This panel of collaborative phenomenological description will take place as a workshop during the Society for the Study of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture’s (EPTC) annual meeting at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Ottawa, Ontario, May 26-29, 2009. For more information, see the EPTC website.
Back to the Things Themselves! is an attempt to temporarily liberate ourselves from textual exegesis, and return to the lived world to divine the essential structures of experience through rigorous phenomenological description. Husserl's call to return zu der Sachen selbst has only been intermittently heeded by subsequent generations of phenomenologists, the majority of which have generally focused on contributing to and elaborating on the enormous critical apparatus issuing from the founding texts of the movement. Back to the Things Themselves! proposes to build on the important contributions of such scholarship by using them to guide our reflections on phenomena in the lifeworld.
The Theme: “Methodologies and Practices”
For next year Back to the Things Themselves! invites submissions that offer an original and rigorous description of a phenomenon of the author's choice, but which also explicitly addresses issues related to the methodology or practices used to reveal the meaning of the phenomenon under analysis.
Important Submission Guidelines for “Methodologies and Practices”
As always, Back to the Things Themselves! is explicitly interested in the application of phenomenology’s insights and the generation of detailed, rigorous, extended descriptions of the lived world, which can be expressed in terms of essences or manifold matrices of meaning. As always, we are interested in textual exegesis only to the extent that it complements a given description. As always, our aim is to stay close to the phenomenon itself in order to be faithful to it and describe it vividly to others. Descriptions may arise from phenomenological reflection broadly construed, so long as the phenomenon remains the chief focus of the paper.
Papers for the 2009 panel on “Methodologies and Practices” should therefore bear these general commitments in mind, but also, given the announced theme of the panel, call attention to the phenomenological method the author has employed in generating his or her description. This might be done in a variety of ways, but the goal should be to show the audience how a description was generated. Explications of method should be stated in broad terms, and overly-detailed textual exegesis should be avoided in order to preserve the "flow" of a description. We are not interested in extended retellings of how the major figures of the phenomenological canon have explained their “method,” but rather in how authors have learned from, applied, adjusted, merged, questioned, subverted or otherwise deployed these methods in the development of their own phenomenological practice. Our intention is for these methodological reflections to contribute directly to our half-day workshop, in which we will focus explicitly on participants’ divergent experiences of “doing phenomenology.”
In sum, papers submitted to this panel must contain both:
1. A detailed, rigorous, extended and original description of a phenomenon in the lived world.
2. An explication of the method used to generate this description.
In the spirit of collaborative phenomenology, paper commentators for Back to the Things Themselves! 2009 will view these descriptions in light of their rigor, originality, and the application of method. In other words, commentators in this panel will act less as critics of scholarly exegesis and more as collaborators helping to extend, refine and deepen a paper’s description. Criticisms of textual interpretation are welcome so long as they further the aim of collaborative inquiry into phenomenological method.
Papers should be submitted to David Koukal by RTF or Word email attachment at koukaldr@udmercy.edu by January 5, 2009. Papers should take no longer than 30 minutes to read (generally less than 4000 words), should be prepared for anonymous review (identifiable by paper title only), and include a separate abstract not exceeding 100 words. The cover sheet should also list the paper's title, the author's name, institutional affiliation, and e-mail address. Please note that papers will be initially reviewed by the panel organizers, and suitable papers will be forwarded to EPTC for anonymous review.
Workshop: Intertwining Flesh and Space
The four-paper panel will be followed by a three hour moderated workshop and discussion of phenomenological method and practice. The work of the panel will culminate in this workshop, which will take place at the end of the meeting. As always, the workshop will be open to all participants in the EPTC 2009 meeting, and will provide a unique opportunity to dialogue and exchange ideas with colleagues from various disciplines and with various levels of experience.
Our workshop facillitator will be Dr. Rachel McCann of Mississippi State University. McCann obtained her Ph.D. in Histories and Theories of Architecture at the Architectural Association (London), and she teaches architectural history, theory, and design. Her research, inspired by French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, investigates the full-body engagement of architecture.
Please address any questions concerning the panel or workshop to: Astrida Neimanis and/or David Koukal.