Andrew Adams

Navigating intersubjective structures of homeworld / alienworld to make sense of the lifeworld of leisure volunteers during Covid 19

In leisure studies, the concept of “lifeworld” is frequently used to signal depth in qualitative examinations of how individuals experience specific aspects of their leisure lives (e.g., Spracklen, 2011; Elkington, 2014). This paper critiques the uncritical use of the lifeworld concept and aims to broaden its application beyond phenomenological scholarship. We adopt the journey metaphor from contemporary medical understandings of illness and health (Alonso, 2004; Engels, 1977; Sulmasy, 2002), where a journey describes individual lived experiences in response to medical crises. This metaphor is integrated into our conceptual framework, drawing from Steinbock’s (1995) interpretation of homeworld/alienworld (Heimwelt/Fremdwelt) based on Husserl’s writings on intersubjectivity (1973).

Our research involved ten in-depth semi-structured interviews with habitual leisure volunteers to explore their perceptions of the impact of the third UK lockdown (January 6th to March 8th, 2021) on their voluntary activities. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was chosen as the analytic strategy due to its alignment with Steinbock’s generative phenomenology (Apostolescu, 2015) and its suitability for examining how individuals make sense of their experiences, including feelings of familiarity and estrangement. IPA aims to capture the essence of participants’ lived experiences and incorporates a hermeneutic approach to describing and interpreting these experiences.

The findings reveal how leisure volunteers’ lifeworlds are interpreted, negotiated, and constructed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Viewing Covid-19 as the “alien(world)” provides clarity and understanding of how individuals navigate meaning and existence, linking value and identity to the disruption and transformation of fixed identities through leisure activities.

Andrew is principal academic in the department of sport event management at Bournemouth university. His research interests are focused on qualitative interpretations of social justice, volunteering and evaluation in sport, leisure and physical activity. Andrew has published in peer reviewed academic journals and is currently a Managing Editor of the journal Leisure Studies.

Sophie van Balen

More-than-human attuning in face of ecological crises. An empirical-philosophical account of attunement as a breath-fostering practice.

Ecological crises destabilise the lifeworlds of human and other breathers. In times in which air becomes increasingly unbreathable and climate change poses an unimaginable threat to living (Gabrys, 2021; Irigaray, 2015), it is adament we make sense of more-than-human breathing and breathability. How do we navigate to breathable futures? In this paper, the results of two empirical-philosophical case studies are presented in so far as they regard attuning as a breath-fostering practice in face of ecological crises. The first case study (2023) enquires into the breathing troubles of cows, farmers, and surrounding ‘nature’ in the Dutch nitrogen crisis. The second study (2024) deals with the breathing of insects and their habitats in face of biodiversity crisis. Drawing on both studies, I lay out three phases of attuning – slowing down, filtering, and reading – and explore to what extent they foster ontological, atmospheric, and physical-ecological breathability.

Attunement, or mood, has a strong phenomenological tradition. Following Heidegger, ‘we are never free of moods’ (1962, 175) and thus moods can and do change. Attunement is connected to our human Being-in-the-world, meaning that other beings do not attune as we do. In environmental humanities, (embodied) attunement is differently considered in methodological terms, as a mode of witnessing that questions the ontological distinctions between the human scholar and that which she witnesses (Verlie & Neimanis, 2023). Attunement, here, is however seen as re-centring the human observer as it concerns affect ‘only’, thus not allowing for relating to what is other or unknown. The cases I present, which are based on short-term ethnographies (Pink & Morgen, 2023) and semi-structured interviews, situate attunement in more-than-human practices towards breathable futures. Empirically troubling the conceptualisations above, I compose attunement as witnessed in distinct professional settings of working with other-than-human beings to be affective and epistemic, and not privy to human beings.

Sophie van Balen is PhD candidate in Climate Philosophy at Erasmus School of Philosophy. Her project, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), brings together contemporary continental climate philosophy with feminist theory and politics, and includes two empirical-philosophical case studies. Picking up on the ‘forgetting of air’ that both Luce Irigaray and Peter Sloterdijk theorise, Sophie van Balen theorises climate disruption by thinking through breath. Recently, she published ‘Composing climate change as a matter of everyday living’ (2024) together with dr. Irene van Oorschot and ‘The climate politics of care practices’ (2023). Her article ‘Breathable futures’ is forthcoming in 2025. 

Kristina Baranovaitė

Fragmentation and Recreation: Understanding the Lifeworld through Psychosis

The onset of psychosis is said to be one of the most disruptive experiences a person can face. In academic jargon, we may say, it imposes many alterations to the fundamental structures of experience. If we agree to view the Husserlian notion of the lifeworld as continuously constituted by the manifold underlying syntheses, we must acknowledge that disruptions in these implicit syntheses redefine the lifeworlds of affected individuals. The proposed presentation addresses one specific aspect of the named crisis, which has been repeatedly reported by experts by experience.

First-person accounts reveal that one of the disturbing phenomena in psychosis revolves around the fragmentation of the perceived objects. In such instances, objects' properties become loose and scattered; separate parts do not form the usual unities; instead, novel objects arise, comprising different parts and qualities regardless of their previous borders. Thus, the fragmentation is immediately followed by formation. The proposed article argues that disruption of perceptual unity and its subsequent recreation in psychosis provides us with an important perspective on the vulnerability and plasticity of the lifeworld – precisely, how psychosis, by serving as "an uncalled-for epoché," illuminates the implicit structures of experience as well as impacts the affected individuals' further ability to "trust" their perceptions.

The presentation will initially provide a lived-experience-based context of the discussed issue through first-person accounts. Following this, the discussion will be positioned within the contemporary discourse of phenomenological psychopathology, particularly regarding the EAWE interview. The main body of the presentation will involve a theoretical investigation of the phenomenon through the framework of Edmund Husserl found in the Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis (2001). The fundamental modes of unitary perception will be addressed by analyzing association, affection, and attention syntheses. The concluding part of the presentation will show how the altered syntheses are actively recreated and how this transformation impacts the lifeworld of the affected individual in regard to self-trust, the ability to construct narratives and intersubjective relations.

Kristina Baranovaitė is a PhD student at Vilnius University, Institute of Philosophy, Lithuania. Her main research interest lay in Husserlian phenomenology and its critical dialogue with contemporary phenomenological psychopathology. In ongoing research, she aims to analyze the lived-experience of psychosis, focusing on object fragmentation and recreation; among Husserlian syntheses, she searches for those responsible for such a shift. On a personal level, she hopes that phenomenological analysis of psychotic experiences could aid in better understanding the phenomena as well as the affected individuals, improving the possibility of respectful dialogue in healthcare settings. Relevant publications: Baranovaitė, K. (2024) “Psychosis as Eluding Agency: Perspective of Phenomenological Psychopathology”, Problemos, 105, (2024).

James Bartholomeusz

Rainbow partisans: Phenomenologies of queerness, class and resistance

One key symbol of the present crisis in our lifeworld is the backlash against LGBT+ liberation. Recent years have seen a blossoming of queer expression in societies around the world as LGBT+ people finally began to achieve recognition as subjects worthy of self-determination and celebration; in some respects, the furthest extension of rights from the centre to the periphery. Mirroring this, it is queer expression - and queer people themselves - that are the first targets in the ascendancy of authoritarian populism worldwide. In the new far-Right Weltanschauung, queerness is summoned up to epitomise the decadence and civilisational suicide brought on by progressive cultural hegemony.

This configuration plays a specific role in winning and consolidating mass support for far-Right politics. Queer communities are presented in a contradictory way, both at the ragged margins of mainstream society and as integral to the cultural elite and its illegitimate rule over ordinary people. As both Lumpenproletariat and haute bourgeoisie, queer people are separated from the working-class majority as an Other onto which all anxieties and bigotry can be projected. (There is no accident in the similar far-Right configuration of migrants and certain ethnic minorities.)

Nevertheless, in facing this lifeworld disruption, there is the opportunity to enact a counter-configuration. Opposing the class-based articulation of the far-Right, the queer liberation and labour movements are already cooperating at a renewed level both locally and globally to reclaim the belonging of LGBT+ people in working-class communities. The challenge ahead is to reassert a form of intersectional solidarity in support of a common lifeworld, one in which queer and class identities are compatible rather than exclusionary. The foundation of this lifeworld is, of course, the material interest that the majority of people share in the realisation of a just and free society.

James Bartholomeusz (he/him) is an independent scholar and trade-union official. His union role involves supporting cooperation between the labour and LGBT+ movements internationally and building strategies to combat the far-Right. His particular scholarly interests are in the history of political ideas, socialism in theory and practice, and phenomenology and existentialism. He holds an MA in Philosophy from King's College London, a Graduate Certificate in History from Birkbeck College and a BA in English from the University of Exeter. This abstract submission is made in a personal capacity. 

Jonna Beebe

The Rupture in being of the Anthropocene: Husserl and the Eco-aura

The rupture of lifeworlds caused by anthropogenic climate change has drastically altered our relationship to our environment and, of course, our very mode of being. Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction argues that within major historical periods both the mode of being and manner of sense perception of the human collective are altered. In a similar manner to Husserlian lifeworlds, Benjamin argues that the basis of our experience is dynamic in nature, for example how the aura becomes degraded during the age of mechanical reproduction. From this I derive an environmental critique regarding the authenticity of nature, or the eco-aura, which arises specifically in post-anthropocene lifeworlds. During the climate crisis we have become so deeply estranged from nature that questions regarding what is “real” or “authentic” prompting both debate and pursuit of these notions. An individual cannot find authentic nature if they adhere to the stance that nature and human society are truly two completely separate entities. It is not ontologically possible for you to experience authentic nature or eco-aura due to your very presence. You are cut off at the very level of being. I argue that a Husserlian approach, drawing on both lifeworlds and his earlier work in Thing and Space,  is the correct methodology to analyze the way the mode of being has been altered in regards to the issue of the “eco-aura” or natural authenticity that has arisen during the anthropocene. Husserl allows me to take into account the way in which both individual belief and socio-cultural conditions feed into our current mode of being where we are so estranged from our natural surroundings that we question whether they are authentic or real.

Jonna Beebe (she/they) is a philosophy lecturer for the KCTCS technical and community college system and currently lives in Cincinnati Ohio. She has a B.A. in political science from Washington Adventist University, an M.A. in philosophy from NU London, and an M.A. in eco-sociology from Goldsmiths University of London. Her research specialties are environmental philosophy and continental philosophy with teaching experience mostly resting in the realm of ethics. An avid member of her community she often gives free public lectures on various topics at the Boxelder Community Center.  

Joseph Berendzen

Critical Phenomenology in Times of Crisis: Some Skeptical Remarks

This paper will critique the idea that phenomenology is capable of critically intervening in crises.  For this purpose, “critical” will be interpreted along the lines of Horkheimer’s early conception of critical theory.  A critical theorist must form “a dynamic unity with the oppressed class” (“Traditional and Critical Theory” 1937).  This “dynamic unity” requires that the theorist examine the actual lived experience of the oppressed.  But the theorist must also elaborate the situation of the oppressed in a manner that brings the oppressed to consciousness of their full situation.  If such a critical project is possible, it would seem highly applicable to multiple current crises.  For instance, it might help us deal with the fact that disadvantaged groups increasingly side with far-right groups--and also against ecological movements--in a manner that does not actually fit their interests.

Phenomenology might seem well suited for such a critical project, insofar as it can provide first-person descriptions of experiences of oppression.  But it faces two major problems.  First, there is a question as to who is the phenomenologist in the theorist/oppressed dynamic.  Presumably, the theorist would be the phenomenologist--but if that is the case, phenomenological description will not help reveal the experience of the oppressed to the theorist.  But if the oppressed are able to engage in phenomenological reflection directly, the critical project described above would be unnecessary, because they would not need to be brought to full consciousness of their situation.  Second, it is not clear that phenomenology is really necessary for, or sufficient to, provide first-person accounts of the experience of oppression that can have emancipatory power.  Arguably, forms of aesthetic expression would be more adequate to that task.  These points will be elaborated, and some potential solutions will be considered, in the paper.

Joseph C. Berendzen is William and Audrey Hutchinson Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Loyola University New Orleans.  He specializes in phenomenology, German Idealism, Frankfurt School critical theory, and contemporary metaphysics and epistemology inspired by idealism.  He is the author of Embodied Idealism: Merleau-Ponty's Transcendental Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2003. 

Joff P. N. Bradley

Zooming In and Out of Subjectivity: Hikikomori, Deficient Mode of Being, and Autistic Lifeworlds

What is the lifeworld of the hikikomori (social recluse), who withdraws from society? Can subjectivity itself zoom in and out, shifting between immersion and detachment? How might Heidegger’s notion of a “deficient mode of being” help us understand the existential and perceptual conditions of the Japanese hikikomori in relation to contemporary technological mediation? This paper also explores the existential and phenomenological dimensions of hikikomori withdrawal through the Deleuzian concept of the world with(out) Others. Here I focus on optical flow, addiction, immersion and flat modes of attention. It examines how video technology, digital mediation, and pandemic-induced isolation have reshaped the spatial and perceptual experience of subjectivity. Drawing on Paul Virilio, I argue that the zooming-in and zooming-out effect of video technology collapses distance, bringing the far into proximity while simultaneously generating a paradoxical sense of alienation, anxiety, and disembodiment. This technological de-severance of self and world resonates with Heidegger’s concept of being-alone as a deficient mode of being-with. I shall consider this in relation to the autistic milieu or world-without-Other of the hikikomori and critique psychiatric readings of this condition through a philosophical analysis drawing on Han Byung-Chul, Bernard Stiegler, and Felix Guattari. I shall finally ask: Can the very technical act of zooming in and zooming out become a site of resistance and creation—a means of reimagining subjectivity beyond withdrawal?

Joff P. N. Bradley teaches English and Philosophy at Teikyo University, Japan, Currently, he is a visiting professor at the Czech Academy of Sciences. His notable works include Schizoanalysis and Asia (2022), Deleuze, Guattari and the Schizoanalysis of Postmedia (2023), and On the Détournement of the Smart City: A Critical Post-Media Study of the Smart City in Korea, Japan, and India. He published Critical Essays on Bernard Stiegler and On Critical Post-Media and Korea: Philosophy, Technology, and Literature in 2024. Joff P. N. Bradley teaches English and Philosophy at Teikyo University, Japan, Currently, he is a visiting professor at the Czech Academy of Sciences. His notable works include Schizoanalysis and Asia (2022), Deleuze, Guattari and the Schizoanalysis of Postmedia (2023), and On the Détournement of the Smart City: A Critical Post-Media Study of the Smart City in Korea, Japan, and India. He published Critical Essays on Bernard Stiegler and On Critical Post-Media and Korea: Philosophy, Technology, and Literature in 2024. 

Kathryn Body

Pre-constituted panel with Tarun Kattumana

Public Health in Crisis: Covid-19 and the Forced Renegotiation of the Lifeworld

During public health crises, interventions are often driven by population-health priorities that neglect the embodied lived experience of specific individuals and groups. Drawing on phenomenologically informed research on various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, in this panel, we explore how embodied experience can inform the formulation of public health measures, influence adherence, and reveal overlooked dimensions of health crises. More specifically, we demonstrate how phenomenologically informed qualitative research can re-centralize embodiment in public health research, advancing applied phenomenology and contributing to more effective policy interventions.

“The loss of touch is painful”: Embodied experiences of social isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic

As social beings, how we understand ourselves, other people, and our environment is foregrounded by our interpersonal relationships with others who typically help structure our lives and act as reliable ‘sounding boards’ against which we validate and make sense of our experiences. On that basis, some scholars have argued that certain forms of legal punishment involving periods of enforced social isolation and solitary confinement have a destabilising effect on individuals’ lived experience of the world (Guenther 2013; Leder 2016) and, in severe cases, create ‘self-disturbances’ resembling mental disorders such as schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety (Gallagher 2014; Ratcliffe 2017).            Drawing on these accounts, in this paper, I argue that in some cases public health interventions introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic, specifically national lockdowns, self-isolation protocols, and social distancing elicited self-disturbances akin to those identified by Gallagher (2014). To demonstrate this, I have used a combination of Reflexive Thematic Analysis (‘Reflexive TA’) (Braun and Clarke 2021) and Phenomenologically Grounded Qualitative Research (PGQR) (Køster and Fernandez 2023) to analyse online qualitative survey data on the Covid-19 pandemic (Froese et al., 2021; James et al., 2022). I use this data to develop five themes highlighting phenomenologically salient aspects of pandemic-related social isolation namely, (i) becoming invisible for ‘the Other’ (ii) the ‘painful’ loss of touch (iii) self-dissociation and bodily disturbances (iv) disturbed sense of reality (v) emotional dysregulation in the absence of others. Through these five themes I show how policy-driven public health interventions aimed at mitigating virus transmission can overlook other important aspects of human experience, including the ability to partake in ‘participatory sense-making practices’ (Gallagher 2010; De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007) as well as undermine capacities for developing coherent ‘self-narratives’ (Gallagher 2013; Ratcliffe 2016; Byrne 2024) necessary for maintaining a sense of self and personal identity.

Kathryn Body is an AHRC-funded PhD student in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol. Her research combines ideas and concepts from social anthropology and phenomenology to analyse online qualitative survey data on social distancing and other social restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK, Japan, and Mexico. A key aim of her research is to create better understanding of how infectious disease outbreaks like the Covid-19 pandemic impact people’s relationships with their bodies, other people, and their environment. 

Fedra Cabrera Solano

Between Erotic Alienation and Hermeneutical Injustice: A Steinian Critical Phenomenology of Homophobia

In Epistemic Injustice (2007), Miranda Fricker claims that hermeneutical injustice sometimes runs so deep that it can “cramp the very development of self[hood].” However, she does not characterize this impairment further. This essay fills this gap by providing an alternative reading of the case study Fricker uses to defend her claim—Edmund White’s testimony from A Boy’s Own Story (1983), a semi-autobiographical account of growing up gay in the homophobic environment of 1950s Midwestern U.S. According to my reading, people around White misinterpreted his bodily expressions of gay desire as signs of supposed sexual depravity, forcing White to adopt an unnatural stance towards his body as the medium that expressed his sexuality. Instead of perceiving his bodily expressions as ordinary manifestations of a normal desire, he repressed and modified them in order to conceal his gayness in shame. I call this unnatural way of relating to one’s embodied expressions of desire erotic alienation. In defining this concept, I follow two insights from Edith Stein’s unduly overlooked phenomenology of the body: (1) that our living bodies are the objects through which we reveal and perceive expressions of each other’s desires and (2) that the social interpretations of these bodily expressions play a crucial role in how we come to (mis)understand ourselves. In a Steinian reconstruction, the bodily expressions associated with White’s homosexual desires were consistently misinterpreted by those around him. Such expressions were taken to mean that he was a sexual deviant. But he was not the defective person that this construction implied. As I hope to show, my reading has two advantages. Philosophically, it highlights the terrible effects hermeneutical injustice has on bodily experience, hence determining a specific way in which it can cause an impaired self. Historically, it demonstrates the originality and utility of Stein’s phenomenology of bodily expressions. 

Fedra Cabrera Solano is a PhD student in philosophy at Harvard University from Bogotá, Colombia. Conceptually, she is interested in understanding how our embodied experience is affected by the different forms of social dynamics—both pathological and constructive—that we experience in the world. She draws from the insights of the phenomenological tradition to illuminate these phenomena, and she has historical interests in the development of this philosophical movement in Europe and Latin America. She is also very interested in the relation between aesthetic practices and practices of social emancipation, specially as articulated by Latin American women artists.   

Benjamin Cail

Phenomenology, Gender, and the Limits of Naturalism: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty

This paper explores how the phenomenological frameworks of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty can offer compelling alternatives to the dichotomy between biological determinism and social constructionism prevalent in contemporary discourse surrounding gender. Rather than reducing gender to either a biological fact or a mere social construct, phenomenology insists on the lived experience of embodiment as the site where gender and sexuality are continuously formed and re-formed. Husserl’s concept of the lifeworld counters naturalism’s reductive objectivism, revealing how meaning is generated within the pre-reflective structures of everyday experience. Meanwhile, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh (la chair) offers a model of embodiment that resists the static split between nature and culture, showing how the body is both shaped by history and open to transformation. By pairing these two concepts, phenomenology provides a way of understanding gender not as a fixed essence but as something that emerges through relational, embodied experience. That said, this paper also acknowledges feminist and queer critiques that challenge phenomenology’s handling of embodiment and sexual difference. Judith Butler’s engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s reading of the Schneider case and Iris Marion Young’s critique of both thinkers’ treatment of gendered embodiment push phenomenology to confront how gender is not merely constructed, but lived. This paper takes these critiques seriously, yet argues that phenomenology, with its emphasis on historical contingency and the openness of embodiment, offers a way of approaching gender that is neither deterministically biological nor purely discursive. Ultimately, phenomenology reframes gender as a lived, dynamic experience—one that is shaped by the past yet remains responsive to the possibility of change.

Benjamin Cail is a doctoral student in Philosophy at the Institut Catholique de Paris. His dissertation and research focuses on the emergence of the flesh as a concept in French thought.

Emanuela Carta

A Phenomenological-Ameliorative Analysis of Consent

Recent feminist phenomenological work has offered important challenges to the dominant view of consent as a form of contractual permission. In particular, Ellie Anderson [2022] has developed a compelling alternative to this legalistic framework by reinterpreting consent as co-feeling: a shared, affective attunement between desiring subjects. 

In this paper, I advance a phenomenological reading of consent that has its roots in this shift but departs from Anderson’s approach. I propose that consent is best understood as emotive endorsement: a felt affirmation or approval of a situation or action—a notion I draw from Husserl’s analysis of Billigung (approval) in the second volume of the Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins.

Like Anderson’s account, my view avoids the problematic implication that women must respond to a request, and it does not presuppose a dualistic separation of mind and body. In addition, it offers an ameliorative revision of the standard notion of consent. However, in contrast to Anderson’s proposal, it has the advantage of remaining closer to how people ordinarily think about consent and of applying across a broader range of contexts beyond sexual ethics.

Alongside this conceptual proposal, I argue that this intervention exemplifies a form of phenomenological ameliorative inquiry—a method of rethinking concepts not by departing from experience but by reorienting description in light of ethical and political purposes.

Emanuela Carta is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Graz, where she is part of the FWF Cluster of Excellence Knowledge in Crisis project. She is also a research associate at the Husserl Archives at KU Leuven. Her research interests lie at the intersection of phenomenology, epistemology, ethics, and feminist philosophy. She obtained her Ph.D. in philosophy in April 2018 from Roma Tre University.  

Natalija Cera

Alien at Home: Imagining Belonging in Later-Generation Migration

In this paper, I begin exploring the role of imagination in shaping belonging experiences in migration. If homeworld, with its tacit familiarity and comfort, is one of the fundamental structures of the lifeworld that draws our attention to generativity in our everyday experiences, then belonging needs to be approached as a complex experience in continuous co-constitution through mutual relations between me and the lived world in which I find myself. Moreover, many of these relations that co-shape my experience of belonging unfold across generations. This is particularly evident in the later-generation migrants' experiences - people whose families migrated to where they were born and grew up. Since temporal horizons structure belonging experiences, imagination must play a fundamental role - on individual and intersubjective, collective levels. To foreground imagination as one of the crucial structures of belonging experiences, I attend to later-generation migrants' experiences (partly autobiographical, partly from secondary sources). Here, the lifeworld crisis manifests as confused and conflicting feelings of belonging. How does being born here but not being from here affect my and others' imaginations of where my homeworld is, where my alienworld is, and what it means to be in-between worlds? To engage with these questions, I draw on the works of critical phenomenologists (e.g., Al-Saji; Ngo) and feminist philosophers (e.g., Lugones, Fricker) who have argued that structural marginalisation inflicts profound and lasting harm on the marginalised by violently shaping the fundamental structures of lived experiences, such as being fixed in a racialised and colonised temporality. I apply these insights to investigate how systemic marginalisation harmfully co-constitutes later-generation migrants' imagination-horizon, contributing to the lifeworld crisis through a crisis of imagination.

Natalija Cera is a Research Ireland Postgraduate Scholar and currently a 2nd-year PhD student in philosophy at University College Dublin (Ireland). Her research project is entitled “Understanding Belonging in the Condition of Migration”, and her main research areas are critical phenomenology and hermeneutics. In 2023, Natalija obtained an MSc in Philosophy, Science and Religion from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland). Before philosophy, her academic and professional path was in business, law, and finance. Natalija worked for international re/insurance corporations for fifteen years. Originally from Latvia, she has lived in different European countries for more than ten years.  

Yordanka Dimcheva

The Phenomenology of Violent Loss: Trauma, Grief and Remembrance in the Aftermath of Terrorist Violence in France

Within a period of less than nine months between November 2015 and July 2016, France has twice been the target of mass terrorist attacks, claimed by ISIS, which caused the death of 130 people in Paris and 86 in Nice, sent shockwaves throughout French society, and plunged the country into successive states of emergency. Through the interpretive phenomenological analysis of the lived experiences of seven bereaved parents who lost a child in the 2015 Paris attacks and the Bastille Day vehicle-ramming attack, this paper explores the complexity of violent loss to terrorism. Guided by the fundamental lifeworld themes in phenomenology – lived time, space, body, and human relations – the paper traces the intricate ways trauma, grief, and remembrance intersect in the parents’ narratives of loss and the enduring impact of the experience upon their experiential landscape.

While acknowledging the diversity of loss experiences, it considers how the trauma of violent loss permeates all dimensions of the parents’ lifeworlds and disrupts their sense of identity and ways of being in the world, leaving them grasping for meaning. Along with its insights into the workings of trauma and grief, the paper also sheds light on the meaning-making commitments and affective practices of remembrance through which the bereaved seek to preserve the relational bonds with the deceased and re-commit to life and the world as to re-learn them. Respectively, the paper’s focus is on the intricate intersection between the mind, body, and the world in the aftermath of shattering experiences, which remains obscure in positivist approaches (Zahavi 2019). By employing an interpretive phenomenological lens to the study of traumatic bereavement, it offers an original contribution to the understanding of loss as an emotional and structural experience.

Yordanka Dimcheva is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Birmingham. She completed her PhD as part of the ERC-funded project ‘Urban Terrorism in Europe (2004-19): Remembering, Imagining, and Anticipating Violence’ and then joined the European Research Council Executive Agency as a Blue Book Trainee in the Social Sciences and Humanities Unit. Her research centres on the study of traumatic experiences, political violence and grief. Yordanka holds a MRes degree in Security, Conflict and Human Rights from the University of Bath and a Master’s in International Politics from Sciences Po Bordeaux, France. 

Patrick Eldridge

Pre-constituted panel with Joel Hubick and Sean Winkler

The Crisis of Creativity from Phenomenological and Post-Phenomenological Standpoints

This panel addresses today’s so-called ‘crisis of creativity’; that is, the noted decline in novel outcomes across aesthetic, political and technological domains. Developing phenomenological and post-phenomenological standpoints, Eldridge, Hubick and Winkler hope to better define, identify root causes and posit plausible remedies to this crisis. Their work supports ongoing research in creativity studies by accounting for the crisis in terms of the lifeworld and the ways technology occludes it, while being rooted in it. They each propose ways to re-orient responses to the creativity crisis around strategies of ‘defamiliarization’: explicit phenomenalization of the world that intersubjective communities take for granted.

The Crisis of Creativity and the Return to the Lifeworld

In this paper I incorporate the ‘crisis of creativity’ in the ‘age of information’ into the classic phenomenological conception of the crisis of reason in the age of positivism. I do this because—counterintuitively—it is transcendental phenomenology that offers an applicable strategy for conceiving of and responding to the ways we fail to relate creatively to phenomena. I follow Winkler’s (2023) account of this crisis of creativity as being connected to the proliferation of information which commands belief and homogenizes meaningful discourse, while giving the appearance of novelty. Following Deleuze, he proposes acts and experiences of defamiliarization as non-informative but creative ways of constituting objects. I aim to support this thesis by offering a sympathetic reading of the phenomenological reduction as the defamiliarization of that which we fundamentally take for granted: the lifeworld.  There is a limited but nonetheless important sense in which the crisis of creativity demands that we question back into the lifeworld: defamiliarization of objects we take for granted is a necessary (but insufficient) condition for creative gestures. Refashioning Husserl’s multifarious accounts of the reduction via the ontology of the lifeworld, I argue that creative gestures entail neither ‘hard won ignorance’ nor ‘sudden wonder’ at single objects, but a kind of attitude that achieves a disorientation that spreads from the object to its environment, its nexus of givenness, and in this way opens a space of alternative meaningfulness around the object. The object we relate to creatively no longer fits unproblematically into a settled world—its objectivity has been shaken. Where the reduction is normally presented as a neutralization that ultimately leads to knowledge, we can consider it as an open-ended practice of estrangement (as Chernavin & Yampolskaya [2018] do), which generates unforeseen possibilities of givenness of objects and thereby methodically counteracts homogenizing regimes of information.

I am Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John. I obtained my PhD at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) with a dissertation on Husserl. I have published articles on the phenomenology of memory, phenomenological aesthetics, and the history of the phenomenological movement. 

Daniel Estrada

The Possibility of Movement: Institution, Generativity, and the Border Patrol

This paper turns to Merleau-Ponty’s theory of institution to characterize the particular ontological violence of the United States Border Patrol. As Merleau-Ponty will argue, the instituting subject remains within the hinge of self and world, an ontological condition this paper suggests may offer conceptual value to providing a philosophical account of the lifeworld of borderlands, a space decisively marked by ambiguity and nonidentity. This paper also considers the founding of the border patrol beyond its vulgar political character and offers an interpretation of its governing of a choreographic score, that is, the commandment of particular styles of movement and spatial understanding. In other words, the possibility of movement and spatiality is mediated by the border patrol’s institution, establishing a dimensionality to make sense of future experiences to come. Where movement and space remain a constitutive element in considering Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the subject (as David Morris will suggest), we may come to see how political interventions within the production of space are configured as ontological projects. This claim rests upon understanding the theory of institution as Merleau-Ponty’s practicing of a generative method of phenomenology, as that which suggests the possibility of a sense of space as a necessarily historical and intersubjective inquiry. While the hinge ontological structure may be Merleau-Ponty’s attempt at rescuing the subject from domination or reification, that is, in occupying a position not as subject or object, but as the movement between the two, this paper contends this reliance on ambiguity (as well attended to by philosophers and cultural theorists of the border, such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Mariana Ortega) may ultimately indeed not hold prescriptive value in the face of spatial domination, as spatial domination is precisely able to dominate in the first place because of the subject’s precarious, insecure ontology, but nevertheless may offer helpful regard for diagnostic purposes.

Daniel Estrada is a PhD candidate at Emory University studying continental philosophy, phenomenology (especially the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty), theories of space, and Marxist philosophy. Daniel’s research includes Marxist phenomenology and its potential in addressing questions of spatiality, borders, and (im)migration. 

Emma Farrell

The nature and meaning of mental health and well-being amongst Irish young people: A hermeneutic phenomenological study

Mental health difficulties and distress appear to be on the rise, particularly amongst young people. Rates of mental disorders such as anxiety and depression are reportedly increasing, especially amongst young women, and the expanding diagnostic boundaries of conditions such as ADHD and ASD place already stretched mental health services under increasing strain. At times it can be challenging to step beyond the incidence and percentages and understand what is really going on for young people and how they make sense of their experiences beyond the ready-made meaning structures of aetiology, diagnosis and prognosis. This paper describes a hermeneutic phenomenological study of the nature and meaning of mental health and well-being amongst 27 Irish young people with lived experience of significant mental health difficulty or distress. It presents a unique methodology for researching lived experience based on the philosophical principles of hermeneutic phenomenology and shares insights from hours of in-depth interviews in which young people themselves were invited to share their story, in their words, and without the curtailment of researcher-led schedules or interruptions. Analysis of the almost 1000 pages of interview transcripts, using a combination of the hermeneutic circle of understanding and Braun and Clarke’s reflexive thematic analysis, revealed a pattern in how students described and made sense of their experiences. Comprising of four stages, this narrative structure, or ‘plot’, was drawn on by students in ordering their experiences into meaningful wholes. This paper provides insight into ways students made sense of their experience of distress, and how they located this experience in the ‘whole’ of their life story. It examines features of each of the four narrative phases and pays particular attention to what recovery or ‘being-well’ means to these young people. Overall, this paper acts as an invitation to consider the role of phenomenology in examining, not just the nature, but the meaning of mental health and well-being for those with experience of significant distress.

Dr Emma Farrell is Assistant Professor of Mental Health in Maynooth University. She is a founding member of Jigsaw, Ireland’s National Centre for Youth Mental Health and a member of the Royal Irish Academy’s Young Academy Ireland. Emma is author of ‘Making Sense of Mental Health: A Practical Approach through Lived Experience’ (Liffey Press, 2022) and ‘Irish University Students with Mental Health Difficulties: Experiences, Challenges and Supports' (Lived Places Publishing, 2024). 

Lisa Foran

Joint presentation with Dervla MacManus

Cocoons of Practice: Spielraumen and Homeworlds in Architectural Practice

Michel de Certeau distinguishes between a strategy – a structure implemented by institutional power; and a tactic – the manner in which a user of the system can subvert the strategy.  Drawing parallels with structural linguistics, de Certeau discusses a city as a readable text but that behind this text, this ordering of geometrical space as a series of possibilities and interdictions is another text unreadable but performed woven by the pedestrians who enunciate or actualize these possibilities and create new ones.  This kind of memorialisation in legend exceeds the possibility of the system to totalize it, legend operates in the space of what de Certeau calls a local authority – a Spielraum made up of invisible identities of the visible. These tactics of the individual in their relation with the other or others are infinitely diverse and subvert the strategies of the system which totalize.  In this paper we argue that de Certeau’s account can be brought into productive dialogue with Edmund Husserl’s account of home and alien worlds as described in in the Crisis.

Emanating from a larger research project — Gender Equity in Irish Architecture — we draw on the evidence of 23 qualitative interviews on the lived experience of contemporary architects. We argue that contemporary architectural practice can be taken as a strategy in de Certeau’s sense; a readable text that imposes a way of thinking what architectural practice is or should be. This strategy is governed by what we term the genius model of the architect. This strategy takes the architect as the sole originator of design and takes success as belonging to the individual subject. Bringing de Certeau into dialogue with Husserl, we argue that this strategy of architecture makes what should be a homeworld for any practising architect an alien and/or alienating world for women architects; a world that, despite familiar practises and environments, becomes essentially uninhabitable and unethical for the contemporary architect, and especially so for those from marginalised groups. Using Reflexive Thematic Analysis  (Braun and Clarke, 2019, 2021) we have identified a number of  ‘tactics’  which ‘ordinary’ architects use to generate local authorities or Speilraumen in which architecture is brought back to the everyday and, most importantly, the meditated and collaborative. As one interviewee put it ‘we have made a cocoon for ourselves’. This ‘cocooning’ is a way in which an alienating world can be made homely once again.

Dr Lisa Foran is assistant professor at the School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, where she researches and lectures in European thought. Her research uses translation to approach the ethics of intersubjective relations within the frameworks of phenomenology and hermeneutics. Her current work uses those frameworks to investigate the relation between ethical and aesthetic judgement. She is the author of Derrida, The Subject and the Other: Surviving, Translating and the Impossible (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), editor of Translation and Philosophy (Peter Lang, 2012), and co-editor of Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida: The Question of Difference (Springer, 2016) as well as numerous book chapters and articles. 

Antony Fredriksson

Kinship with the non-human: Merleau-Ponty’s concept of nature

The ordinary meaning of “kinship” alludes to a family relationship. To be someone’s kin, entails that we come from someone that was there before us. Our qualities and features are formed by something that preceded our existence. This is the specific meaning of the kinship between the human subject and nature that Merleau-Ponty had in mind in his later work. Our form of life is structured upon nature and receives its foundational characteristics from the non-human world which preceded our form of life. Merleau-Ponty articulates it as the “inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself” (1991, 16). In this sense the human subject is not autonomous, transcendent or external in relation to nature, but rather co-constituted by an agency that is non-human.

This articulation of nature acknowledges how the human body is constituted by the same fabric as the encompassing material world, subsequently this view renders the human/non-human relation to be lateral, rather than hierarchical (Merleau-Ponty 2003). This ontology of nature goes against the grain of philosophical traditions of the enlightenment, in which human subjects are primarily understood as constituted by the “higher” cognitive capacities of beings that are rational and linguistic animals (Kee 2023).

Through an assessment of the implications of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of nature, this paper aims to bring potentially new ethical perspectives to the discourse on climate crises by scrutinizing the notions of kinship and relationality between the human and non-human.

Antony Fredriksson (PhD), is an Assistant professor at the Centre for Ethics, University of Pardubice. His areas of interest include attention, environmental emotions, intersubjectivity, Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology, philosophy of perception, and Wittgenstein. He has taught philosophy at Åbo Akademi University, University of Helsinki and the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki. His most recent work focuses on environmental ethics, including the book The Philosophy of Environmental Emotions Grief, Hope, and Beyond, Routledge 2005. His previous work focuses on existential questions concerning the faculty of attention, including the book A Phenomenology of Attention and the Unfamiliar: Encounters with the Unknown. Palgrave Macmillan 2022.

Enara García

Pre-constituted panel with Martin Kristiansen and Peter Stilwell

Front-loaded Phenomenology in Clinical Research: New Methodological and Interdisciplinary Perspectives in the Study of Health Crises

Applied phenomenology, in the form of qualitative research, has become a popular way to gain insights into people’s experiences of health crises. However, there is a troubling lack of methodological guidance on the role and purpose of phenomenological concepts and distinctions. This interdisciplinary panel, consisting of three inter-related presentations, will address this gap by providing new methodological reflections and examples from past and ongoing studies of pain, suffering, and mental health. Collectively, this panel will engage with the conference topics Conceptual Foundations, Homeworlds/Alienworlds, and Methodological Challenges. This panel may interest anyone invested in these topics and advancing phenomenological qualitative research.

Atmospheres in Psychotherapy

In an era of mental health crisis, understanding the full spectrum of factors that contribute to healing is more important than ever. While therapist expertise and patient motivation are widely acknowledged as crucial, an often-overlooked element is the atmosphere of the therapeutic situation. 

Atmospheres are defined as holistic affective qualities of situations that integrate disparate emotional forces into a unified experience. In phenomenological psychiatry, this concept has been applied to describe how subjective experience is altered in mental health conditions in a way that extends to the interpersonal affective field. However, there is still an open question about how atmospheres affect the therapeutic space and recovery processes. Previous evidence indicates that the atmosphere of a consultation room can actively elicit emotional responses such as relaxation, trust, and intimacy, or, conversely, feelings of shame, distance, and restraint. These affective responses appear to set the stage for distinct interactional styles, potentially shaping the quality and direction of therapeutic engagement.

This talk presents a novel methodology for studying atmospheres in psychotherapy, combining phenomenological interviews with video-aided interaction analysis. Front-loaded phenomenological interviews will be used to assess the experience of therapeutic atmospheres. In addition, Cognitive Event Analysis on video recordings will help analyze the real-time dynamics and sequences of significant moments of change in therapy sessions. Integrating these methods makes it possible to go beyond momentary experiences captured by the interviews, identifying changes in atmospheres across different steps in the interaction. The discussion will highlight the various contributions of this methodological design in capturing the dynamic and embodied nature of therapeutic atmospheres, while also addressing the challenges of integrating first-person experiential reports with third-person observational analysis. In doing so, it will provide a framework for refining phenomenological methods in the study of relational and affective dynamics across diverse contexts.

I am a philosopher and cognitive scientist with a multidisciplinary background in philosophy, experimental neuroscience, and humanistic psychotherapy. My research interests span the broad field of embodied cognition theories and mental health, particularly enactive and phenomenological approaches in psychotherapy. I am currently a a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellow at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study (DIAS) & Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics, University of Southern Denmark. 

River Heisler

Crossing the Chiasm: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of the Visible and the Invisible Read Through Nonbinary Experience

Despite the growing interest in recent years in the applicability of critical and queer phenomenologies to understanding transgender and nonbinary experience (cf., Burke, 2022; Burke, 2025; for instance), theoreticians have struggled to extricate nonbinary embodiment in particular from the cis-heteropatriarchal construct of the binary of sex. In an effort to respond to this difficulty, I draw on the Merleau-Pontian notion of the chiasm (le chiasme) (Merleau-Ponty, 1986; Muller, 2017; Evans & Lawlor, 2000) which—to an extent—avoids falling into normativity due to its reference to both the visible and the invisible. Throughout my talk, I offer a detailed reading of the chiasm, illustrating the particular ways in which the references to the visible and the invisible offer a de-pathologizing, non-normative way to conceptualize nonbinary embodiment. Subsequently, I highlight the particular importance of a chiasmatic understanding of nonbinary embodiment for both critical phenomenology as well as applied phenomenology (e.g., phenomenological psychology). Specifically, I emphasize the liberatory potential of a chiasmatic understanding of nonbinary embodiment: as I demonstrate, developing theories of nonbinary embodiment which run contra to normativity and the sex binary are well-positioned to be translated into a praxis which de-sediments our binary understanding of the body. Consequently, developing chiasmatic understandings of the body promises to function as a powerful antidote to traditional perspectives on the body, many of which can lead to significant dysphoria in nonbinary individuals. By contrast, chiasmatic theories of embodiment de-reify the binary sexing of the body, allowing for nonbinary embodiments which emphasize the crossing-over between the nonbinary individual and the world. Ultimately, the performance of such a crossing-over goes beyond reducing dysphoria; once freed from the chains of cis-heteronormativity, nonbinary understandings of embodiment promise to liberate not only nonbinary individuals, but indeed propose to free embodiment itself from incomplete and reified ways of being.

River Heisler is a second year PhD student at Duquesne University's Clinical Psychology program, a program rooted in the phenomenological and human science tradition of psychology. They have a deep passion for phenomenology and its liberatory potential, and much of their research focuses on the worlding processes of nonbinary individuals in particular. Through their attempts to understand the worlding processes of nonbinary individuals, they hope to begin to understand how nonbinaryness can liberate phenomenology, and how phenomenology can liberate nonbinaryness.  

Thunder Storm Heter

Phenomenology and “the White Problem”

This paper argues that the field of Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) is at its best when it combines phenomenology and history. Contemporary critics of whiteness including Sara Ahmed, George Yancy, Shannon Sullivan, Linda Martín-Alcoff, Michael J. Monahan, Lewis R. Gordon, Nathalie Nya, Kathryn Sophia Belle, and Mabogo P. More, utilize phenomenology to describe whiteness variously as a visible identity, an orientation, a way of being-in-the-world, a form of bad-faith, and/or a relationship to property, resources, and land.  Contemporary CWS draws on a large body of thought that originated with Black, Brown, Indigenous and plurally-raced thinkers who began critically analyzing European-ness (and later whiteness) from the earliest moments of modern European conquest. 

The critical examination of being-White--or what Jean Paul Sartre called “the shock of being seen”--is one reaction to the slow-burning crisis affecting White people in the West who have grown skeptical of White supremacist narratives used originally to justify European colonial expansion and still used to support ongoing colonial domination of Indigenous people in settler states like the USA and the Canada. While Sartre was one of the first White westerner thinkers to write critically about whiteness, his analysis drew heavily on Richard Wright and Frantz Fanon. 

In France, the United Kingdom, and Ireland academics (and popular writers) have asked whether CWS is an “imported American ideology.” I examine such questions as: Is there a singular White identity that people in the West share? How should we think of the crisis of being-White in settler colonial nations like the US, Canada, South Africa, and Australia as compared to the experience of whiteness in European nations with histories of exploitation colonialism? I turn to Irish Studies scholars like Patrick R. O’Malley, (2023), Ebun Joseph (2020), Anne Mulhall (2020), and G. K. Peatling (2005), who challenge a central theme of CWS, the notion that Irish folks in the USA “became White” (David Roediger and Noel Ignatif).  

I contend that in some scholarship coming out of the USA, whiteness is oversimplified as a Black/White binary, instead of being seen in its full complexity. I emphasize that whiteness in settler colonial regimes is defined primarily against Indigeniety.  Even among American CWS scholars, there is sometimes a failure to think of the USA as having an ongoing imperial project, consisting in land and resource theft from Indigenous peoples. DuBois’ claim that “Whiteness is control of the earth” is applicable to contemporary White identity in the USA, but it should be augmented through the work of Indigenous scholars like Glen Coulthard, Brian Burkhart, Klee Benally, and Audra Simpson.

Thunder Storm Heter is author of Sartre’s Ethics of Engagement (Continuum: 2006), The Sonic Gaze: Jazz, Whiteness and Racialized Listening (Rowman & Littlefield: 2022), and editor of Creolizing Sartre (Rowman & Littlefield: 2023). He is former president of the North American Sartre Society and is an executive editor of Sartre Studies International.  He co-edits the Living Existentialism book series at Rowman & Littlefield. He is currently working on an edited collection called Jazz Philosophies: Improvisational Approaches to Being Human. 

Ole Höffken

A Critical Evaluation of a Phenomenological Crisis Diagnosis: Hartmut Rosa's Thesis of a 'Resonance Catastrophe' in Modernity from an Interdisciplinary Perspective

Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance is one of the major contributions to current Critical Theory. Rosa employs the notion of resonant subject-world-relationships to critically analyze structural features of modern societies that systematically undermine stable conditions for such relationships to unfold (Rosa 2019, 2020). As an account of the ‘good life’, resonance can figure as a positive ‘antithesis’ to states of alienation, which has been the leading (but ‘merely negative’) concept of traditional Critical Theory.
Resonance is an emphatically phenomenological concept, describing an experiential quality of the relationship to the world or ‘segments’ of the world. Resonance theory is an attempt to ground a ‘phenomenological critical theory’ (Gros 2019), striking a middle path between criticizing society on the basis of essentialist preconceptions of human nature or the good life, and taking the self-interpretations of subjects in a given society uncritically at face value.
As a main crisis of lifeworlds in modernity, Rosa identifies a ‘resonance catastrophe’, driven by a mode of social organization he terms ‘dynamic stabilization’: both individual and collective actors can keep the status quo only through continuous efforts, dynamic development and, growth. Rosa traces the roots of this mindset to an orientation towards ‘expansion of one’s share of the world’, which he calls ‘the structural program and cultural project of modernity’, suggesting a development in the 18./19. century. But possibly, many relevant developments in this context reach back far more than this and are not exceptionally modern, but only have intensified in modernity.
An interdisciplinary perspective incorporating evolutionary-anthropological and historical insights may provide a deeper understanding of the conditions affecting resonance. Specifically, status competition, influenced by in-group selection pressures and intensified by agricultural and industrial transitions, may have contributed to adverse conditions for experiencing resonance, as part of a gradual cultural evolution rather than a singular catastrophe.

I have studied history and philosophy at Bonn University, and completed my dissertation in philosophy (Ph.D.) there in 2022 with a thesis on phenomenology and philosophical methodology. Parallel to this, I have worked in adult education. Since 2022, I am research assistant at the Philosophical Seminar at Heidelberg University.In my work, I draw on phenomenology, broadly construed, analytic philosophy, and an interdisciplinary dialogue with evolutionary anthropology and psychology. Currently, my main interested lies with applying the resulting integrative approach to the question of happiness and the good life, and exploring practical consequences on an individual and a societal level. 

Joel Hubick

Pre-constituted panel with Patrick Eldridge and Sean Winkler

The Crisis of Creativity from Phenomenological and Post-Phenomenological Standpoints

This panel addresses today’s so-called ‘crisis of creativity’; that is, the noted decline in novel outcomes across aesthetic, political and technological domains. Developing phenomenological and post-phenomenological standpoints, Eldridge, Hubick and Winkler hope to better define, identify root causes and posit plausible remedies to this crisis. Their work supports ongoing research in creativity studies by accounting for the crisis in terms of the lifeworld and the ways technology occludes it, while being rooted in it. They each propose ways to re-orient responses to the creativity crisis around strategies of ‘defamiliarization’: explicit phenomenalization of the world that intersubjective communities take for granted.

Social Media Meets Lifeworld: Applying Phenomenology to the Crisis of Creativity

In this paper, I consider the ‘crisis of creativity’ in our current ‘age of information’ attributed to social media and other technology. Following Winkler’s (2023) account of the crisis of creativity, I explore another possible solution provided by Jan Patočka’s interpretation of Husserl and Heidegger’s phenomenology of crisis. Husserl’s crisis is not one concerned with a failure of science but rather its overt success, claiming that “modern man […] let itself be determined by the positive sciences and be blinded by the ‘prosperity’ they produced, [leading to] an indifferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity” (Crisis 6). In his own way, Heidegger echo’s this concern regarding technology, however it is not technology per se but the essence of “technology [as] a way of revealing” (QCT 318) that is dangerous. The instrumentality and power of ordering everything into a system which is henceforth ‘on demand’ also brings the questions of humanity into its overtly ‘successful’ project of ordering. It is this power to bring order that furthermore, according to Patočka, “brings about even a transformation in our very lifeworld: it is being rebuilt and transformed in its factual state and meaning. […] A process of universal uncovering is set in motion which will pass over nothing: both things and people receive their ‘meaning,’ that is, their place within the process” (Dangers 284). The similarities of this process are eerily reflected in the way social media already has a place for you, your memories, pictures, thoughts and feelings, in total: your meaning. However, all three thinkers suggest that the danger also provides a saving power: for Husserl, it is zu den Sachen selbst, a return to the things themselves in the lifeworld; for Heidegger, it is a retrieval and preservation of the piety of questions (QCT 341); and for Patočka, it is sacrifice which interrupts the ordering instrumentality of technological systematicity.

Dr. Joel Hubick is a phenomenologist teaching at the University of Regina. He recently published his first monograph The Phenomenology of Questioning: Husserl, Heidegger, and Patocka. 

Dawid Kasprowicz

Lived experience in climate science: A phenomenological approach in philosophy of science

The use of Virtual Reality (VR) in science has a long history, especially in engineering and in psychotherapeutic research. What caught less attention in phenomenology and in science studies is, however, how VR has been applied in natural sciences. For instance, in heavily data-driven disciplines like climate science, to “know” the probability of extinction for certain species does not only require to model the data for the year 2070, but also to build VR environments that simulate experiences of what it would be like to embody an endangered species. These “lived environments” of virtual data-models pose epistemological questions like: How to describe a non-human causality? How to deal with the tension of empathy and validity of data in technologically mediated environments?

In my talk, I present an enactive approach that does not depart from a neutralized research object but from the coupling of collectively engaged, embodied and skillful agents (CEESA) within their technically mediated scientific worlds. To do so, I first refer to the extension of Husserl’s concept of experience in the context of scientific practices as it was conceptualized by forerunners such as Francisco Varela and Shaun Gallagher. Second, to underline this approach, I present a case study from a research group that used Virtual Environments to simulate the plausibility of their climate models for the year 2070 and to experience the embodiment of an endangered turtle species. This case study illustrates the tension between technically mediated environments that scientists engage with and the variations of scientific experience. It also shows the potential to apply phenomenology to analyse and describe new methods to understand predictive models in data-driven sciences such as climate science.

Dr. Dawid Kasprowicz is a research assistant at the Institute for Advanced Studies "Cultures of Research" at the RWTH Aachen University. He studied media studies and philosophy at Ruhr University Bochum and at the Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale in Dunkerque, France. His main research areas are phenomenology, philosophy of computer simulation, media theory and human-robot collaborations.  

Tarun Kattumana

Pre-constituted panel with Kathryn Body

Public Health in Crisis: Covid-19 and the Forced Renegotiation of the Lifeworld

During public health crises, interventions are often driven by population-health priorities that neglect the embodied lived experience of specific individuals and groups. Drawing on phenomenologically informed research on various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, in this panel, we explore how embodied experience can inform the formulation of public health measures, influence adherence, and reveal overlooked dimensions of health crises. More specifically, we demonstrate how phenomenologically informed qualitative research can re-centralize embodiment in public health research, advancing applied phenomenology and contributing to more effective policy interventions.

On navigating multiple crises: a phenomenological analysis of public health actors during the COVID-19 pandemic

Public health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic are always encountered amidst other interlinked and simultaneously occurring crises (political crises, economic crises, rising domestic abuse cases, and mental health crises). For these reasons, effective public health interventions should be guided by a holistic and transdisciplinary outlook that works across multiple social sectors. However, operating holistically in a transdisciplinary manner has itself been termed a transboundary crisis that requires public health actors to function with limited resources, in a time sensitive manner, with collaborators who do not share similar assumptions, priorities, or end-goals (Boin, 2019).

Phenomenologically speaking, the lived experience of navigating transboundary crises sees public health actors operating outside the boundaries of their ‘I can’, or the tacit confidence with which familiar activities are performed. Adapting Young (1980), during transboundary crises public health actors are forced to confront the disconnect between aim and enactment characterized by an inhibited intentionality or ‘I cannot’. Furthermore, recontextualizing Carel (2013) for institutional settings, engaging with unfamiliar collaborators and uncertain circumstances compromises the background certainty of working within disciplinary boundaries contributing to a form of ‘bodily doubt’.

This presentation is divided into three parts. The first part follows existing qualitative research on public health actors navigating transboundary crises with a focus on their lived experiences of ‘bodily doubt’ and the ‘I cannot’. Following calls for a critical and engaged phenomenology, the lived experiences discussed in part one are built upon to generate new liberatory possibilities. This is achieved, in part two, by phenomenologically incorporating the Critical Systems Theoretical practice of “boundary critique” - a 12 question interview technique that enables participants/groups to interrogate the boundaries they operate within and potentially redraw them collaboratively (Ulrich and Reynolds 2020). Part three evaluates the methodological novelty of bringing together applied phenomenology and boundary critique for engaging complex social crises. 

Tarun Kattumana is a PhD researcher at KU Leuven and is jointly associated with two research centers: i) Husserl Archives and Center for Phenomenology and Continental Philosophy; and ii) Access-to-Medicines Research Center. His doctoral research examines vaccine hesitancy from a phenomenological and systems theoretical perspective. From 2020-2021, he was a part of the Transvaxx Project, a transdisciplinary initiative that engaged with expert and public perspectives on vaccine hesitancy during the COVID-19 pandemic in Flanders, Belgium. Along with colleagues, he has published on topics related to vaccine hesitancy, trust, the COVID-19 pandemic and the expert-public relationship during crises. 

Alice Koubova

Pragmatic Phenomenology of Contingency and Theories of Resilience

While fixated on the modernist project of progress (the promise of ever 'better' and 'more' in the future), lifeworlds at different scales - individual, institutional, socio-ecological and socio-political - are experiencing loss and polycrisis. In this context, Andreas Reckwitz suggests that a paradigm shift from progress to certain kind of resilience would be a wise step. Resilience research is generally concerned with analysing how systems cope with unprecedented disruptions, shocks and violence. It analyses the factors that support or suppress the system's ability to resist, collapse, adapt, reorganise, transform, recover or thrive under stress. Despite the fact that these topics are highly philosophically relevant, and in contrast to numerous disciplines that study resilience (psychology, sociology, political theory, ecology, governance studies, security studies), there is no robust phenomenological contribution to this area of research. My paper aims to contribute to filling this gap. Drawing on the debate between the neuropsychologist Boris Cyrulnik and the neurophenomenologist Catherine Malabou, I will explore the limits of plasticity in subjectivity, its (im)potentiality-for-being in responding to contingency. When subjectivity crosses a threshold and becomes dead alive, divided and oxymoronic, does this mean that it can no longer reconnect with life and experience life as livable? With reference to Claude Romano, Frédéric Worms and Emmanuel Falque, I will discuss possible interpretations of what recovery and livable life after contingency can mean. I will refer to the multisystemic approach to resilience, emphasising the role of the social environment and kinship, the possibility of “coping ugly”, of undergoing “weird”, non-ideal metamorphoses. I will also discuss the existence of multiple equilibria and the importance of paying attention to pragma - things that matter. This will allow me to formulate some principles of what I call a pragmatic phenomenology of contingency. I will explain what kind of resilience leads to paradigm shift that supports the “good enough” recovery and livability of current lifeworlds in crisis.

Alice Koubova is a deputy director of the Department for Contemporary Continental Philosophy at the Philosophical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, leader of Systems of Resilience team at the Systemic Risk Institute, co-investigator of the HORIZON INSPIRE project focused on art-based methods and applied phenomenology. She is the author and editor of nine monographs and dozens of academic articles (Routledge, Brill, Camden, PUF, Bloomsbury, Filozofia, Applied Psychology, Journal for Disaster Risk Reduction, Public Health and others). She has also vastly published in Czech newspapers, participated in public debates, cooperated with cultural institutions and authored several theatre plays. She has been awarded the President's of the Academy of Sciences Prize, Otto Wichterle Prize, the Libellus Primus Prize and the Josef Hlávka Prize.

Martin Kristiansen

Pre-constituted panel with Enara García and Peter Stilwell

Front-loaded Phenomenology in Clinical Research: New Methodological and Interdisciplinary Perspectives in the Study of Health Crises

Applied phenomenology, in the form of qualitative research, has become a popular way to gain insights into people’s experiences of health crises. However, there is a troubling lack of methodological guidance on the role and purpose of phenomenological concepts and distinctions. This interdisciplinary panel, consisting of three inter-related presentations, will address this gap by providing new methodological reflections and examples from past and ongoing studies of pain, suffering, and mental health. Collectively, this panel will engage with the conference topics Conceptual Foundations, Homeworlds/Alienworlds, and Methodological Challenges. This panel may interest anyone invested in these topics and advancing phenomenological qualitative research.

Estrangement, Oppression and Invasion: The Lifeworld of Socially Anxious Patients

Recent years have seen many psychopathological phenomena being revisited through phenomenological methods. This work is uncovering previously unarticulated accounts of how patients’ subjectivities are altered at the pre-reflective level. In this presentation, I utilize the recently advanced approach of Phenomenologically Grounded Qualitative Research to elucidate the phenomenology of Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD). 

SAD is diagnostically marked by fear of other people’s critical attention. However, through analysis of in-depth first-person accounts generated through phenomenological interviews, I argue that SAD is fundamentally a disorder of belonging. Employing a Sartrean lens on intersubjectivity, I elucidate how, in SAD, a normal mode of experiencing sociality characterized by a fundamental sense of intersubjective co-constitution is altered. A sense of estrangement from others displaces the normal sense of belonging. I will share two empirical examples of this alteration. First, in descriptions of being a perpetual outsider to a seamlessly flowing sociality, desperately attempting not to be revealed as an imposter. Second, in descriptions of private spaces full of openings for the gaze of others and public places empty of anywhere one might dwell without being in the way of other people. Thus, the person’s world is characterized by an estranging, oppressive, and invasive sense of the Other. 

The presentation concludes with a discussion of the implications of this conceptualization of SAD for psychological and pharmaceutical treatment. Current evidence suggests that treatments directed toward alleviating the fearful affect and thoughts inherent in the disorder reduces certain symptoms, but does not increase life quality for patients. I suggest reorienting treatments to instead transform a mode of being with others that is affectively marked by shame and loneliness to one marked by sharing existence with others.

Martin Kristiansen is a researcher and clinical psychologist with a main interest interested in phenomenological psychopathology and qualitative research methodology. He has worked empiricially with the phenomenology of anxiety disorders and is currently engaged in a new project on depression. Clinically, he draws on psychoanalytic theory in addition to his phenomenological background.  

Daniella Krisztán 

"Trembling off the Page": Text, Language, and Embodiment in Pauline Kaldas's Poetry

It is certainly not a newfound idea that the individual’s primary experience is inherently entwined with language, grounding the subject in the lifeworld and enabling their temporal, spatial, and social embeddedness by its meaning constructing quality. As the primary mode of meaning production and reflection on one’s self-concept, language is a precursor of the formation of subjectivity, therefore, the geographical, social, (inevitably) political, and cultural displacement that comes with one’s migration may very well elicit the body-subject’s need to negotiate languages and identities in a new lifeworld. Despite writing in English instead of her native Arabic—or perhaps very much owing to it—mother tongue is a central motif in Pauline Kaldas’s collection of poems, Egyptian Compass (2006) that records her longing for her Egyptian homeworld she left behind as a child to immigrate to the United States with her family. Repeatedly amalgamating Arabic expressions in the English texts, the poems achieve a hybrid textual quality, which aptly alludes to the migrant subjectivity’s bilingual and bicultural experience, thus articulating the acute sense of shifting lifeworlds in the migrant subjectivity’s experience. Building on Kaldas’s poetry collection, this paper sets out to inquire into the migrant body-subject’s access to their roots and heritage through language and the literary texts in particular, as well as into the intertwinement of embodiment, language, and belonging, contending that in Kaldas’s compositions, the recurring crisis of attempting to translate the self between different languages and cultures reveal the apparent fissure between these unidentical selves, which ultimately demonstrates the formative and creative power of the lifeworld(s) over the embodied subject.

Daniella Krisztán is a PhD candidate in the British Literature and Culture sub-program of the Doctoral School of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Debrecen, Hungary. Her main research interests lie in cultural, literary, and gender studies, more particularly exploring questions of subjectivity and embodiment. Her current research investigates the psychosocial relations and cultural belonging in contemporary Egyptian women writers’ anglophone literature. 

Dervla MacManus

Joint presentation with Lisa Foran

Cocoons of Practice: Spielraumen and Homeworlds in Architectural Practice

Michel de Certeau distinguishes between a strategy – a structure implemented by institutional power; and a tactic – the manner in which a user of the system can subvert the strategy.  Drawing parallels with structural linguistics, de Certeau discusses a city as a readable text but that behind this text, this ordering of geometrical space as a series of possibilities and interdictions is another text unreadable but performed woven by the pedestrians who enunciate or actualize these possibilities and create new ones.  This kind of memorialisation in legend exceeds the possibility of the system to totalize it, legend operates in the space of what de Certeau calls a local authority – a Spielraum made up of invisible identities of the visible. These tactics of the individual in their relation with the other or others are infinitely diverse and subvert the strategies of the system which totalize.  In this paper we argue that de Certeau’s account can be brought into productive dialogue with Edmund Husserl’s account of home and alien worlds as described in in the Crisis.

Emanating from a larger research project — Gender Equity in Irish Architecture — we draw on the evidence of 23 qualitative interviews on the lived experience of contemporary architects. We argue that contemporary architectural practice can be taken as a strategy in de Certeau’s sense; a readable text that imposes a way of thinking what architectural practice is or should be. This strategy is governed by what we term the genius model of the architect. This strategy takes the architect as the sole originator of design and takes success as belonging to the individual subject. Bringing de Certeau into dialogue with Husserl, we argue that this strategy of architecture makes what should be a homeworld for any practising architect an alien and/or alienating world for women architects; a world that, despite familiar practises and environments, becomes essentially uninhabitable and unethical for the contemporary architect, and especially so for those from marginalised groups. Using Reflexive Thematic Analysis  (Braun and Clarke, 2019, 2021) we have identified a number of  ‘tactics’  which ‘ordinary’ architects use to generate local authorities or Speilraumen in which architecture is brought back to the everyday and, most importantly, the meditated and collaborative. As one interviewee put it ‘we have made a cocoon for ourselves’. This ‘cocooning’ is a way in which an alienating world can be made homely once again.

Dr Dervla MacManus is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in UCD School of Philosophy. Her current research project is Gender Equity in Irish Architecture which is co-funded by the Irish Research Council and the RIAI and is looking at why women leave architecture, gender differences in the profession, and attitudes towards gender equity in architecture more generally. Dervla is a former architect and in recent years her research interests have focussed on dark heritage, architectural pedagogy, gender and feminism. She is a member of the Open Heart City collective of academics concerned with the built legacy of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland.

Bence Marosan

Lifeworld and Ecological Crisis: Husserl’s Concept of Life as a Basis for Biocentric Ethics

Our global lifeworld faces an ecological crisis marked by the mass extinction of non-human species, rapidly accelerating deforestation, environmental pollution on an industrial scale, and climate change. Most 20th-century and contemporary philosophers who have examined the deeper causes of this crisis agree that it stems from the essence of modern calculating, formalizing, instrumental rationality, a view shared by Edmund Husserl. He diagnosed this crisis – which threatens both the natural environment and humanity’s existence – as attributable to an illness (Erkrankung) of modern rationality. The current presentation proposes a biocentric eco-ethics and eco-politics based on related Husserlian considerations.

While precedents for a Husserlian-based eco-ethics and eco-politics exist in the works of Ian Angus, Erazim Kohák, András Lányi, and Ulrich Melle, unlike these authors, we aim to ground our conception specifically on Husserl’s theory of life and its intrinsic value. In Husserl’s view, one and the same immanent life manifests in every living being (e.g. Husserliana VIII, p. 482; Husserliana XV, pp. 593–610), and each particular form has inherent value that is worthy of respect. Properly conducted axiological reflection, Husserl claimed, can reveal this valuable character of life with apodictic certainty. His lectures on ethics (e.g. Husserliana XLII, pp. 297–332) reveal this and other insights.

To my knowledge, a biocentric eco-ethic and eco-politics that rely upon Husserl’s above-mentioned ideas are unprecedented in eco-phenomenological and eco-ethical discourse. Furthermore, drawing upon certain positive remarks by Husserl on social democracy (Briefwechsel VI, pp. 222–223), we venture the assumption that these considerations point towards a Husserlian-based eco-socialistic stance. The lecture concludes by examining the practical applicability of these ideas, exploring the possibility of a phenomenologically grounded environmental education that fosters empathy for nature and non-human beings.

Bence Peter Marosan (1978, Budapest, Hungary) is an associate professor at the Budapest University of Economics and Business. His main fields of research include phenomenology, hermeneutics, political philosophy, environmental ethics, and the works of Edmund Husserl in particular. Some of his more important publications include Husserl on Minimal Mind and the Origins of Consciousness in the Natural World, Husserl Studies 38 (2022), Radical Emancipation: The Theory of Biocentric Ecosocialism and the Principle of Dynamic Equilibrium, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (2023), and Genesis of the Minimal Mind. Elements of a Phenomenological and Functional Account, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (2024). 

Bernard Micallef

Reworkable ensembles: Walter Benjamin's Montage and Heidegger's Rift-design

Walter Benjamin intimates how flanerie obtains within the spectacle of modern urban architecture, the startling montage of furnishings and commodities that fosters unexpected transitions between different states of awareness. Benjamin’s unfinished collage of textual fragments, The Arcades Project, offers an analogous montage of textual excerpts that similarly resists any overarching principle of cohesion in its open relationship between citations prone to constant reworkings. Dissecting and reassembling our everyday perception of reality through modern mechanical and technological equipment constitutes a third Benjaminian example of the same fundamental methodology: the means to detonate an accustomed world into scattered fragments until our normal perception finds itself situated, not merely in the act of dispersal itself, but more importantly in the heightened possibilities of connection that would thereby come into startling view. It is not Benjamin’s montage experience alone that permits us to navigate the fragmentation of a received world with renewed creativity. Amongst other twentieth-century schools of thought, phenomenology too stands out by virtue of its manner of opening up the relational manifold of worldly phenomena that rests on its own unknowable earth, a fundamental conflict between an intelligible structure of being and its unintelligible matter. Martin Heidegger’s notion of a rift-design illustrates the point. It concerns the dwelling space opened up by the creative (truth-establishing) strife between a formulated context of human care and the opposing obscurity of its own undifferentiated matter. This strife entails the coming apart and together – the rupture and mutual belongingness – between an intelligible historical configuration of being and the unfathomable ground out of and upon which it must necessarily set itself up. Even Heidegger ultimately puts this strife down to a fundamental poiesis, a creative principle inhering in a natural worlding as much as in the artistic endeavour. This study explores how Benjamin's and Heidegger's respective notions, of montage and rift-design, deal with the very structure of lived reality, albeit from very different outlooks on their shared historical world. 

Bernard Micallef is a member of the Department of Maltese at the University of Malta, lecturing in the fields of Maltese literature and literary theory. From his MA thesis on Existentialism in the poetry of Philip Sciberras, he went on to specialize in hermeneutical and reader-response criticism for his doctoral thesis, entitled Between the Text and the Reader: Interpretation in the Reading of Modern Maltese Poetry. Author of literary works himself, Micallef has published several studies on literary technique approached from a hermeneutical and a phenomenological viewpoint. Papers he presented at conferences organised by the The World Phenomenology Institute have been published in the Analecta Husserliana Yearbook of Phenomenology.

Paulina Morales Guzmán

Identities and Plurality: Individuality as the Core of Sharing in Crisis

Jean-Luc Nancy in The Inoperative Community (1984) already showed us that the danger when thinking about community is its very impossibility due to the loss of plurality in it. This loss is caused by its main component: individuality through the subject. Following this diagnosis of current approaches to communal living, I wish to propose that phenomena such as belonging and sharing are only possible to develop under a deconstruction of subjectivity towards a relational existence and bring it to a phenomenological frame by situating it under a perceptive and expressive ontology, following Merleau-Ponty’s development of subjectivity and community in a pre-reflexive level of experience. Exemplifying, on one hand, with nowadays nationalisms worldwide and, on the other, the further isolation of existence with the rising of individual rights, I will show how the experience of sharing can only be experienced outside and prior to political actions. In this sense, I will propose that the current crisis is not on how to acknowledge the other in a political sphere but rather how to bring the experience of belonging and sharing on a thetical level, without the constitution of the subject – and, therefore, of the totalization of the plural. Hence, this presentation will be divided in three parts: firstly, I will present Nancy’s critique of community and its impossibility through the logic of subjectivity; secondly, I will incorporate Merleau-Ponty’s relational ontology (cf. 1945, 1964; Saint-Aubert 2013, 2016, 2020) into Nancy’s diagnosis to uncover a possibility in experiencing sharing and belonging; and finally, I will propose expressivity (cf. Merleau-Ponty) as the space for active engagement in the institution (cf. Merleau-Ponty 2013) of a being-with (cf. Nancy), on the basis of a common passive-active ontology, and analyze its possible paradoxes and dangers in contemporary society, driven by the logic of subjectivity. 

 Paulina Morales Guzmán is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy from Leiden University and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, directed by Dr. Susanna Lindberg and Dr. Andrea Potestà. M.A in Contemporary Thinking from Diego Portales University, and B.A in Philosophy and Aesthetic from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. Author of the articles “Beyond the Human: The Pre-Subjective Existence in Bimbenet’s Reading of Merleau-Ponty’s Anthropology” (2024) published in Meta: Research In Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy, and “La expresión en la Gimnasia Rítmica como apertura: una lectura desde el cuerpo en el pensamiento de Merleau-Ponty y Nancy” (2023) in Implications Philosophiques. 

Justin Aaron Moll

On the Neurophenomenology of Crisis

I argue for a neurophenomenological appropriation of the Waldenfelsian Phenomenology of the Alien (2011) through integrating said framework with existing research in pragmatically grounded neuroscience. While Bitbol (2019) has captured the neurophenomenology of surprise, the connection between phenomenological analyses of crisis and neuroscientific literature remains understudied. Waldenfels captures the phenomenology of crisis through articulating the pathic intrusion of alien or anomalous information into our domains of order: the intentional structure of order and the inhabitable lifeworld it gives rise to entails a delimitation against a domain of unintelligible, anomalous and strange information that can come to unbiddenly emerge, challenge and destruct our taken for granted world interpretations. This entails a logic of response: as also expressed in the phenomenological literature on environmental shocks (McMahon 2018, Jacobson 2006), challenges to a given lifeworld can either be absorbed through adaptation and re-creation, or lead to continual maladaptation. I argue for integrating the Waldenfelsian framework with what Solymosi (2024) has termed neuropragmatism: a set of research in the pragmatist and neuro-psychological literatures conceptualize our access to reality through the application of world-abbreviating interpretations of situations, which can become problematized by our environments. This literature posits firstly that  crisis-inducing novelty entails a switch in neural circuitry and a dual affective reaction: we experience novel information as simultaneously threatening and promising. Secondly, it contends that we cease operating on anxiety-driven circuitry only once a novel and pragmatically viable world-interpretation has been re-established (Hirsh, Mar & Peterson 2012; Johnson, 2017; DeYoung & Krueger 2018;  Schulkin, 2021; Johnson & Schulkin, 2023; Lindholm 2023). I contend that these two moments represent cognition-centred correlates to the dual Waldenfelsian thrust of pathic experience and response-logic, which can be seamlessly integrated with the latter in order to form the foundations of a neurophenomenology of crisis.

Justin Moll is a PhD Student at Royal Holloway, University of London. His work aims at integrating phenomenological, pragmatist and neuroscientific findings with the goal of formulating a novel philosophy of religion based around the experience of calls to action. Prior to commencing his PhD, Justin Moll attained his master’s degree in PPE at the University of Hamburg and a Philosophy B.A. at the University of Bonn.    

Timothy Mooney

The Crises of the Sciences and Skills

In The Crisis, his most prescient of works, Edmund Husserl sketches out the crisis of the modern sciences, with their reduction of beings and of the world to the mathematically determinable and hence the measurable. In the same work and in ‘The Origin of Geometry’ he goes on to foreground the constitutive contribution of the lived and skilled body to the pre-scientific senses of things, without which the natural sciences could never have been born. A more recent feature of our contemporary crisis, however, has been consequent on the denigration of practical trades, those that gear their practitioners into the material rather than digital world. Drawing on recent work on being-engaged, I will argued that a revalorisation of such skilled work would help to ameliorate the climate and pollution crises.

Timothy Mooney is Associate Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin. Together with Dermot Moran he edited The Phenomenology Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). He has published articles on process philosophy, phenomenology and deconstruction, and has more recently become interested in the philosophy and phenomenology of embodiment. Some of his work on the latter can be found in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: On the Body Informed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). 

Alexandra Morrison

Digitization and Lifeworlds: Phenomenological Ethics of Decision Making

This paper employs Merleau-Ponty’s work on institution from his late lecture course Institution and Passivity to highlight the importance of interdisciplinary phenomenological research for the advancement of productive dialogues concerning ethics and technology. While Merleau-Ponty did not explicitly cite technological innovation as site for exploring the institution of sense, the recent exponential growth of AI technologies is arguably ripe for such analysis. Institution in Merleau-Ponty captures the way in which meaning is simultaneously social -historical and individual. Technological “tools” have tacit pre-histories and structuring principles that precede their development; thus, the meaning of new technologies need to be analyzed as events within a history inflected with prior meanings. This type of analysis has importantly been the work of scholars in social science fields like Science and Technology Studies for decades. And yet, while historicality, materiality and political economy, etc., ‘behind’ technologies are crucial for our critical analysis of them, phenomenology is crucial for directing our ethical considerations since phenomenological analysis aims to understand how these larger social and historical events are made real by manifesting in the lived-experience of individuals. With an interdisciplinary European robotics and AI project, functioning as the background case study, this paper aims to demonstrate concrete ways that phenomenology can play a crucial role for describing the implicit normativity of human-techno relationships and addressing the ethical crises around the design, implementation and governance of AI technologies. While many STEM academics and industry players are claiming to have the ‘silver bullet’ for creating ethical AI, phenomenological philosophers and practitioners, whose research is informed by embodied models of meaning making (e.g. cultural anthropologists and geographers), have the relevant epistemological knowledge base to compellingly challenge the epistemic hegemony of the digital automation of decision.

Alexandra Morrison is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan Technological University. Her main research areas include 20th century Continental Philosophy especially Phenomenology, Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Ethics. She is currently working on several interdisciplinary projects in STEM ethics including acting as an independent ethics advisor for the pan-European AI and Robotics research group RoboSapiens.

Clarissa Muller-Kosmarov

Authoring Autism: Can the Autistic Speak?

The construction and reification of objectivity in autism research has resulted in the systemic exclusion of Autistic involvement in the production of such knowledge. The dehumanising, objectifying, and violent accounts of autism perpetuated by such objectivist methodologies are endemic and, until recently, have gone unquestioned due to the validity and "scientific soundness" conferred by their perceived objectivity. The idea of objectivity in autism research sidelines Autistic expertise while enabling dehumanising research to appear detached from the social and cultural values it embodies and reproduces. As such, I suggest the exclusion of Autistics from autism research constitutes a socio-epistemic crisis with devastating effects on Autistic lives.

In this paper, I argue that recognizing Autistic people as experts on autism by attending to phenomenological descriptions of their lived experiences exposes the inaccuracy and violence of dehumanizing autism research while revealing its role in shaping Autistic subjectivity and impact on their material and psychological lives. I begin by briefly outlining autism’s roots in medical and psychiatric research, highlighting the connection between the pathologisation of autism and the enshrinement of positivism and objectivity. Then, I present examples of how autism research discusses autism and Autistic people to demonstrate the research-based violence Autistic people are subject to.

Following this, I discuss how scientific discourse reverberates into Autistic lives. Referencing Autistic lived experiences, empirical research on Autistic mental health outcomes, and the proposed cuts to Personal Independence Payments (PIP), I argue that the dehumanizing discourse pervading autism not only influences socio-economic status and well-being but is a determinate factor in constituting Autistic subjectivity. This, I show, occurs both from the external “objective” perspective, as autism research defines Autistic traits and internal constitution, and internally, as these publicly circulated associations between autism and subjectivity inform the self-perceptions of those it describes.

Clarissa is an AuDHDer and PhD candidate at the University of Warwick (UK). Their doctoral thesis, which presents a critical phenomenology of othering as both the exercising and effects of a particular kind of perceptual and interpretative practice, brings key aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment into conversation with first-person accounts of racialized, gendered, neurominoritized, and ableist otherness and othering. Clarissa is interested in the philosophy of disability – particularly the philosophy of neurodivergence – social epistemology, and the writings of Michel Foucault. 

Richard Murphy

Learning about Intrinsic Dignity from the experience of communities that include people with Down syndrome and learning disability

This research engages with a crisis in worth and meaning. The research draws on Marion’s phenomenology of saturated phenomenon. Using observation, semi-structured interviews and third-party accounts, I explore how research participants experience their own worth and other people’s worth. The participants include people with and without learning disabilities. I draw on my own experience as a father of two children with Down syndrome.

Intrinsic dignity creates a paradox for social work practice. Intrinsic implies it is found within the person and not dependent on the evaluation of characteristics. However, current theory associates dignity with thriving, bodily integrity and social justice. Intrinsic dignity is appealed to in claiming rights for these. This research addresses a gap created by this. Namely, how intrinsic dignity can be witnessed in situations in which these lack. It then goes further to consider how it is witnessed in moments of joy and everyday life.

The findings elucidate how intrinsic dignity is misunderstood if it is approached as an object that needs to be defined. Such an approach leads to the comparison of a person’s life against a standard of a good life.  Intrinsic dignity is rather, something endured by the one who witnesses it. Examples are given of how intrinsic dignity is witnessed when someone humbly approaches another’s vulnerableness and responds in responsibility. That vulnerableness can be manifest in joy or suffering. To do this the witness must embrace their own vulnerableness and open themselves to the other person. Examples include, a person with learning difficulties following their boyfriend’s dying wishes and someone dancing with a shy member with learning difficulties. These experiences stay with the person and others that see or hear about them. They call to respond in responsibility to others and bring a hope that is independent of the need to control.   

Richard is a qualified social worker. He has worked in child protection and mental health. He now lectures on several social work programmes at the University of Winchester. He is currently undertaking his own PHD research in the area of intrinsic dignity and communities of people who have members with Down syndrome. This is inspired by his work and the lives of two of his four children who have Down syndrome. He has contributed to a book on social work law and coauthored a book on mental health law for nurses.     

Michaila Peters

Grieving the Collapse of the American Rural Lifeworld: bell hooks’ theory of Elegiac Imagination

Four years before J.D. Vance published Hillbilly Elegy, constraining the U.S. social imaginary of rural experience to stereotypes like “redneck” and “white trash,” bell hooks published her own Appalachian Elegy. These two elegies represent not only two contrasting narratives about rural poverty, but about how process the traumatic collapse of rural lifeworlds. Vance attributes rural resentment to individual failures to live up to the American dream out of laziness, reducing rural experience to derogatory stereotypes. bell hooks, on the other hand, in a genuinely elegiac “wistful mourning.” allows herself to grieve the environmental, economic and social destruction of rural lifeworlds. In a theory I call elegiac imagination, hooks take grief to be a hermeneutic process whereby we transform inarticulable traumas into a meaningful acknowledgement of what has been lost so that it can be reintegrated into an imagination of the future. Building on Daggett’s work on “petro-masculinity,” the affective economy of rural misogyny, following Manne, deems the vulnerability required by grieving debilitatingly shameful. According to the critical phenomenologies of Whitney, Gallegos, and others, this is both a product and a source of affective injustice. That is, following Ahmed and Steinbock’s phenomenological accounts of debilitating shame, folks in misogynistic affective economies are so existentially threatened by the shame of vulnerability that their need to grieve induces self-hatred. This self-hatred often erupts, following Lugones and Daggett, as dominating rage, and an authoritarian personality, as reflected in the extremist MAGA ideology of rural folks. Thus, folks like Vance, in responding to rural trauma with rage and fascism, are engaged in emotional self-deception, avoiding grief, and exacerbating the affective injustices of rural decline. In this paper, I develop hooks’ account of elegiac imagination, arguing that subaltern rural folks not fully controlled by misogynistic affective norms are in the best position to carry out elegiac imagination.

Michaila Peters (she/her) is a PhD Candidate and Teaching Fellow in Philosophy at Boston College. She has been named the Pensionnaire étranger for 2025-2026 at the École normale supérieure in Paris, France where she will complete her dissertation. She is currently an instructor at the Tufts Experimental College. Peters is also a Doctoral Research Fellow at the Emotion and Society Lab at UC Riverside, and a research fellow at the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy. She is the founder and director of the Public Philosophy Initiative (PPI) at Boston College. She is also the director of the Corrupt the Youth Boston Chapter.  

Georgios Petropoulos

Joint presentation with Christina Petropoulou

Toward a Phenomenological Account of Self-medication and Substance Misuse.

This talk will focus on substance misuse and addiction, attempting to shed new light to the self-medication hypothesis with the help of phenomenology. We argue that re-examining this already influential theory and adding a phenomenological viewpoint to it, can set the conceptual foundations for interdisciplinary research and treatment.

Edward Khantzian’s self-medication theory suggests that “substances of abuse are and become compelling because in susceptible individuals they help to cope with unbearable painful feelings and/or to adapt to external realities that are otherwise unmanageable” (Khantzian, 2018). From this perspective, substance misuse can be seen as an attempt at resilience, albeit a short-lived one, offering temporary relief from mental pain and negative affective states. 

To expand on Khantzian's self-medication hypothesis, we employ a phenomenological approach to affectivity and temporality. We propose that affective states are not merely internal states but dispositions that shape our interactions with the world and others. This phenomenological understanding underscores the relational nature of affective phenomena. While certain affective states attune us to the world in a way that makes our everyday practical comportment easy, other affective states reveal the world as an alien place. This idea has been explored by phenomenologists to describe situations where one’s affective relation to the world is characterized by a sense of not-being-in-the-world. Negative affective states can thus be viewed as disruptions in the self-world relationship, leading to the suffering and pain associated with these states and motivating individuals to seek relief through substance use. In the final part of the talk, we explore the relation between affectivity and temporality. We suggest that a disrupted affective and temporal relation to the world can, on some occasions, be considered as a motivating factor for substance misuse. 

Georgios Petropoulos is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Galway and the Insight Research Ireland Centre for Data Analytics, involved in the “Critical Thinking in Communities of Inquiry” research project. His research interests include phenomenology (classical, applied, and critical), philosophy of education (with an emphasis on interactive and dialogic pedagogies), philosophy of childhood, and ancient philosophy. His work has been published in journals such as the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Critical Horizons, Childhood & Philosophy, and Angelaki. 

Christina Petropoulou 

Joint presentation with Georgios Petropoulos

Toward a Phenomenological Account of Self-medication and Substance Misuse.

This talk will focus on substance misuse and addiction, attempting to shed new light to the self-medication hypothesis with the help of phenomenology. We argue that re-examining this already influential theory and adding a phenomenological viewpoint to it, can set the conceptual foundations for interdisciplinary research and treatment.

Edward Khantzian’s self-medication theory suggests that “substances of abuse are and become compelling because in susceptible individuals they help to cope with unbearable painful feelings and/or to adapt to external realities that are otherwise unmanageable” (Khantzian, 2018). From this perspective, substance misuse can be seen as an attempt at resilience, albeit a short-lived one, offering temporary relief from mental pain and negative affective states. 

To expand on Khantzian's self-medication hypothesis, we employ a phenomenological approach to affectivity and temporality. We propose that affective states are not merely internal states but dispositions that shape our interactions with the world and others. This phenomenological understanding underscores the relational nature of affective phenomena. While certain affective states attune us to the world in a way that makes our everyday practical comportment easy, other affective states reveal the world as an alien place. This idea has been explored by phenomenologists to describe situations where one’s affective relation to the world is characterized by a sense of not-being-in-the-world. Negative affective states can thus be viewed as disruptions in the self-world relationship, leading to the suffering and pain associated with these states and motivating individuals to seek relief through substance use. In the final part of the talk, we explore the relation between affectivity and temporality. We suggest that a disrupted affective and temporal relation to the world can, on some occasions, be considered as a motivating factor for substance misuse. 

I am a psychologist who has completed a BA in Psychology at Deree - The American College of Greece and a Master’s in Clinical Psychology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. My interest focuses on addiction, and my goal is to guide my practice as a psychologist through research. I have completed a Professional Certificate in Women and Substance Use at UCD, focusing on the policies and societal circumstances that act as barriers to women accessing support. Furthermore, I have been trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and am currently working to support individuals facing homelessness and complex mental health issues.

Thomas Pryce

Ontological pluralism and phenomenological realism in trans-inclusive worlds of sense: Responding with care to lifeworlds in crisis

This talk will: (1) Build on Mariana Ortega’s argument that phenomenology historically failed to account for lives on the “borders” of (life)worlds; (2) Argue that a modified, Heideggerian-hermeneutic phenomenology can support the pluralism and realism found in “multiple world” accounts of truth and language, including in Talia Mae Bettcher’s trans philosophy, and Ortega and María Lugones’ Latina feminist phenomenologies.

I will expand Ortega’s modification of Heidegger’s existential analytic, agreeing that Dasein must be multiplicitous to account for lives lived across dominant and resistant worlds. I will connect Ortega’s account to Bettcher’s “multiple meaning realism”, which also builds on Lugones description of multiplicitous worldhood, theorising how trans worlds have trans-inclusive “rules” and “meanings”, while being intertwined with dominant worlds that do not. I will argue that the hermeneutic looping of truth, language and world in Heidegger’s account of understanding helps theorise multiplicitous world-building, exploring Ortega’s and Ephraim Das Janssen’s accounts of how das Man strengthens gender norms, and challenging Heidegger’s idea that dominant worlds are “tranquilising” until broken.

I will next argue that Heidegger’s post-Kehre account of truth and language can strengthen the realism and pluralism in Bettcher’s account, moving from “multiple meaning” to “multiple world” realism. This maintains that trans women are women, because language and truths in trans-inclusive worlds build on the unconcealment of their Being as women. “Truths” built on trans-exclusionary unconcealments, by contrast, narrow the truths that Dasein can uncover about themselves and others. Avoiding this “supreme danger” (Heidegger, QCT) challenges trans exclusion, while avoiding pluralism’s risk of relativism.

Heideggerian, ontological pluralism helps theorise the formation of multiple worlds and truths, but often leads to fatalism. Building from resistant worlds, Lugones offers coalitional tools for seeing the contingency of worlds and “truths”. These reflect Dasein’s Mitsein and multiplicity, while helping to realise a Left Heideggerian, post-foundationalist pluralism.

Thomas Pryce is a Post-Graduate Researcher at the University of Brighton, a member of the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics. His AHRC-funded research asks how trans philosophy challenges and helps think the unthought in critical and transcendental phenomenology. He considers ontologically pluralistic, post-foundationalist appropriations of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology, seeking interventions in the insight that political positions can be “true”, and built on contestable foundations. This project centres on accounts of lives lived across worlds, on borders and in positions of oppression <--> resistance. Before Brighton, his MPhil at the University of Cambridge responded to Derrida’s critique of Heidegger’s “transcendental signified”. 

Lior Rosenfeld

De-Automation as Public Discourse

An autonomous being possesses an identity; it always returns to itself, since it functions independently of its experiences. As a result, it remains unaffected by contingency, allowing it to justify its beliefs and actions through concepts. Additionally, autonomy inherently implies agency, as a self-ruling entity is not bound by causal laws and is, therefore, capable of initiating its own actions independently. The phenomenological description of the life-world—the historical, shared space within which we are situated—challenges autonomy, which naturalizes the world by reducing it to mere sense data for private cognitive processes. Moments of crisis, when the world loses significance, uncover autonomy as an impossibility, and intersubjective experiences as fundamental to understanding selfhood and agency. Hannah Arendt emphasizes in her work the tension in modernity between claims of autonomy and the political life-world. This conflict has become increasingly significant in today's context, particularly in light of the emergence and growing influence of Artificial Intelligence. Many tech companies claim to be making significant advancements in the development of artificial general intelligence, commonly referred to as AGI. This technology is envisioned as an autonomous system capable of independent thought and decision-making. Furthermore, these companies often promote this technological progress as a potential substitute for human labor. Drawing on Arendt's phenomenology of plurality, I argue that the quest for AGI signifies a displacement of public spaces, resulting in political exclusion, which democratic practices can challenge. I will begin by critically examining the responses of several Marxist philosophers to the claims made by AI companies concerning their anticipated development of autonomous systems. These philosophers acknowledge the irreducibility of intersubjective experiences within the life-world, suggesting that complete autonomy is unattainable. Nonetheless, autonomy remains central to their understanding of agency and political freedom; as a result, they do not acknowledge the inherent paradox involved in the exercise of autonomy. As I will demonstrate, the design and deployment of AI systems within the techno-scientific industry, which reflect autonomy, undermine the sovereignty of the modern state, effectively transforming it into a structure governed by familial ties. This transformation leads to political exclusion and oppression. The claim to autonomy, rooted in a private or familial realm of meaning, ultimately serves to justify the use of force. In the second part of my paper, I will examine how Arendt’s phenomenology of plurality can address the potential political nihilism inherent in an AI regime. Arendt illustrates that public performance signifies the impossibility of private ownership, the meaning of the law—autonomy, and creates a space for both resistance and the affirmation of individual agency. In conclusion, I will address the concern that AI systems could further commodify free speech, a practice legitimized by the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Arendt’s phenomenology of plurality demonstrates that without public spaces in which men address one another, there are no speakers or political freedom. Rather than trying to align the design and deployment of artificial intelligence systems with human rights, the emergence of these technologies highlights the critical need to institutionalize public spaces and adopt an agonistic rather than antagonistic rhetoric —one that effectively contextualizes historical narratives through the ongoing struggle to articulate unique viewpoints.

Lior Rosenfeld obtained an M.A. in Philosophy from the New School in 2020. Currently, Lior is a fourth-year Ph.D. Candidate at Michigan Technological University. In his research, Lior investigates how the phenomenological description of the life-world alleviates the tension between democracy and science, or politics and philosophy, as illustrated by contemporary examples such as climate change denial and vaccine skepticism.

Philip Ryan

Temporarily Able: Inclusive Design through a Phenomenological Model of Disability

The paper explores inclusive design through a phenomenological model of disability. It focuses on administrative processes, and using the literature on phenomenology and disability outlines its affective, intracorporeal, sensory, and spatiotemporal dimensions. A response to universal design which aims for 99% accessibility, inclusive design focuses on interventions for the most marginalised. It is presented as a practical response to varying levels of ability, benefiting everyone by addressing edge cases. A method is outlined use phenomenology to constructs an understanding of institutional processes role in the real world, allowing for reassessment in a manner that integrates the goals of disability interventions with real life practices. 

It is argued a phenomenological approach, by illustrating in the world realities of disability, can be part of processes that enhance the agency of marginalised users and insights such as intentionality and intersectionality can diminish the adverse effects of power imbalances inherent to institutional experiences. Understanding the being in the world of disability can help user rights to be integrated into existing and emerging institutional structures. Temporality in the life cycle of individual and societal ability and the importance of care and maintenance are considered. Particularly, the roles of different groups and the government’s engagement with disability, as well as the importance of legacy of interventions. 

Insights from critical disability studies highlight the successful and unsuccessful aspects of previous disability interventions. The principle of “nothing for us without us” and the ethics and effectiveness of applying such models are examined. Particularly effective intervention examples, known as curb cut effects, named after the curb cuts for wheelchair users, which also benefit pram users and older adults, are discussed. 

Phil is a PhD in Inclusive Design & Creative Technology Innovation candidate based in SMARTlab, University College Dublin. He researches creative technology innovation, inclusive design, sociology, bureaucracy, user experience, trust, privacy, and migration. He holds a BA in Communications Studies from Dublin City University, Adv Dip in Immigration and Asylum Law from King’s Inns Dublin, and an MSc in Comparative Social Change awarded jointly by UCD and Trinity College Dublin. Professionally Phil directs a consultancy business providing information and assistance in Irish immigration matters.   

Maria Savarese

The Phenomenology of Crisis: Rethinking Cultural Participation and the 'Lifeworld' of People with Disabilities

Article 30 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2007) underscores the need to eliminate barriers to full social and cultural participation for people with disabilities. Museums and cultural institutions have responded to this call by striving to enhance accessibility. However, these efforts often face criticism for reducing disability to a simplistic notion, failing to foster genuine cultural inclusion (Barnes, 2003; Sandell & Dodd, 2020). Central to this challenge is the reductionist approach that dominates both academic and policy discussions on accessibility, which treats it primarily as a matter of accommodations within existing systems. Recently, the debate on accessibility has seen a phenomenological shift, advocating for a deeper understanding of disability not as a deficit but as a mode of being that reshapes how we engage with the world. This shift challenges the traditional view of accessibility and highlights the importance of lived experience. This leads to our first research questions: How can we move beyond the notion of accessibility as mere accommodation, to a more inclusive reimagining of cultural participation that acknowledges disability as an active form of agency? In what ways can a phenomenological perspective, centred on lived experience, offer new insights into cultural participation and challenge prevailing understandings of disability? How can cultural institutions better account for the relational nature of identity in the context of disability, to foster more meaningful inclusion? This article proposes a research framework structured in three key sections: In the first section, we will review the state of the art regarding cultural accessibility, exploring critiques of reductive definitions and examining how cultural institutions have responded to calls for inclusion. In the second section, we will construct a theoretical framework based on phenomenology, particularly the work of Merleau-Ponty, to reframe accessibility as an active form of agency, grounded in the lived experiences of people with disabilities. Finally, in the third section we develop a case study of the "Tactum" project presented at the Uffizi Galleries in 2018, illustrating how the embodied experience of disability, when acknowledged and celebrated, can transform cultural heritage into a site of contestation, creating new forms of meaning-making and social coexistence. By focusing on the lived experiences of people with disabilities, we argue that their world—often excluded or distorted—can offer a new basis for rethinking accessibility as an active form of agency. A phenomenological approach allows us to view disability not as a deficit but as a mode of being that reshapes how we relate to and engage with the world. This perspective urges us to rethink the "lifeworld" through a relational lens, emphasising that identity is not simply individual but deeply interwoven with social contexts, histories, and power dynamics. In conclusion, the crisis in cultural accessibility can only be addressed by critically rethinking the structures that govern cultural institutions, engaging with disability not as an anomaly to be accommodated but as a lens for re-envisioning the lifeworld itself. This rethinking opens up possibilities for deeper, more meaningful cultural inclusion, rooted in a fundamental transformation of societal values and practices.

Maria Savarese is PhD student in "Law and organizational studies for the Promotion of Diversity and Inclusion" at Scuola Superiore Meridionale and Teaching Assistant in Political Philosophy at LUISS Guido Carli. She is also Managing editor for the Journal "Philosophy and public issues". She has participated in several international conference and has published on many international journal. Is member of the "Italian society of Critical theory" of "Punto org international research network". Her research interest are focused on the concept of accessibility, and the phenomenological comprehension of the concept of disability. 

Louise Shale

Peace as a Phenomenological Problem in Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger

Our 21st century lifeworld is in crisis in so many profoundly troubling ways. Yet, however we experience this as individuals – whether it be as (mostly) spectators of violence and conflict, as denizens of a growing anxiety and fear, or as victims of the effects of climate change, social injustice, or political oppression – the resolution of these crises, the bringing to an end of these growing threats in our lifeworld, can almost universally be described as one form or another of peace.

Several important thinkers in the field of phenomenology have addressed peace directly, and this paper examines two of the most prominent: Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger.

Both Scheler and Heidegger interpret Husserl’s famous dictum ‘to the things themselves’ in starkly different ways. For Scheler, the object of phenomenology is ethics and value-philosophy, whereas for Heidegger it is being and ontology. When addressing peace as a phenomenological problem, therefore, both thinkers follow their own phenomenological preconceptions.

For Scheler, following Kant, peace is a positive value which can overcome the militarism of interwar Germany (Die Idee des ewigen Friedens und der Pazifismus GW XIII). For Heidegger, the early stages of the cold war show peace to be contradictory and ultimately meaningless (Was Heist Denken? GA 8); only a new ontological conception of peace as a positive human relationship to the world, and the things in the world, can restore meaning to peace and ultimately overcome the nihilism of the 20th century (Bauen Wohnen Denken GA 7).

This paper offers an exploration of these two contrasting notions of peace, concluding with some thoughts on the relevance of these conceptions of peace to the present day.

Louise Shale Robinson is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Erfurt, Germany, working under Prof. Dr. Dr. Holger Zaborowski. Her thesis title is “The Question of Peace and the Task of Thinking”, and with her thesis she aims to trace the development of Heidegger’s ontological engagement with peace, and show the importance of this engagement to the contemporary world. She has previously received an MA degree in Peace Studies from the University of Bradford, UK, and with her work more broadly she aims to increase dialogue between philosophers and peace researchers. 

Domonkos Sik

From violence to illness and mental disorders – towards a critical-medical phenomenology

According to Husserl, pain is a transformative experience: whereas in the natural attitude the body is a pre-given constituent of the self (Leib), in pain the body is transformed into an object (Körper). According to Merleau-Ponty, pain transforms the way the world is inhabited: what was once full of potential is now full of obstacles. Violence, understood as pain caused by the other, can be described on this basis: according to Scarry, violence does not simply transform the world into an uninhabitable horizon, but rather subordinates it to an alien lifeworld. The pain component of violence demolishes the lifeworld, while the hurting other engraves a new horizon, based on their – expressed or assumed – intentions. While pain related to bodily dysfunctions is meaningless in itself, pain from violence implies a sense of subordination to an omnipotent other (who controls the world by controlling pain), and an existential decision between subordination or resistance.

The presentation analyses the phenomenological consequences of subordination to violence. It is argued that the incorporation of the enforced alien horizon normalizes a lifeworld in crisis. Being exposed to violence for a longer time might imply that such normalized paradox manifests as illness or psychopathology. According to Toombs and Carel, the experience of illness revolves around an extended sense of loss (affecting bodily integrity, security, control, freedom, and familiarity). According to Fuchs and Ratcliff, the experience of psychopathology revolves around distorted existential structures (affecting agency, intersubjectivity, temporality). While these experiences may arise from organic dysfunctions, they may also emerge as consequences of violence. Persistent violence transforms Leib into Körper, reconfigures the world as a horizon of obstacles and engraves an alien lifeworld – that is the phenomenological equivalent of the extended sense of loss following illness or the distortion of existential structures characterizing psychopathology. Accordingly, in a phenomenological sense, violence can cause illness and psychopathology. By causing pain and normalizing its inevitability, violence makes intertwining ruptured and damaged, i.e. a potential cause of illness and psychopathology.

Domonkos Sik is associate professor of Sociology at the Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest), alumni of CEU-IAS (Budapest-Vienna). His research deals with various topics in phenomenology and critical theory including political culture and mental disorders in late modernity. His work has appeared in such venues as The Sociological Review, Theory, Culture & Society, European Journal of Social Theory, Thesis eleven, Continental Philosophy Review, Philosophy and Social Criticism and Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry. He has written several monographs including Radicalism and indifference (Peter Lang 2016) and Empty suffering (Routledge 2021). 

Tanja Staehler

Mathematising the Lifeworld: examples from Pregnancy and Childbirth

My presentation will begin by setting out briefly the connection between mathematisation of nature and crisis of the lifeworld in Edmund Husserl's terms. Emphasis will be placed on the ways in which the preference for objective, unequivocal knowledge has been established since the beginning of philosophy and the sciences. I will also indicate how, to my mind, Husserl's diagnosis  of the link between a quantitative approach and a forgetfulness of lifeworld and of subjectivity still pertains to our current historical world. 

In the second half of the paper, I turn to examples from experiences of pregnancy and childbirth in which mathematisation can lead to problems. These examples include measuring hormones, measuring the size of the fetus, the weight of the mother, etc. Without denying the need for such examinations in principle, I ask -- with the help of interview excerpts -- what effects the approach has on subjective experiences of the pregnant person. Such effects are exacerbated in situations where a lack of funding prevents the possibility of in-depth discussion with practitioners. A phenomenological approach to the matter would require for the practitioners to be trained in terms of the objective as well as the subjective dimensions of the issues at stake. Additional problems arise in the case of at risk pregnancies as well difficult life histories. In the final part, possibilities to address such issues by way of videos, brochures or questionnaires will be explored from a phenomenological perspective. 

Tanja Staehler is Professor of European Philosophy at the University of Sussex. Her main research areas are Plato, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas as well as aesthetics, phenomenology, philosophy of pregnancy and childbirth. 

Peter Stilwell

Pre-constituted panel with Enara García and Martin Kristiansen

Front-loaded Phenomenology in Clinical Research: New Methodological and Interdisciplinary Perspectives in the Study of Health Crises

Applied phenomenology, in the form of qualitative research, has become a popular way to gain insights into people’s experiences of health crises. However, there is a troubling lack of methodological guidance on the role and purpose of phenomenological concepts and distinctions. This interdisciplinary panel, consisting of three inter-related presentations, will address this gap by providing new methodological reflections and examples from past and ongoing studies of pain, suffering, and mental health. Collectively, this panel will engage with the conference topics Conceptual Foundations, Homeworlds/Alienworlds, and Methodological Challenges. This panel may interest anyone invested in these topics and advancing phenomenological qualitative research.

An introduction to Front-loaded Phenomenology in Qualitative Health Research

This talk will introduce “front-loaded phenomenology” in qualitative research, an approach where researchers incorporate phenomenological concepts and conceptual distinctions at the start of a study. Shaun Gallagher initially proposed front-loaded phenomenology to guide experimental research in the cognitive sciences. Since then, it has been widely applied. Recently, authors have argued that this theoretically-driven approach may also be valuable in phenomenological qualitative research. Indeed, many researchers already use this approach. However, there is a clear gap in the literature: there is limited available methodological guidance, resulting in suboptimal application. Guidance is desperately needed to help qualitative researchers design and implement coherent, high-quality studies that align with the purpose of front-loading and reach its full potential as a distinct approach within the many available approaches to applied phenomenology. Drawing from ongoing interdisciplinary collaborations, this talk will address this gap by consolidating and expanding upon available guidance. To exemplify front-loading, the talk will highlight qualitative pain research on the disruption and reconstruction of different aspects of one’s sense of self. This will include an overview of past work characterizing how aspects of the minimal-self and narrative-self can be disrupted, as well as ongoing work illuminating how these disrupted aspects of self may be restored or reconstructed through clinical interventions and self-management strategies. The talk will conclude with outstanding methodological questions and areas for future research.

Peter Stilwell is a Canadian pain researcher who currently holds a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Southern Denmark where he is affiliated with the research unit Movement, Culture and Society (MoCS). He is also an Affiliate Member at McGill University in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. Previously, he held a Fellowship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research at McGill University, and was the Ronald Melzack Fellow in Chronic Pain Research at the Alan Edwards Centre for Research on Pain at McGill. He has over 30 publications and completed over 80 invited talks. 

William Tullius

Empathy vs. Alienation: On the Phenomenological Constitution and Erasure of Borders with Edith Stein

Phenomenologically, geographical/political borders are given in an intersubjectively open space—as prohibitive or formal limits within a space that is given as otherwise open. Sometimes borders are natural, as when a river or a mountain range demarcate a space of belonging and a space ‘beyond’ where I am not ‘at home’, where I become a ‘foreigner’, an ‘alien’. Sometimes borders exist purely by convention or force. Whether natural or artificial, de facto or de jure, the constitution of a border always reflects an alteration of the ‘contours’ of the life-world, an alteration that relies upon empathic acts that presuppose and even intend an ‘other’; borders presuppose a shared consciousness between the I and the other of being reciprocal ‘aliens’ with respect to one another. Borders thus represent a phenomenological enigma as well as a locus of ethical and human crisis—they can only be constituted in empathy, yet are simultaneously alienating as well. Yet, while it is only in empathy that borders can be constituted, phenomenologically it is simultaneously empathy that provides the conditions for the erasure of the conditions of alienation that is established every time a border is thrown up. Following Edith Stein, phenomenological investigation of empathy and of the essentialities that are its condition, tying humanity together across all borders (geographical/political as well as cultural and even historical), not only can resolve the phenomenological enigma posed by the phenomenon of the ‘border’, but also lays down ethical lines through which humanity is called to complete human solidarity in the border’s spiritual erasure that is the condition for the givenness of the life-world as a shared world ‘for all’.

William E. Tullius holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research and is currently an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at American Public University System. He has previously occupied visiting positions at the American University in Cairo, Gonzaga University, and the University of Dallas. His main areas of research revolve around the development of a phenomenological and personalist ethical theory through the study of Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, and Edith Stein. He is the author of On the Ethical Philosophy of Edith Stein: Outlines of Morality (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2024). 

Rani Unnamalai

Being free as a life-world phenomenon: a study of institutionalised female adolescents

Adolescents are brought to Child Care Institutions (CCI) as Children in Need of Care and Protection (CNCP) in India under the predicament of vulnerable situations in their lives. The present study utilises the Hermeneutic Phenomenological approach to explore adolescents' understanding of autonomy over themselves within the discourse of institutionalisation and the right to protection. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with four female adolescent participants from a Child Care Institution. The main aim of this study is to describe their lifeworld phenomenon of being free and to explicate the dynamic structure of this lifeworld phenomenon as their natural experience (taken for granted). Their reflections on manifestations of freedom in their everyday experiences are meaningful within the loss of this individual agency resulting from their lived experiences as adolescents and their perceptions of adulthood. The findings of this study provide a comprehensive understanding of the temporality in the adolescent's lived experiences and emphasise the intersubjectivity in the adolescent's interpersonal relationships with adults.

She is a Junior Research Fellow in Behavioural Sciences at National Forensic Sciences University India (Gandhinagar campus). She holds a Master’s Degree in English Studies, IIT Madras (Department of Humanities and Social Sciences). She has cleared UGC NET in English and UGC NET/JRF in Social Work. Her Phd Thesis explores the adolescents' understanding of abstract concepts such as justice especially within child care institutions. She is the author of the book "Echoes of Patriotism: Nationalist writings of India's Freedom Struggle" published by National Book Trust, New Delhi. 

Celeste Vecino

Feminist phenomenologies and the reproductive nature of norms

This presentation aims at reviewing and revising the current feminist phenomenological landscape. Our main goal is to contribute to the ongoing discussion in critical phenomenology by drawing attention to an important yet neglected aspect in the literature: the relationship between perceptual and ideological norms. 

The research is divided into two sections. The first one examines the current literature in critical and feminist phenomenology, and the ongoing debate between classical and critical phenomenology. Feminist phenomenology has been largely characterized by the attempt to trace intersubjective structures to the passive levels of experiences (Young 1980, Heinämaa 2003, Al-Saji). A critical phenomenology adds a new perspective to the analysis of gender by focusing on the question of power and the genesis of the normative structures themselves. It also draws attention to the situated character of the reduction, thus putting into question the validity of phenomenological inquiry. We argue that, despite raising some valid questions, a critical approach does not undermine the results of a more ‘classical’ transcendental phenomenology, whose main tenets keep us in check regarding the risk of relativism. 

The second section examines the relationship between norms of perception and political norms, providing a phenomenological approach to normative reproduction. Following Husserl’s ethical developments, we call norms that damage or hinder our ability to self-determine ideological, and claim the need to contest them. We conclude with some remarks on how to break the reproductive cycle.

María Celeste Vecino is Professor in Philosophy from Buenos Aires University in Argentina, and has a PhD from Leiden University in the Netherlans and Diego Portales University in Chile. Currently works as an assistant profesor at the Institute of Philosophy of Diego Portales University in Santiago de Chile, where she is developing a post-doctoral research on phenomenology of nature in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Her research topics include: phenomenology of limits, phenomenology of institution, and feminist and queer thought. 

Sean Winkler

Pre-constituted panel with Patrick Eldridge and Joel Hubick

The Crisis of Creativity from Phenomenological and Post-Phenomenological Standpoints

This panel addresses today’s so-called ‘crisis of creativity’; that is, the noted decline in novel outcomes across aesthetic, political and technological domains. Developing phenomenological and post-phenomenological standpoints, Eldridge, Hubick and Winkler hope to better define, identify root causes and posit plausible remedies to this crisis. Their work supports ongoing research in creativity studies by accounting for the crisis in terms of the lifeworld and the ways technology occludes it, while being rooted in it. They each propose ways to re-orient responses to the creativity crisis around strategies of ‘defamiliarization’: explicit phenomenalization of the world that intersubjective communities take for granted.

Beginning at the End of the World

In this paper, I will address today’s ‘crisis of creativity’ in light of 20th-century French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze’s remarks on the aesthetic of ‘apocalypticism’. The crisis of creativity refers to the widespread decline of novelty across numerous domains, particularly seen in the last half-century. The validity of this crisis is attested to quantitatively by the world’s foremost creativity metric, the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, as well as qualitatively of present-day styles, political ideologies, technological developments, etc. increasingly manifesting as nostalgic pastiche. For many, this crisis is attributable to the loss of a future-oriented horizon, but for Deleuze, it is not so much the lack of a belief in the future, but the belief that creativity must be directed by the telos of an ideal future. In one of his final articles, “Nietzsche and Saint Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos”, Deleuze provides an uncharacteristic reading of scripture, specifically the Book of Revelation, by distilling what he calls the aesthetic of ‘apocalypticism’; or the belief in a final judgment and absolute renewal. He maintains that rather than create a utopian horizon, apocalypticism produces paralysis by positing an unobtainable ideal through the process of some unfathomable reckoning. While such an orientation originates in the Book of Revelation, in the modern era, it has come to be a characteristic feature of the contemporary aesthetic in art, cinema, literature and music. As a counterpoint, he offers an alternative sense of the creative act as de-familiarization to re-invigorate our sense of possibility. In section 1, I provide a description of the contemporary crisis of creativity, followed by Section 2, in which I explain Deleuze’s reading of this crisis in accordance with the aesthetic of apocalypticism. And finally, Section 3 will provide an analysis of Deleuze’s alternative sense of creativity as de-familiarization.

Sean Winkler is a literature and philosophy teacher at La Salle College Preparatory. He received his PhD in philosophy from KU Leuven and has held postdoctoral research fellowships at the Higher School of Economics and the Vienna Circle Institute. He currently researches the theme of creativity in the information age, in which he addresses the question of how digital media have affected creative expression. He is the author of Boris Hessen and Philosophy, of articles that have appeared in journals such as Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Science in Context, and Telos, and of published short stories. 

L. N. Wyman

Anomie and the Brute: Crisis, Media Representation, and Intersubjective Personhood

Shared beliefs amongst persons determine how we associate human value and perceive personhood. With media integrated into how we associate meaning, media portrayals of persons are able to replace authentic personhood with social perceptions that impact the treatment of individuals. The agency of persons subjected to this social recognition alters their being-toward-death—especially during crisis states and social system dysfunction where what is considered normal is determined by a governing body, like with Emile Durkheim’s anomie. Focusing particularly on the perceived personhood of black men in states of crisis, this paper asserts society reverts to a lower state where these persons—usually depicted with dark skin, large statured, and stereotypical violent characteristics—are viewed as the archetype ‘brute’ from the transatlantic slave trade, thereby eliciting violent treatment to protect natural laws like life, property and liberty. Because media saturates the lifeworld today—unlike the era of Husserl—when crisis suspends bracketing (our ability to distance ourselves from an event) and it prevents society from seeing an event without judgment, the meaning of personhood is reduced to the dominant social narrative, which has now been perpetuated by the power of media portrayals. Using the Ferguson Report—a lived example of Durkheim’s anomie—and its media coverage to examine how personhood is constructed in relation to others, this applied example will demonstrate how racialized perceptions informed by media portrayals disrupt the lifeworld of black men by allowing fear to influence the intersubjective creation of personhood negatively.

L. N. Wyman is an essayist and author with an advanced master’s degree in architecture, focusing on theory and discourse, from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, and a current Master of Science scholar at Maryland University of Integrative Health. His research interests include ethics (both meta and applied), determinism, religious ethnography, philosophy of the mind, philosophy of science, and aesthetics with a particular focus on free will, perception, and moral responsibility. His most recent work is under review at the Australasian Philosophical Review. His current academic work explores perception, media, and meaning in modern society. 

Ilami Yasna

What We Consider Normal When Everything Goes Crazy ‘Normality Cascades’ in Disrupted Lifeworlds

In my presentation, I will discuss mechanisms of ‘re-normalization’ – a bidirectional process through which once anomalous phenomena become normalized while previously normal and taken-for-granted is reclassified as abnormal. I put this issue into a context of systemic social disruptions that simultaneously alter multiple domains of social life, as exemplified by the ongoing Russia’s war in Ukraine. 

Such situations challenge the very foundations of phenomenological perspective on normality: instead of singular anomalies emerging within a stable lifeworld, we face the collapse of everydayness itself. I will discuss potential theoretical framework for such inverted study of normality – where normal is constituted within abnormal rather than disrupted by it. To this end, I intertwine Husserl’s genetic approach to normality with Schutz’s notion of typification as a key mechanism through which disrupted experiences are reclassified and reintegrated into a renewed sense of the ‘normal.’ I further enrich this framework with Garfinkel’s insights on breaching and repair, and Douglas’s work on anomaly classification. 

To trace how re-normalization unfolds over time, I introduce the concept of normality cascades – gradual shifts in what is seen as normal across different layers of experience – from bodily habits and routines, through daily practices and interactions, to changes in self-understanding, moral views. I will demonstrate this analytical framework in action through the first results of my pilot study – a qualitative thematic analysis of over 350 published civilian diaries written during Russia’s war against Ukraine – a largely untapped source in the context of this specific war, though proven highly effective in studying previous conflicts.

I invite discussion on how applied phenomenology can grasp such processes of reassembling normality when the everydayness itself collapses, and how we might rethink the very concept of normality when it is constituted not in the margins of the familiar, but from within the heart of the abnormal.

I am a PhD student with a broad interest in historical and cultural sociology, social phenomenology, history of ideas, social transformations, marginal and extreme experiences, and normativity research. I prefer qualitative interpretative methods while aiming to support my insights with quantitative data. My doctoral research investigates 'normative cascades' – rapid shifts toward new norms following significant societal ruptures – as exemplified by the ongoing Russia's war in Ukraine.

A special panel 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. 

Scott Marratto

Expulsion and the Lifeworld: A Phenomenological Study of Violence in the Global Economy

A challenge for any phenomenology of violence is that while phenomenology is concerned with the emergence of sense in our experience, violence is often said to be distinguished by its senselessness (Dodd [2009]). While it is true that experiences of violence often defy expression in words, phenomenological approaches can also show how violence is also related in complex ways to the domain of sense (Staudigl, 2013). Phenomena of violence appear through different standpoints (perpetrators, victims, witnesses) and occur in the context of social orders (Waldenfels, 1996). These insights help us to identify and describe, beyond punctual acts of kinetic violence, the many forms of structural (Galtung, 1969) or symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1977) at issue in the lifeworld. Our embodied condition entails a fundamental interdependence, including a need for recognition of our sense-making agency; as embodied, we are constitutively situated in symbolic, normative, and legal orders. This means that, even when it targets the body directly, violence always also operates in the sphere of discourse, norms, orders, law. This insight allows us to consider phenomenologically what is at issue in structural or symbolic violence. In this paper, I consider a case a contemporary form of structural violence—what sociologist Saskia Sassen (2014) has called "expulsion.” Expulsion is Sassen’s term for the widespread displacement, in the context of globalization, of persons and communities from living spaces, livelihoods, and sustaining environments. Expulsions are often a function of what Sassen calls “predatory formations” operating at the level of transnational economic systems. They thus tend to defy any simple analysis in terms of actors and victims. What is involved in recognizing expulsion as violence? Expulsion, I argue, is forced displacement from horizons of sense-making—entailing that the work of phenomenological description coincides with that of restoring sense-making agency. As with other forms of violence, the epistemic challenge of identifying and describing the violence of expulsion is inseparable from the political challenge of recognizing and empowering its victims.   

Scott Marratto is Associate Professor of Phenomenology at Michigan Technological University. He is author of The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity (SUNY Press, 2012). His current research concerns questions of embodiment in political life. He is working on a book on violence, power, and agency.  

Christie Nicoson

In/visible harms against women: Using visual methods in a feminist phenomenology of coercive control in conflict-affected communities

What is the lived experience of women in conflict and political transitions? Until now, understanding of conflict-related violence against women in scholarship and global politics has focused largely on war-time rape. We investigate a whole new dimension in the study of war-time violence and political transitions: investigating the concept of conflict-related coercive control by studying women’s lived experiences of it.

To do so, we develop a feminist phenomenological methodology to render the gendered phenomenon of coercive control more discoverable and relevant to the study and understanding of conflict-related violence. Phenomenological approaches enable capture of lived experience, of lived space and of lived phenomena (Dolezal and Petherbridge, 2017; Marion Young, 2005). 

In this paper, we present a discussion of applied phenomenology for studying experiences of conflict and a framework for using visual methods. We bring feminist methodology from peace and conflict research into critical conversation with phenomenology around key components such as time and temporality, embodied and habitual experience, and ruptures to lifeworlds. We turn to visual mediums such as art, storytelling, and built or shaped landscape in both data generation and as a tool for analysis to help visibilise the more-than-physical harms that women experience during conflict.

Christie Nicoson is a postdoctoral researcher at UCD. She specialises in Peace and Conflict Studies, and her research has focused on knowledge production and processes of transformation using applied feminist phenomenology and feminist theories to engage with ethics of care. Christie completed her PhD at Lund University’s Department of Political Science and as part of the Agenda 2030 Graduate School.  

Lucía Poveda

A Phenomenological Analysis of Women’s Experiences of Armed Conflict in Colombia’s Truth Commission Report: Embodied Memory, Suffering and Trauma

In the aftermath of the armed conflict in Colombia, the Truth Commission (La Comision para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad, la Convivenica, y la No Repeticion) has a mandate to clarify and help to understand the human rights violations by documenting experiences of survivors, witnesses and responsibles. From 2017 to 2022, the Truth Commission interviewed over 10,000 women and produced volumes telling their stories of what happened to women during the armed conflict. This process of truth-telling raises many expectations - around justice, truth, and peace - as well as reactions - such as disappointment with the limitations of what a mechanism such as the Truth Commission can deliver. Participating in a Truth Process is an important event for victims-survivors and society as a whole.

In this paper, I will engage with women’s testimonies from the Truth Commission through a phenomenological method. First, I review existing literature on phenomenology around transitional justice and truth commissions in post-conflict societies dealing with legacies of past violence, with attention to key concepts that emerge and themes around suffering, trauma and memory. Second, I present a methodology for studying women’s lived experiences related to the post-conflict Truth Commission in Colombia, identifying key phenomenological concepts such as embodied experience and embodied memory to guide the study. Finally, I apply this method and present novel empirical data and findings that offer new ways to approach the study of post-conflict transitions and the empirical application of phenomenological methods. This paper contributes to ongoing debates that emphasise the need for greater understanding of women’s experiences of violence and armed conflict in order to nuance and (re)value a diversity of lived experiences in theoretical, practical, and political arenas for building peace. 

Dr. Lucía Poveda is a postdoctoral researcher at the Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin in the Coercive in/Justice Project. Lucía holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Valencia. Her research focuses on woman mobilization against territorial dispossession driven by armed groups, drug traffickers, and private agribusinesses in northwestern Colombia. Lucía has over 20 years of experience working with local communities on armed conflict, humanitarian aid, peacebuilding, and development working within NGO’s and transitional justice institutions. She is actively involved in peace, feminism, human rights defenders and the Legacy of the Colombia Truth Commision networks. 

Nataliia Reva

War as a Phenomenon worth studying

There are many ways to talk about war. It can be discussed through ontological lenses as an eternal battle between Good and Evil. Such stories go back to ancient times and are present in all mythic-religious texts. It can also be described from a political and/or anthropological perspective. Recall Thomas Hobbes' Bellum omnium contra omnes. War can also come to light in an ethical and/or legal narrative. However, what if we take it separately as a unique phenomenon worth examining itself? Can it become the subject of the phenomenological inquiry? Like any phenomenon, war meets the criteria for that: it (1) has a spatial and temporal length, (2) is embodied, and (3) shapes a unique intersubjective experience. Therefore, I propose to see the phenomenon of war as: (1) a disruption of the Lifeworld, which suspends the ordinary temporality, makes the sacred space of Home unsafe and fragile, and amplifies the meaning of the routine as an attempt to catch normality; (2) an embodied trauma, causing loss of agency and both emotional and physical wounds (e.g., physical violence to POW and civilians, filtration camps, rape as a weapon); (3) a crisis of Dasein that, by provoking an alteration of the sense of Self, impacts one’s being-with-the-Others-in-the-world (e.g., the experiential gap between soldiers, civilians in the war zone and war refugees creates tension inside the nation and causes alienation between them and breaks in interpersonal connections). Such a phenomenological outlook, in my opinion, allows us to capture how war is lived and felt.

I earned my PhD in Philosophy from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Ukraine) in December 2021. Due to the Russian invasion, I was forced to leave my homeland. Since then, I  have worked in three different countries, including the University of Birmingham (UK), the University of Vienna, and currently, the Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná in Brazil. In June, I'll start my visiting research stay at the Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. Russian invasion also shaped the choice of my current research topic, which is the concept of evil, war and justice, which I study with the help of phenomenology, ethics and metaphysics. 

Ka Lok Yip

An Existential Phenomenology of IHL Compliance in War

This paper draws on existential phenomenology to explore why international humanitarian law (IHL) is or is not complied with in war. Specifically drawing on Husserl’s ‘non-objectifying awareness’ and Sartre’s ‘pre-reflective consciousness’, the paper argues that combatants/fighters, like most human beings, operate often in a ‘numerical identity’ with minimal self-reflection. Ingrained orders and commands compliant with IHL, rather than individual judgments, are thus essential to promoting IHL compliance by combatants/fighters operating in this mode of consciousness.

Since ‘being is that which is an issue for every such entity’ per Heidegger, when combatants/fighters are awoken to the infinite possibilities of their ‘being’, the conscious exercise of their existential freedom determines IHL compliance/violation. To rein in the radicality of this freedom to promote IHL compliance, certain ‘identity’ may be inculcated but per Ricœur, identity building requires ‘narrative coherence’. An identity built on narratives about ‘restraint’ or ‘warriors’ to promote IHL compliance may be coherent with the narratives of combatants motivated to do ‘justice’ e.g. UN peacekeeping. But it is incoherent with the narratives of combatants/fighters motivated otherwise e.g. by vengeance. Even when a ‘warrior’ identity is successfully built, this need not translate into better IHL compliance, as seen in the recent Brereton Report which found that the ‘warrior’ culture among Australian troops, instead of promoting IHL compliance, actively undermined it. As the adoption of an ‘identity’ always involves certain self-alienation through compromising one’s radical, existential freedom, it could backfire on IHL compliance if the ‘identity’, because of its inherent ambiguity, fluidity and malleability, turns into a façade for group conformity.

Reconciling the subjectivist and objectivist readings of existential freedom, the paper argues that IHL compliance finds its appeal among combatants/fighters because of their shared predicament, not as authentic ‘warriors’ but as highly conditioned humans who find a modicum of humanity in each other.

Ka Lok Yip, assistant professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, holds an interdisciplinary PhD (summa cum laude) in international law and international relations from the Geneva Graduate Institute, a BCL (distinction) from Oxford University and an LLB (first class honours) from King’s College London. She has published extensively on international law and armed conflicts. Her monograph, ‘The Use of Force against Individuals in War under International Law – A Social Ontological Approach’, won the Francis Lieber Book Prize. With a strong interest in philosophy, she has conducted research at the Center for Subjectivity Research and the Soren Kierkegaard Research Center.