Critical Phenomenology Research Articles

Critical phenomenology and the banality of white supremacy

AbstractCritical phenomenology is a rapidly flourishing field of research within philosophical phenomenology. This article undertakes a genealogy of the critical philosophical enterprise, drawing out its key commitments, motivations, tensions, and productive potential. In the second half of this article, I explore the promise of critical phenomenology, by examining how a critical phenomenological approach to questions of racism and racialised embodiment can help extend our understanding of white supremacy, opening up new possibilities for thinking its banality and ubiquity in contemporary social and political life.

Idle Talk and Anti-Racism: On Critical Phenomenology, Language, and Racial Justice

While race and racism have never stopped being urgent issues for many communities of color, talk about race, racism, and racial justice have once again become a central part of mainstream social and political discourse in America. But while critical phenomenologists have offered many accounts of what it is like to live in a world shaped by racism—particularly in terms of embodiment—they have not drawn attention to questions about what it is like to live in a world increasingly shaped by anti-racist sentiment and action, the kind of world in which the question of critical phenomenology’s contribution to projects of racial justice can itself arise. In this paper, I argue that one avenue to approach the silence in critical phenomenology around the experiences and habits of anti-racism as they circulate in our discourse is to draw attention to how critical phenomenology, as it turns to questions of race, tends to turn away from explorations of language. Interrogating how critical phenomenologists approaching racial issues have managed to escape explicitly thematizing language, I argue that this occlusion of language by critical phenomenology consequently leaves behind resources through which to ask ourselves what is happening as we articulate increasingly taken-for-granted ways of speaking and living out an opposition to racism.

Critical Impurity and the Race for Critical Phenomenology

Informed by María Lugones’s understanding of the “logic of purity,” this essay analyzes the race for critical phenomenology. It suggests how Lugones’s analysis of such a logic may guide us in developing phenomenological analyses of complex social identities such as race. It also shows how traces of the logic of purity remain even in critical phenomenological analyses of race. Specifically, the essay analyzes the methodological call for a reduction of quasi-transcendental structures. Ultimately an attitude and practice of critical criticality and a mode of critical impurity are suggested so as to avoid problematic traces of the logic of purity. Ultimately, the discussion reveals how Latina feminist theorizing stands to enhance critical phenomenology.

Introduction. Critical Phenomenology after Merleau-Ponty. Part II

Introduction. Critical Phenomenology after Merleau-Ponty. Part II

Towards a Critical Phenomenology of Borders and Migration: Introduction to the Themed Issue

With the themed issue “The Critical Phenomenology of Borders and Migration,” we at Puncta wish to highlight the need for a continued systematic reflection on the lived experiences of migrants in relation to the political and social structures that inform these experiences. By claiming that critical phenomenology can be a fruitful approach to this work, we insist that the complex lived experience of migrants should not only be acknowledged and included in the form of examples and anecdotes, but systematically integrated and interrogated in philosophical conversations on migration-related matters. The hope is that critically attuned phenomenological analyses of migrant lived experiences may contribute to offer new knowledges indispensable for understanding what is actually at stake—philosophically, politically, ethically, and existentially—with the particular situations that migrants, border-crossers and border-dwellers continually negotiate

We Feel Grateful and Alive to be Doing This Work Together: Phenomenological Reflections on a 2020 Summer of Feminist Research Across Difference

This essay presents the interwoven phenomenological reflections of three feminist women, situated across various intersections of difference, whose plans to conduct research on Black feminism and ambiguity were affected by the coronavirus and the social climate resulting from widespread responses to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the United States during the summer of 2020. The authors offer an experimental, juxtaposed intersubjective phenomenology of research, located in the critical phenomenological framework of intersectional ambiguity. The reflections include reconsiderations of the utility of research and its (inter)subjective dimensions. Each writer captures how differences in their sociopolitical identity and positioning affected their ability to conduct “research” during a summer of unrest and unease. Taken in sum, these reflections argue that critical phenomenology provides many opportunities for reflecting upon lived experience and the relevance of intellectual labor and knowledge-production to the sociopolitical challenges we face.

Illegal Skin, White Mask: A Critical Phenomenology of Irregular Child Migrants and the Maintenances of Whiteness in the United States

I reinterpret the experiences and perceptions of child migrants through the lens of racialization and White Supremacy by advancing work by Cheryl Harris (1993) and Lisa Guenther (2019) on the critical phenomenology of “Whiteness as Property” (WaP) and the protection of “White Space.” WaP is “the collective investment in state violence” to protect the economic, territorial, and legal privileges of Whiteness, while White Space describes its two dimensions: “enclosure and territorial expansion” (Guenther 2019, 202). I build on this foundation by examining the way WaP regulates sociogenic3 and emotive states in order to protect its accrued resources, resulting in an “economy” of racial identity where ownership produces and is produced by particular societal structures and relationships. I use these concepts to understand the framework that willfully misinterprets racialized children. I establish “the Child” as a sociogenic concept and symbol of national futurity and universalism, and therefore of the futurity and universalism of Whiteness; reiterating and interrogating the inconsistency that many immigration and child activists point to, that there is no such thing as an “illegal” or racialized child. Thus, the ICM either loses the privileges and protections afforded to children or must don the White Mask through a performance of victimhood. Through this framework, I undertake an examination of the ICMs as portrayed in the legal process using tools from legal sensorial studies and critical phenomenology, demonstrating the sociogenic shifts that occur for the ICM and how these shifts work to protect WaP.

Unsettling Encounters: On the Ontological Significance of Habitual Racism

The richness of the term “unsettling” has made it readily employable for phenomenological accounts of racism in philosophy of race literature; yet, the term has been left largely under-theorized. Here, I argue that unsettling encounters can be said to occur when the unfamiliar other has come into contact with the boundary of one’s existential home. For many white people, interracial interactions produce an (often unwarranted) feeling of physical danger, but as I hope to show, this habitual (mis)perception of such encounters is not merely a conditioned response; it also functions to subvert situations that might unsettle white identifies partially constituted by phenomenological demarcations of space along racial lines. Drawing on empirical literature and recent developments in critical phenomenology, I suggest that by exercising habitual, racist gestures and perceptions, white people (mis)perceive ontological threats to their worldview—e.g., a bookish Black student or a masculine gay man—as ontically threatening so as to avoid the kind of work and existential anguish that altering one’s normative expectations would require.

Critical Phenomenology, Racial Justice, and Radical Imagination: An Introduction

Starting with the acknowledgment of the necessity of radical imagination for social change, and with the threat that neoliberal capitalism poses to radical imagination, our hope is that this themed issue offers the time and space to cultivate radical imagination as it takes up questions of racial justice. Moreover, our intent is to solicit critical phenomenology toward robust investigations of radical imagination, what it makes possible, and the ways in which current social, economic, and political arrangements sustain or foreclose the space and time for its cultivation. What the past few years have made clear is that individuals and institutions continue to be complicit in the perpetuation of structural inequality and racial violence in our society. For us, the editors of Puncta, acknowledging this complicity means at a minimum to use our platform to amplify the voices of scholars of color and establish a forum devoted to critical conversations about racial justice. In sum, we hope we can create a space-time for the cultivation of radical imagination. This themed issue strives to be such a venue; the ten articles featured in this issue explore the intersections of race/racialization with methodological concerns within the field of critical phenomenology, theoretical understandings of the notion of race itself, and demands for racial justice on scholarly, activist, and imaginary grounds.

Embracing Misfit Bodies: A Reflection on My Brother’s Dementia in the Time of COVID-19

2020 was a year of global crisis. During this time, I experienced crisis on a very personal level. For me this coincided with the beginning of the pandemic, when my older brother developed a kind of dementia. In this text, I briefly explore a few philosophical issues relating both to the spread of COVID-19 and to my brother’s disease. Reflecting on themes such as anxiety, uncertainty, grief, privilege, vulnerability, social distancing, and misfit bodies—mainly through critical phenomenology—I attempt to give sense to the experience of personal crisis in times of global crisis. I conclude by embracing “misfit bodies” in a sincere attempt to recognize the pervasiveness of sickness and absurdity—but also in hope for solidarity and empathy to persist.

On Aging: a Critical Phenomenology of Transitions

This article advances a critical phenomenology of the meaning of aging embodiment. Its broad aim is to profoundly challenge an idealized view of aging as foremost and fundamentally a natural or normative procession of “ready-made” stages pre-set “in” time (i.e., infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and “old age”) or pre-given units of time that unfurl along a timeline (i.e., chronological age), from past to present to future. Combining, defending, and adapting resources from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception with a reading of the concept of institution (Stiftung) via the phenomenon of puberty in Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954-1955) as well as insights from critical gerontology, I argue that the phenomenon of aging embodiment demands to be understood in terms of transitions, that is, as an intensive reorientation in relationality, sociality, and the style in which one has a past rather than as changes along a timeline.

Becoming a “Vulnerable Senior” in the Days of COVID-19

As the COVID-19 crisis unfolded, older people in the Netherlands were framed as essentially vulnerable. In the public discourse, the figure of the “vulnerable senior” rose to unprecedented prominence. Taking a critical-phenomenological approach, we combine an empirical study with philosophical reflection, drawing on phenomenological and post-structuralist work on vulnerability and precarity to interpret quotes from daily newspapers and other media. This approach leads us to distinguish three forms of vulnerability: (1) vulnerability as discursive effect; (2) vulnerability as unrealizable; and (3) vulnerability as creative appropriation. We conclude that the COVID-19 crisis has reinforced the entanglement of age and vulnerability and has led to novel social distinctions and labels. These labels harbor harmful stereotypes and are in constant need of critical evaluation. Still, the people who are affected by them are not passively dominated; rather, they exhibit a certain freedom in re-interpreting and challenging their situation. It is this attention to the entanglement of discourse and lived experience that situates our research in the broader field of critical phenomenology.

Crisis, Alterity, and Tradition: An Anthropological Contribution to Critical Phenomenology

One does not just live in a crisis: a crisis calls for action. Etymologically, from the Greek krisis, it is a turning point or a moment of decision. It not only alters perception; it alters the demands for living. It stands out from the everyday. If we follow Gail Weiss (2008), we could say that a crisis is a moment when the ground called “ordinary life” is interrupted in such a way that it no longer functions as an out-of-awareness backdrop but itself becomes the visible figure. But what happens when the ground is already permeated by crises, large and small? How should we think about crisis when we cannot call upon a simple binary—times of crisis and somehow livable normal times? How to think, conceptually, about those communities who live with what is variously termed “slow death” (Berlant 2011), “slow violence,” (Nixon 2011) or “chronic crisis” (Vigh 2008) that make the everyday a source of such continual threat that crisis and non-crisis shade into one another? I ask these questions in the context of my twenty-year history of research in African American communities in which families are caring for children with disabilities and chronic illnesses.

Asking Different Questions: a Decolonial Reading of Merleau-Ponty’s Institution Course Notes

In this essay, I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s Institution Course Notes to clarify Patrick Wolfe’s claim that, for settler colonialism, “invasion is a structure, not an event.” I also engage critically with colonial assumptions in Merleau-Ponty’s own work, including his Eurocentric response to questions such as: “[I]s there a field of world history or universal history? Is there an intended accomplishment? A closure on itself? A true society?” In this essay, I ask different questions – with Merleau-Ponty, against him, and beyond him. I neither defend Merleau-Ponty against his own worst self nor disown him as “bad” philosophical kin. Rather, I learn what I can from Merleau-Ponty for a critical phenomenology of settler colonialism and for amplifying movements to transform and abolish settler colonial structures at the level of thought, being, and politics.

Political Elitism in Nigeria: Challenges, Threats and the Future of Citizenship

This paper explores the impacts of political elitism in Nigeria. This is informed by our past experiences and present realities of Nigerian political elites that play exclusionary politics which this paper interrogates. It argues the thesis that there is need for inclusive governance and political participation in order not to turn Nigeria into a fragile state. The purpose of this is to ensure that good governance is achieved and sustained. This is based on the reason that political relationships between elites and citizens dictate development outcomes. Delivering development involves working with the political dynamics that has citizens’ welfare as its focus. It does this by addressing social justice and extremes of inequality as “bottom-up” as well as “top-down” political, social and economic processes that sustain effective states, efficient markets and vibrant societies. Governance describes the way states and societies manage their affairs politically and the way power and authority are exercised. Entrusting governance to a few people that constitutes the political class endangers development, political participation and settlements. It also increases cycles of poverty among citizens that do not belong to the elite class. This reinforces the argument of the thesis that political elitism creates poor relations and hinders economic development and sustains fragile citizenship. Hence, this paper adopts critical phenomenology as its methodology to redefine political participation with inclusiveness while dismantling the tempting tendencies of political elitism and corruptive practices that stagnate governance and development. This paper submits that inclusive political participation will ensure that governance is centralized and built on finest philosophical ideals for overall nation building for the benefit of Nigerian citizens. By this, Nigeria will not be left in the hands of few less sensitive political elites.

Border Deaths as Forced Disappearances: Frantz Fanon and the Outlines of a Critical Phenomenology

This article aims to examine the racialized forms of violence enacted by contemporary border regimes by rethinking border deaths as “forced disappearances." Although “forced disappearance” is often associated with military dictatorships, I extend it to border control policies that push migrants beyond the pale of the law, make it difficult to find out about their fates or whereabouts, and render their lives disposable. In thinking about border deaths as forced disappearances, I move beyond the strictly juridical meaning of this term and foreground its phenomenological resonances to inquire into the conditions of appearance and disappearance, including the social structures, normative orders, and representational frameworks that make and unmake one’s relations to the world and other living beings. To undertake such an inquiry, I engage with Frantz Fanon's works and examine how borders establish racialized partitions among both the living and the dead. The analysis highlights how certain elements of colonialism—spatial compartmentalization, racial immobilization, routinized violence, legalized lawlessness—reappear within border governance. It also points to the crucial role that law plays in legitimizing racialized state violence in border control.

Management of Occupational Health and Safety During The Covid-19 Epidemic : Facts and Challenges

<p><em>The Covid-19 epidemic has resulted in drastic changes as well as losses for the business world. This causes various companies to carry out occupational safety and health procedures for their employees. The purpose of this research is to dig deeper and understand the policies for managing occupational health and safety during the Covid-19 virus epidemic, implementation, challenges, and solutions. The number of informants in this study was ten people, including five subject informants and five triangulation informants. Data analysis was performed using qualitative data analysis methods with the critical phenomenology approach of the Stevick-Colaizzi-Keen model. The results of the analysis show that the management of occupational health and safety during the Covid-19 epidemic at the Rembang post office by implementing the 5M health protocol, namely wearing a mask, washing hands, social distancing, stay away from crowds, and reducing mobility has been carried out properly according to with a Circular from the Ministry of Manpower number B.5/51/AS.0202/I/2020, so as not to cause the spread of the Covid-19 virus cluster in the work environment of the Rembang branch Post office.</em></p>

The Crisis Management Experiences of Female Media Leaders During The Pandemic


 The Covid-19 pandemic entered Indonesia in February 2020, one month later most of the institutions changed their work policies. Business processes have also changed. Leaders at all levels are tested to be adaptive to unpredictable conditions, including the media business which is also affected by the effects of the pandemic. The leaders of female countries have shown good performance, as evidenced by the number of countries they lead that have succeeded in reducing the number of Covid-19 transmissions. Women leaders are considered to be more responsive and quick. Even so, how the experiences of women leaders at other leadership levels have not been well covered in any media. So this study will try to understand the experiences of female media leaders during the pandemic in 2020 as well as the initial steps for crisis management. This study uses a critical paradigm with a descriptive approach. The theory used is Standpoint Theory developed by Sandra Harding and Julia T. Wood and Crisis Management. This theory seeks to understand the world through women's eyes. The method used is critical phenomenology. The results showed that women as media leaders act quickly, utilize technology, and adapt business processes. Apart from that, it puts forward four crisis management steps in its implementation.

‘Well, they do have a good point’: contextualising the Colin Kaepernick protest using counternarratives with U.S. elementary students

ABSTRACT Research has shown that classroom instruction can be precarious when addressing potentially ‘controversial’ issues. Yet, students can benefit from examining the narratives of those who have questioned the merits of United States democratic citizenship. By employing critical childhood studies and windows, mirrors and sliding glass doors as theoretical frameworks and critical hermeneutic phenomenology as its methodology, this study elicits the perspectives of ten first- and second-grade Black male students via interviews and classroom discussions regarding the Colin Kaepernick protest. The findings indicated that counternarratives can be an effective instructional tool for student engagement, authentic expression, and analysis of social phenomenon.

Deadseeing and Its Discontents: A Critical Phenomenology of Ecocide and Earthcare

Deadseeing and Its Discontents: A Critical Phenomenology of Ecocide and Earthcare