Critical Phenomenology Research Articles

Qualitative critical phenomenology

AbstractSince its inception, phenomenological philosophy has engaged with empirical data of lived experiences. Recently, phenomenological philosophy itself has branched out into performing systematic qualitative research, resulting in a heterogeneous field of qualitative phenomenological philosophy. By introducing and outlining the research approach of ‘Qualitative Critical Phenomenology’ (QCP), this paper shows how one may conduct systemic qualitative research to lived experiences with an explicit phenomenological philosophical aim. In building on insights from various approaches within critical phenomenology, we not only give a stepwise explication of how to do QCP, we also discuss how we reflectively engage with lived experience as a research object and how key phenomenological themes – i.e. varieties of pre-/reflectivity and the phenomenological reduction – matter for designing and conducting a QCP inquiry. As such, we contribute to discussions on critical phenomenology – i.e. why it matters – but also to debates on how qualitative critical phenomenology may provide a critical lens to prevailing socio-cultural norms and their constitutive force in co-shaping perception and experience.

The Public’s Response to the Book of Mormon

When the Book of Mormon was published in March 1830, it represented a textual shift from the Bible as the representation of sole scriptural truth to the possibility of the Book of Mormon as an equal contender. Within the New York newspaper scene, the Book of Mormon was constructed as a novel false scripture as well as a true culmination of prophecy by competing parties. Within these parties, social actors presented interesting rhetorical dynamics between the establishment of authority and competing Christian canons. Both parties use scripture – the Bible and the Book of Mormon – as tools to navigate the world. One party uses the Bible to argue that the Book of Mormon stands in opposition to an established Christian canon. The other argues that the Book of Mormon is a fulfilment of prophecy made necessary by the Bible. This paper explores the clash of authoritative discourses between those who understood the Book of Mormon as scripture and those who did not. Nevertheless, both groups insist on taking “scripture” seriously. Reading the archive with critical phenomenology, I argue that the publication of the Book of Mormon represents a historical moment where the identity formations of nineteenth-century Americans relied on a discourse of authority mediated through competing canons.

Collective Memory at Canada's Prison for Women

This essay proposes a critical phenomenology of the ontological, social, ethical, and political dimensions of collective memory. At an ontological level, the site of collective memory is not intentional consciousness but rather the lifeworld itself, understood as a historically sedimented context for meaning and mattering. The social dimension of collective memory is structured around an antagonism between hegemonic public memory and insurgent countermemory. The ethical dimension issues a command to anyone to listen and respond to the countermemory of the oppressed. And the political dimension of collective memory asks us to commit to building a world that refuses to repeat past oppression; it calls for the reclamation and (re)invention of a collective procedural memory of how to care for a common world. This analysis of collective memory unfolds in the context of a proposed memorial garden on the grounds of Canada's first prison for women, which is in the process of being redeveloped into luxury condominiums.

A Critical Phenomenology of Vulnerability: Toward a Paradigm Shift? A Contribution to an Interdisciplinary Trialogue on Vulnerability

A Critical Phenomenology of Vulnerability: Toward a Paradigm Shift? A Contribution to an Interdisciplinary Trialogue on Vulnerability

The lived experiences of transformations: The role of sense-making and phenomenology analyses

Studies of transformative change have been making headway in understanding the complexity of societal transformation processes. Yet, we lack understanding of how people’s lived experiences of transformations both shape and are shaped by meaning-making processes. In addressing this gap, we make two assumptions: Firstly, change processes comprise interactions between social actors that shape the way they are made sense of and experienced by the people involved in such interactions. Secondly, such change processes involve transformative experiences, which can bring to light previously taken-for-granted dimensions of lived experience. To address this research gap, we describe two complementary tools for analysing transformations: dialogical sense-making and critical phenomenology. These approaches share a focus on the experiential and sense-making dimensions, yet ask distinctly different kinds of questions and use different methods. Dialogical sense-making explores how people create meanings around transformations through various social interactions. Critical phenomenology analyses subjectivity, lived experience and structures that make possible and help shape experience. When brought into dialogue with each other, they allow for richer analyses of how the sense or meaning of transformations is constituted in experience.

Weight, relief and overcoming: a safe space for racialized women learning to swim in Sweden

ABSTRACT This article aims to contribute to the nascent field of critical phenomenology in geography by elaborating on a feminist-phenomenological understanding of the conceptual binary of weight–relief and Nietzsche’s (self)overcoming. These notions provide a theoretical language for the universality of the human condition, transcending the tendency for theoretical-political reification of marginalized subjects’ lives and agencies. The empirical component consists of in-depth interviews with predominantly non-white, immigrant women who have either learned or taught other adult women to swim in a women-only swimming school founded in the multicultural suburb of Fisksätra, Stockholm, Sweden. By historicizing and contextualizing this setting, it is argued that the lack of swimming ability in Sweden (and elsewhere) is today a partly racialized phenomenon, where this deficiency constitutes a socio-phenomenological weight in individuals’ everyday geographies. What this gender-exclusionary space enables, in its quality as a ‘safe space’, is not so much the integration or securing of minority identities as the possibility to overcome one’s own fears and bodily challenges regarding water through shared experiences of safety, convivial solidarity and the joyful pleasures of being-in-water together.

Attentive Observation: Walking, Listening, Staying Put

In this article I suggest that a renewed emphasis on “attentive observation,” as both a form of radical empiricism and a source of imaginative insight, might contribute towards building a more nuanced conception of fieldwork that is better attuned to the multisensory and multispecies textures of material geographies. I focus on interactions with nature, landscape, and nonhuman others in an urban context but my argument has wider connotations for concerns with embodied methodologies, critical phenomenology, and slower forms of research.

Toward a phenomenology of politics: Vulnerability, autonomy, and the making of “hard” corporeal selves in Chile's migrant campamentos

AbstractHow do people experience vulnerability, and what can this experience tell us about how states help those living in precarious conditions? According to the Chilean state, people who live in vulnerable encampments do so strictly out of necessity, not choice, and vulnerability is best addressed by demolishing encampments, resettling their communities, and giving the poor opportunities to recover their economic and moral autonomy. Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in predominantly migrant informal settlements in Chile's northern border city of Antofagasta, this article shows how the state's project to demolish vulnerable encampments is in tension with migrant women community leaders’ own personal and collective projects of autonomy. Examining one migrant woman community leader's use of the moral concept of “hardness” to express her ethics of autonomy, I attend to ordinary instances where women helping the state resettle their communities instead subtly undermined the state's resettlement plan. This case advances feminist theories of politics and vulnerability that examine how the domain of the political is reconfigured through women's “domestic” work in the everyday. Psychological anthropology, with its recent turn to critical phenomenology, has much to add to this phenomenology of the critical, of politics.

Touching the wounds of colonial duration: Fanon's anticolonial critical phenomenology

AbstractI counter a tendency in critical phenomenology to read Frantz Fanon as derivative upon, indeed reducible to, other (European) phenomenologies, eliding the originality and contemporaneity of his method. I propose it is time to read phenomenology through Fanon, instead of centering analysis on his assumed debt to Maurice Merleau‐Ponty's body schema. Fanon reconfigures and ungrounds phenomenology in Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks). I show how he creates his own method through an anticolonial phenomenology of touch and affect that breaks with the perceptual spectacle at the center of most phenomenologies before him. I read Fanon's “toucher du doigt”—in contrastive relation to Edmund Husserl's touch‐sensings—to define a phenomenology that dwells with colonial wounding and holds the memory of a “burning” colonial duration. This is to say that Fanon's phenomenology is not mere description; rather, Fanon invents a critical, distinctly temporal, and anticolonial method from the affective territory in which he has had to dwell. This method addresses the conditions of possibility for doing (critical) phenomenology. Fanonian phenomenology makes tangible the (de)structuring violence through which colonialism ontologizes itself, while providing tools to dwell with the wounding and critically mine it—to create possibilities for living otherwise than what colonialism makes of us.

Young refugees’ feelings of belonging? Encounters with rural Denmark and northern Norway

ABSTRACT This paper investigates how young refugees settled in rural Norway and Denmark experience their new places of residence. We find inspiration in the idea of ‘contradictions of space’ (Kinkaid [2020]. “Re-encountering Lefebvre: Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Social Space.” Society and Space 38 (1): 167–186.) in exploring how young refugees navigate issues in rural life from housing, education, work and social life to their material surroundings, including the weather. Which experiences result in feelings of meaning and orientation, and which spur feelings of disorientation and contradiction? The empirical material is based on fieldwork and qualitative interviews with young refugees and local volunteers in rural Norway and Denmark. Despite several differences between rural areas in the two countries, young refugees’ experiences from within show many similarities and common experiences between them. The harsh weather, empty streets, lack of familiarity with the more formal community life in rural areas, long distances from sites of education, etc. create feelings of disorientation and contradiction, while socializing with other refugees provides feelings of community and belonging. Taken together, the two aspects drive their decisions to stay in or leave the rural area.

Phenomenology and empowerment in self-testing apps.

Although self-testing apps, a form of mobile health (mHealth) apps, are often marketed as empowering, it is not obvious how exactly they can empower their users-and in which sense of the word. In this article, I discuss two conceptualisations of empowerment as polar opposites-one in health promotion/mHealthand one in feminist theory-and demonstrate how both their applications to individually used self-testing apps run into problems. The first, prevalent in health promotion and mHealth, focuses on internal states and understands empowerment as an individual process. However, this version of empowerment has been accused of paternalism and responsibilisation. The second, feminist version considers structural conditions and foregrounds collective, political change, whose realisation is not obviously attainable for an individually used app. By pointing out the flaws of the positions that focus on either internal states or external conditions, and by engaging with theory from critical phenomenology, I argue that the interplay between them is where empowerment can take place. I propose to formulate empowerment in phenomenological terms as a shift in being-in-the-world and discuss how this conceptualisation of empowerment would avoid the criticism of previous empowerment narratives while being realisable by self-testing apps.

Re-presencing telematic dreaming – awakening a critical feminist phenomenology

ABSTRACT This article enacts a re-presencing of Telematic Dreaming, the influential telepresence art installation by Paul Sermon from the 1990s. Revisiting an often-cited text I wrote in 1994 called ‘Spacemaking', which spoke from the experience of being a performer in the installation, I fill in what was missing, downplayed or unwelcome in the discourses of the time: that nobody is anybody (i.e. in technological environments bodies are never neutral or universal); and that artistic works are deeply contextual and intersectional. Taking a strongly political and contextual approach to Telematic Dreaming, I first reflect on the dual states of wonder & entitlement characterising digital experimentation of the 1990s then I consider the cultural structures and material infrastructures of the installation, assessing the scope for ontological expansiveness and gender crique they afforded. Beyond a particular instance of time-travel, this article proposes a new methodological framework for examining past performances. By turning to critical phenomenology, with contributions from feminist archaeology, media archaeology, and an unexpected appearance of Sara Ahmed’s feminist killjoy, I offer an approach that paves the way for future researchers interested in engaging reflexively and critically with historical phenomenological analyses of artistic performance and of wider lived experiences.

The Reductions in Phenomenology - A Comparison Across Main Authors

IntroductionPhenomenology is one of the fundamental tools in the clinical practice of psychiatrists, constituting one of the touchstones regarding the diagnostic framework in which clinicians navigate.For Husserl, Phenomenology provided access to the structure of pure consciousness, experience and existence. These are conditions of possibility for the object of Psychiatry, ontologically prior to it. Thus, clarification of the object and method of Phenomenology is preliminary to understanding the object of Psychiatry.Phenomenology, being a direct tributary of Philosophy, evolves dialectically, constantly dialoguing with its predecessors. While it is taken as a philosophical current, it is also considered a method. It is precisely as a method that we can see how the methodology changes in different phenomenological traditions.ObjectivesTo compare how the main phenomenological traditions operate.Methods Comparative analysis between the phenomenological reductions in key figures of the phenomenological tradition, resorting to the corpus of the Husserliana, Being and Time, Phenomenology of Perception and General Psychopathology. Additionally, a non-systematic literature review of papers on the database Philpapers, using the keywords “critical phenomenology”, “eidetic reduction”, “phenomenological reduction”.ResultsWhile there is a multiplicity of ways of taxonomizing phenomenological currents, we divide it in: pure, existential, embodied, jasperian, psychopathological, and critical.Husserl’s pure phenomenology uses the free variation in phantasy and epoché as operators, starting from the natural attitude.Heidegger’s existential phenomenology makes no reference to a reduction of any kind. For him, it is necessary to take a step back, to a more primordial mode of being through which we can access Being, where the world is given and constituted.Embodied phenomenology, of Merleaupontinian provenance, recognizes the reduction, but cannot be fully achieve it.Jasperian phenomenology uses empathy and co-experience as its operators, through which it gains access to the subjective states of the other, with the aim of systematizing and taxonomizing subjective phenomena.Phenomenological psychopathology tentatively uses Husserlian reductions to identify the a priori structures of the human, be it Biswanger’s forms of manifestation of failed human existence or Blakenburg’s anthropological disproportions.Critical phenomenology uses a historical-transcendental analysis of experience as its operator, through which it accesses transcendental intersubjectivity.ConclusionsAt a time when the DSM and ICD are increasingly seen as inadequate, limited and dogmatic, the resurgence of interest in Phenomenology is evident. It is important to avoid falling back on new presuppositions without constant revision and questioning, at the risk of simply mutating dogmas and missing the original legacy of pure phenomenology, the suspension of presuppositions.Disclosure of InterestNone Declared

A duplication of marriages? An ethnographic account and assessment of the necessity for both traditional and Christian marriages for African Christians

This article is based on ethnographic research for a doctoral study that was conducted in 2016 among the Ndau people of Chimanimani, Zimbabwe. The article described and assessed the practice of some African Christian churches, especially missionary founded churches, to conduct ‘white church weddings’ after getting married customarily. The study employs a postcolonial approach as a theoretical lens. It argues for a hybridized form of Christian marriage that takes into cognizance the validity of African customary marriages in and for themselves, while at the same time appreciating the importance ascribed to ‘church weddings’ in especially missionary-founded churches. The study uses the case study of the Ndau people, but the phenomenon is widely practised among African Christians across the continent. In the article, doctoral thesis findings were related with Erlank’s (2014) work on marriages in South Africa. The article offered description, critique (postcolonial, gender, class), and suggested interventions. Critical phenomenology was utilized to assess the findings and to expose the power relations that exist in the hierarchical treatment of African customary marriages as of an inferior status compared to church weddings. The economic aspect of the duplication of marriages was also foregrounded. The article underscores the importance of ethnographic research on religion as a human phenomenon in Southern Africa and beyond, as well as a critical assessment of the phenomenon. It provided several possible interventions for African missionary-founded churches.

Resisting Bodies: Between the Politics of Vulnerability and “We-Can”

ABSTRACT This article presents a critical phenomenology of embodiment in radical democratic struggles, focusing on racialized citizens inhabiting and navigating public spaces and on anti-racist protests. It contrasts the notion of the precarious body, central to critical theorists like Judith Butler, with an alternative phenomenological understanding, locating the political significance of the body in spontaneous movement (Arendt) and competence (Merleau-Ponty). Attending to either precariousness or mobile-capable bodies reveals distinct dimensions of radical democratic struggles. While precariousness addresses the unequal distribution of social-material conditions, it tends to overshadow the shared lived experience of freedom among citizens countering inhibitions of free movement, often motivated by their disproportionate exposure to precarious conditions in the first place. From a phenomenological perspective, public action is permitted by capable and mobile bodies. It is argued that public space opens the power of “we-can” bodies by soliciting citizens' movement among others and their engagement in shared projects, according to their bodily capacities. Pluralistic interaction, aiming to maintain or create free spaces of movement, is presented as the political practice of freedom par excellence, exemplified by radical democratic walking practices in the Black civil rights movement.

From Edmund Husserl to Audre Lorde: The Path to a Critical Phenomenology of Oppression

What corresponds, in contemporary feminist and decolonial usage, to the demand to “return to experience,” or rather “to the lived experiences” of oppression - a distant echo of Husserl’s call to return to the things themselves? Beauvoir and Fanon appear to have laid the first foundations of a critical phenomenology of oppression - or of a phenomenologization of social critique. Later, Young and Ahmed took up a similar approach, reading history and politics in bodies, and habitus and structures in intimate experience - an approach that is now discussed in the United States under the label of “Critical Phenomenology.” But is this still, really, phenomenology in the strong sense? This article contributes to an understanding of the path taken by the field of Critical Phenomenology from Husserl to Lorde, and of the shifts that can be observed both in the field and in the method that it presupposes. Finally it undertakes to clarify the horizon of this field, which is essentially concerned with the defence of a life that is both deeply corporeal and open to a total meaning.

A Praxis of Facticity for Critical Phenomenology

This paper critically engages the method that guides critical phenomenology’s approach to political praxis. While many in this field have emphasized the need to clarify critical phenomenology’s method of social critique, less attention has been given to how critical phenomenology establishes a distinct and rigorously phenomenological method of praxis. The aim of this paper is to enrich the calls to action in critical phenomenology by inquiring into the conditions under which transformative political praxis becomes possible. To this end, I draw on Hannah Arendt’s political appropriation of Martin Heidegger’s factical turn in phenomenology to provide a methodological framework for undertaking this inquiry. By using this framework to clarify the scope, limits, and responsibilities of action, I argue that Arendt’s analysis gives rise to what might be described as a praxis of facticity that critical phenomenology, in its concern for the situatedness and intersubjective constitution of experience, is well-positioned to adopt.

Horizons of Critique

Our political present is characterized by the rise of right-wing populism. This trend has not only led to a repoliticization of society, but also of academic philosophy, including phenomenology. In the U.S., a strong movement has emerged under the label of critical phenomenology whereas in Europe the movement of political phenomenology has become prominent. Both projects have in common the aim of positioning phenomenology as a critical project, questioning social relations of domination and power. These projects relate to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology in different ways. In the following, I want to uncover this relation by fleshing out the horizons of critique that come with transcendental, critical, and political phenomenology. In particular I will show how the phenomenological method of demonstration can become a means of critique in political confrontations.

Mitigating Tensions between Phenomenology and Critique

In this paper I argue that, while there are real tensions between phenomenology and critique, it makes a significant difference what we understand phenomenology to be, and that on a good understanding there is room for a project that is genuinely both critical and phenomenological. I will focus on four areas of tension: the eidetic character of phenomenology as opposed to the concrete character of critique; the transcendental orientation of phenomenology as opposed to social and political orientation of critique; the descriptive nature of phenomenology as opposed to the normative nature of critique; and the possibly “naïve” character of phenomenology with respect to the shaping of phenomena by social forces. In each case, I will not try to show that there is no space between phenomenology and critique; rather, I suggest that the tension between the two can be mitigated to allow for a critical phenomenology

“There is Nothing Fun About Pain”: A Critical Phenomenology of Games for Chronic Pain

“There is Nothing Fun About Pain”: A Critical Phenomenology of Games for Chronic Pain