), Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty with Dorothea Olkowski (Penn State Press: 2006), and Thinking the Limits of the Body with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (SUNY Press: 2003). Other publications include journal articles and book chapters that draw upon phenomenology, feminist theory, critical race theory, disability studies, literature, and queer theory to address the ways in which sexist, racist, ageist and ableist understandings of “normal bodies” differentially affect the meaning of our lived, intercorporeal experience.

Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Groningen, Netherlands. [In-person at BSP|2025|UCD]

Charlotte Knowles is an Assistant Professor in Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. She works primarily in feminist philosophy and phenomenology, where her research focuses on developing a phenomenological understanding of women's complicity in their own subordination. She has published on this topic in multiple venues including The Monist, Inquiry and The European Journal of Philosophy. In 2023 Charlotte received an Early Career Award from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in recognition of her work on deep rooted issues in gender dynamics. Since 2024 Charlotte has been co-editor in chief of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. 

Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the UCD Centre for Ethics in Public Life, School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Ireland. [In-person at BSP|2025|UCD]

Danielle Petherbridge is Associate Professor in Philosophy at University College Dublin and Director of the UCD Centre for Ethics in Public Life. She works primarily in the areas of phenomenology and critical phenomenology, with recent publications on Husserl, habit, affect, attention and perception, as well as books including Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters (2017) and The Phenomenology of Belonging (forthcoming) with Luna Dolezal. She also works in the area of applied phenomenology, ethics and medical humanities, with key projects such as the Phenomenology of Dementia (funded by the IRC). Danielle is also a senior staff member on the ERC funded project Gender, Conflict and Coercive Control: A Feminist Phenomenological Expansion of Conflict-related Harm, working with a team lead by PI Aisling Swaine.

Full Professor of Peace, Security and International Law, Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin, Ireland. [In-person at BSP|2025|UCD]

Aisling Swaine is Professor of Peace, Security and International Law at the Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin. Aisling holds a PhD in law from the Transitional Justice Institute, School of Law, Ulster University. Aisling was awarded a €2million Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council in 2023 for a five-year research project titled: Gender, Conflict and Coercive Control: A Feminist Phenomenological Expansion of Conflict-related Harm.  Aisling’s research and policy work focuses on conflict-related violence against women, the women peace and security agenda and gender equality in global governance and peacebuilding. Prior to joining UCD, Aisling was Associate Professor of Gender and Security at the Department of Gender Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science, and Associate Professor of International Affairs at The George Washington University, Washington DC. Prior to her academic roles, Aisling worked in international humanitarian and peacebuilding work with international organisations, including in Kosovo, Burundi, Timor-Leste and Darfur, Sudan.