Issues and challenges in the application of Husserlian phenomenology to the Lived Experience of Hate Crime and Its Legal Aftermath

The field of hate crime research addresses the presence, sources and impact of particular types of expressions of prejudice, often perceived as particularly damaging and hurtful forms of interpersonal abuse and violence. Little, if any, credible academic research seeks to vindicate the specific racist, gendered and other vicious prejudices articulated by many perpetrators of hate crime. In turn, this raises the reflexive question of the possibilities of researchers themselves ever being able to adopt a truly "unprejudiced" approach to the presence of such damaging prejudices. Can this goal be realised without a researcher necessarily losing an experientially-grounded understanding of what these meanings, values and purposes have come to mean, and how they are themselves interpretatively re-constituted anew, including within the lived experience of victims, witnesses, police, prosecutors, judges and victim support workers? A possible philosophically-informed approach to the dilemmas posed by this topic is offered by Husserl's phenomenology. Husserl's perpetually unfinished philosophical methodology strives, with concerted if sometimes tragic reflective rigor, to "suspend," "bracket out" and "neutralise" those core presuppositions constitutive of the research field that typically pre-judge precisely whatever demands to be questioned and explored in a radically non-prejudicial manner. This study critically explores the possibilities, reflective stages and theoretical limitations of a sympathetically reconstructed Husserlian approach to hate crime, itself understood as a would-be qualitative "science of consciousness." It argues that despite its manifest tensions, gaps, ambiguities and internal contradictions, aspects of the Husserlian philosophical approach directed towards the different levels of experienced hate crime still retain the potential to both challenge and advance our understanding of this topic. It is the "instructive" part of "instructive failure" that this article highlights

What Is an Act of Engagement? Between the Social, Collegial and Institutional Protocols

Engagement is not synonymous with commitment, even though both words are used in translations between English, French, and German. However, engagement is also not some supplementary phenomenon or a technical term that the phrase social acts already includes in itself or that the concepts of ‘commitment’ or ‘joint commitment’ somehow necessarily imply. In this article I would like to describe a special kind of social act and determine the function they have in relation between various agents. Most importantly, I would like to define their significance in the transformation of a group into an institution or higher order entity. My premise is that there are acts whose aim is to engage all others, since they refer to all of us together, and in so doing reduce negative (social) “acts” as well as various asocial behaviors within a group or institution. In this sense, engaged acts could alternatively also belong to a kind of institutional act, since they introduce certain adjustments to the institution, changing or modifying its rules, increasing its consistency and efficiency.First book series in Philosophy of the Social Sciences that specifically focuses on Philosophy of Sociality and Social Ontology. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality Volume 1

Phenomenological psychology & descriptive experience sampling: a new approach to exploring music festival experience

This paper provides in-depth discussion of a methodological approach to researching music festival experience. Grounded in existential phenomenology (Heidegger, 1927/1962. Being and time (J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell) it argues for the adoption of an interpretative phenomenological perspective (Merleau–Ponty, 1945/1962. Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). New York, NY: Humanities Press) to more fully understand the live music festival experience. Phenomenological psychology (Smith, Harre and Van angenhove, 1995. Ideography and the case–study. In J. A. Smith, R. Harre, & L.Van Langenhove (Eds.), Rethinking psychology (pp. 59–69). London: SAGE Publications) contextualises the music festival experience within the attendee’s Lifeworld. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) (Smith, 2015. Qualitative psychology: A practical guide to research methods (3rd ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications Ltd) provides a robust process for analysing the music festival experience ideographically. Participants used Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES)(Hurlburt & Heavey, 2001. Telling what we know: Describing inner experience. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5(9), 400–403) to record their Green Man music festival experiences, this data was then explored during phenomenological interviews. DES and IPA provide a contrasting conceptualisation of experience, with findings that contribute to Ashworth’s (2003b. The phenomenology of the lifeworld and social psychology. Social Psychology Review, 5(1), 18–34) theories of Lifeworld and Krueger’s (2014b. Varieties of extended emotions. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 13(4), 533–555) Hypothesis of Individual Extended Emotions and his Hypothesis of Collective Extended Emotions. Lastly, building upon the application and adaptability to the music festival context allows a consideration of future studies

The articulation of enkinaesthetic entanglement

In this article I present an argument for the necessary co-articulation of meaning within our felt enkinaesthetic engagement with our world. The argument will be developed through a series of stages, the first of which will be an elaboration of the notion of articulation of and through the body. This will be followed by an examination of enkinaesthetic experiential entanglement and the role it plays in rendering our world meaningful and our actions values-realising. At this stage I will begin to extend Husserl’s notion of intentional transgression to the enkinaesthetic sphere of lived experience, and in support of this claim I will examine the theoretical and practical work of osteopathic manual listening [Gens & Roche 2014] and the ‘felt sense’ in focusing [Gendlin] which makes possible a shift from a somatic articulation to a semantic, and potentially conceptual, one. Throughout, my position will be compatible with Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “Whenever I try to understand myself, the whole fabric of the perceptible world comes too, and with it comes the others who are caught in it.” [Merleau-Ponty 1964a, p.15]

The whole and its parts : why and how to disentangle plant communities and synusiae in vegetation classification

Most plant communities consist of different structural and ecological subsets, ranging from cryptogams to different tree layers. The completeness and approach with which these subsets are sampled have implications for vegetation classification. Non‐vascular plants are often omitted or sometimes treated separately, referring to their assemblages as “synusiae” (e.g. epiphytes on bark, saxicolous species on rocks). The distinction of complete plant communities (phytocoenoses or holocoenoses) from their parts (synusiae or merocoenoses) is crucial to avoid logical problems and inconsistencies of the resulting classification systems. We here describe theoretical differences between the phytocoenosis as a whole and its parts, and outline consequences of this distinction for practise and terminology in vegetation classification. To implement a clearer separation, we call for modifications of the International Code of Phytosociological Nomenclature and the EuroVegChecklist. We believe that these steps will make vegetation classification systems better applicable and raise the recognition of the importance of non‐vascular plants in the vegetation as well as their interplay with vascular plants

From a certain point of view: sensory phenomenological envisionings of running space and place

The precise ways in which we go about the mundane, repetitive, social actions of everyday life are central concerns of ethnographers and theorists working within the traditions of the sociology of the mundane and sociological phenomenology. In this article, we utilize insights derived from sociological phenomenology and the newly developing field of sensory sociology to investigate a particular, mundane, and embodied social practice, that of training for distance running in specific places: our favored running routes. For, despite a growing body of ethnographic studies of particular sports, little analytic attention has been devoted to the actual, concrete practices of “doing” or “producing” sporting activity, particularly from a sensory ethnographic perspective. Drawing upon data from a 2-year joint autoethnographic research project, here we explore the visual dimension, focusing upon three key themes in relation to our runners’ visualization of, respectively, (1) hazardous places, (2) performance places, (3) the time–space–place nexus

"Meaning" as a sociological concept: A review of the modeling, mapping, and simulation of the communication of knowledge and meaning

The development of discursive knowledge presumes the communication of meaning as analytically different from the communication of information. Knowledge can then be considered as a meaning which makes a difference. Whereas the communication of information is studied in the information sciences and scientometrics, the communication of meaning has been central to Luhmann's attempts to make the theory of autopoiesis relevant for sociology. Analytical techniques such as semantic maps and the simulation of anticipatory systems enable us to operationalize the distinctions which Luhmann proposed as relevant to the elaboration of Husserl's "horizons of meaning" in empirical research: interactions among communications, the organization of meaning in instantiations, and the self-organization of interhuman communication in terms of symbolically generalized media such as truth, love, and power. Horizons of meaning, however, remain uncertain orders of expectations, and one should caution against reification from the meta-biological perspective of systems theory

Photo-elicitation and time-lining to enhance the research interview: Exploring the quarterlife crisis of young adults in India and the UK

The aim of this article is to convey our experience of using photo-elicitation along with time-lining to enhance the research interview. We reflect on a study on the ‘quarterlife crisis’ in India and the UK. Participants were aged 22-30 years and self-defined as having experienced difficulties ‘finding their place in the world.’ There were 16 British (8 women, 8 men) and 8 Indian participants (4 women; 4 men). First, we consider how photo-elicitation proved highly compatible with our method of analysis – interpretative phenomenological analysis – through affording a deep connection with participant experience. Second, we explore how participants engaged with photo-elicitation and time-lining, providing examples of image content (events and feelings), image form (literal and symbolic), and creative use of timelines. Third, we reflect on how photo-elicitation and time-lining appeared to enhance participant agency, and to have a therapeutic value for participants, as well as providing particularly rich material for analysis