Season five of our podcast concludes with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features a presentation from Marieke Borren, Faculty of Humanities, Open University Netherlands. ABSTRACT: Within critical race theory, phenomenological scholarship is unique in focusing on the racialized body. Based on the work of Fanon and Merleau-Ponty (even if the latter does not address racial difference), phenomenologists have recently developed rich explorations of racial embodiment, predominantly in a visual register (Alcoff, Al-Saji, Gordon, Weiss, Yancy, among others). However, ‘white’ and ‘black’ embodiment are not just involved in perceptual (notably: visual) habits, but also, so I will argue in this paper, in ways of inhabiting and taking up space and habits of moving. What ‘I can’ do, and where, is to a large extent dependent upon my racial situation. This presentation seeks to expand the phenomenology of racial embodiment, more particularly whiteness, by attending not just to the (in)visibility but also to the spatiality and motility of racialized – in particular: white – embodiment. To this end, I will I confront the conceptual resources for understanding spatiality and motility in relation to embodiment, present in the work of Merleau-Ponty (while challenging its false racial neutrality), Fanon’s phenomenological account of black racialization, and Shannon Sullivan’s (feminist) pragmatist account of the ‘ontological expansiveness’ of whiteness. Being a key feature of what the latter calls ‘the unconscious habits of racial privilege’, white expansiveness entails the taken-for-granted freedom to inhabit space and move around as one sees fit. Finally, I will argue that the normative implications of the phenomenology of white expansiveness are undecided. It might be strategically employed for undercutting itself. However, any effort to fight white privilege may end up reconfirming rather than undermining white expansiveness. I will illustrate this undecidability with the case study of Carola Rackete, the self-proclaimed white and privileged German captain of the Sea-Watch 3, who rescued 42 African migrants on the Mediterranean and brought them into port in Lampedusa in July 2019. BIO: Marieke Borren currently works as an assistant professor in philosophy at Open University Netherlands. From 2015-2017, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the department of philosophy of the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Specializing in Hannah Arendt’s political phenomenology, her research expertise lies at the intersection of continental political philosophy, philosophical anthropology and phenomenology. She is particularly interested in feminist and postcolonial perspectives. She has widely published on Arendt’s work, in particular about dis-placement and having a place in the world (‘the right to have rights’), focusing on the predicament of refugees and undocumented migrants. This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/ You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/ The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenom...
This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Ondra Kvapil, École Normale Supérieure de Paris / Charles University in Prague. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. ABSTRACT: My paper will focus on Sartre’s meditations on death. Sartre formulates them as a critique of Heidegger – and the majority of commentators adopt his approach. I will however claim it more fruitful to read Sartre’s conclusions in the light of Husserl’s analyses of death. These were indeed unknown to Sartre, nonetheless the two share key presuppositions: Because our death cannot be grasped in reflection on our subjectivity, it cannot belong to the ontological structure of subjectivity itself; death is then classified as a mundane event, as well as a limit-problem of phenomenological description. I will demonstrate how Sartre radicalizes this notion. Death is not a limit-problem only for transcendental reflection, but already in pre-theoretical and...
Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features a presentation from Sam McAuliffe, Monash University ABSTRACT: Hermeneutic-phenomenology as a method of inquiry is increasingly finding its way into music studies, and the performing arts more generally. Indeed, with respect to music studies there is no shortage of projects where hermeneutic-phenomenology is employed as a means to better understand music, both from the perspective of creating music and experiencing it as a spectator. There is a clear distinction, then, between the practice of music and the application of hermeneutic-phenomenological inquiry; one is used to understand the other. Rarely acknowledged however, are those characteristics that are common to both music and hermeneutic-phenomenology. In this paper I would like to explore one of those shared characteristics: improvisation. By exploring the hermeneutic-phenomen...
This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Adriano Lotito, Milano-Bicocca University. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. ABSTRACT: This contribution focuses on the Tran Duc Thao’s work, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, that is fundamental to post-war French thought, having influenced thinkers as Lyotard and Derrida amongst others and representing the first systematic attempt to synthesize Marxism and phenomenology. Firstly I examine the Tran’s reconstruction of Husserlian phenomenology. Originally there is an objective idealism theorizing the independence of the object; then there is its reversal in a subjective idealism highlighting the constituting consciousness; finally there is the switch from static to genetic phenomenology with the thematization of the life-world as historical-empirical ground (I). Secondly I explore the contradiction indicated by Tran between the Husserl’s idealistic frame, impli...
Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features a presentation from Maria-Nefeli Panetsos, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. ABSTRACT: When talking about Phenomenology we usually think about only the traditional studies of the subject’s perception of its surrounding phenomena. However, when turning the point of view towards the body, except the first steps done by Merleau-Ponty, Philosophy remains under some limitations of the orthological perception of reality. I found interesting the fact that in the history of Philosophy there is a clear absence towards the art of Dance, as the main corporeal - and for Hegel ‘primitive’ and ‘uncivilized’ - form of art which has no place in the fine art hierarchy. Looking for the reasons why this may have happened, I see that there always have been the fear of the body as a source of knowledge, as it has been always seen as un...
This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Pablo Fernandez Velasco, Institut Jean Nicod. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. ABSTRACT: This paper provides a comparative phenomenological analysis of the navigational practices of Evenki reindeer herders in arctic Siberia and of the artistic dérives (drifting excercises) of the Situationist movement. This paper will build on an existing analysis of the phenomenology of disorientation (Fernandez 2020, which focused on the negative aspects of the phenomenon) and on ethnographic research among the Evenki natives of central Siberia. Evenki reindeer herders and hunters have unique navigation methods that result in a very special relationship to their environment. A central aspect of this relationship is the feeling of being ‘manakan’ (‘making your own way’ in Evenki language), a feeling of autonomy and independence. A study of Evenki navigational style and its relations...
Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features a presentation from Mary Coaten, Durham University. ABSTRACT: My paper explores doctoral research on the therapeutic mechanisms of Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP) in an in-patient setting for acute adult psychiatry through the qualitative dynamics of movement and the symbolic and metaphoric processes present. Previous research has focussed on the efficacy of DMP in relation to psychosis spectrum disorders, but little on the mechanisms, especially the role of the moving body within phenomenological approaches. I drew on the phenomenological tradition through Heidegger and Jung, utilising similarities between the two to develop ideas about body movement, space and time. For Brooke (1988), Jung and Heidegger understood the body as the incarnation of psychological life and not as the meaning-less body of anatomy; they saw psyche and d...
This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features María Jimena Clavel Vázquez, University of Stirling and University of St Andrews. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. ABSTRACT: In what sense is perceptual experience situated? Embodied theories of perception might be good candidates to answer this question. However, most of these views have omitted the situated aspect of embodiment, i.e. the way perceptual experience is shaped by a body that is the concrete locus of our social, historical, economic and cultural situation. In this paper, I focus on sensorimotor enactivism (SMEn). I aim to show that this view can remedy this omission by paying closer attention to the idea that perceptual experience consists in situated embodied skills I begin by outlining the relevant aspects of SMEn, a theory that claims that perceptual experience is enacted by the interactions of an embodied agent with her environment (see Hurley 1998, O...
Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features a presentation written by Mary Fridley & Susan Massad, with Gwen Lowenheim presenting for Susan Massad, all from The East Side Institute, New York City. ABSTRACT: As viewed through a biomedical lens – which remains the dominant way in which dementia is seen – Alzheimer’s and related dementias (ADRD) is seen primarily as a condition of loss of capabilities within an individual: of speech, of cognitive abilities, of physical capacities and, eventually, of life while research and treatment is directed toward cure of the individual. Dementia activists across the globe are now raising the question: Is the shame, stigma, and isolation that people with ADRD and their families experience in large part a result of this very narrow lenses through which dementia is understood? In this paper we will present on the Joy of Dementia (You’ve Got...
This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Giuseppe Torre, University of Limerick, Ireland. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. ABSTRACT: With respect to digital technologies, noise is something that is at once both fought and sought. We may wish to minimise noise in communications but require it for encrypting the very content communicated. We may wish to minimise noise when recording sound but also want to use it to improve the fidelity of the recording process. The catch is that noise is both an abstract idea and a concrete thing that does not sit comfortably in relation to systems that are deterministic/probabilistic, such as digital technologies. This is a fact that computer scientists know well but that is systematically overlooked in order to safeguard and improve the functioning of digital technologies, such as digital instruments. Indeed beyond the plethora of different kinds of noises, the comparison betwee...