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 Montreal, Quebec, May 31 to June 3, 2010.
Back to the Things Themselves! (BTTTT!) 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. BTTTT! proposes to build on the important contributions of such scholarship by using them to guide our reflections on phenomena in the lifeworld.
Important Submission Guidelines for BTTTT! 2010
As always, BTTTT! 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 2010 panel should therefore bear these general commitments in mind, but also 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 BTTTT! 2010 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, 2010. 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 then be forwarded to EPTC for anonymous review.
Workshop
The 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 2010 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 facilitators will be Dr. Helen Fielding and Dr. Francine Wynn.
Helen Fielding is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at The University of Western Ontario, Canada. She has co-edited The Other--Feminist Reflections in Ethics with Gabrielle Hiltmann, Dorothea Olkowski and Anne Reichold (Palgrave Publishers, 2007), and Vol. 7 of Chiasmi International with Mauro Carbone. She has published articles on Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Nancy and Irigaray in journals such as Continental Philosophy Review and the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, as well as articles in various collections such as Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty, Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss, eds. (Penn State University Press, 2006). She is currently working on a book manuscript titled The Cultivation of Perception.
Francine Wynn is a Senior Lecturer and Graduate Co-ordinator at the Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, University of Toronto. She has a long term interest in how continental philosophy potentially opens up the understanding of everyday nursing work and the care of the sick. She has published articles on maternal-infant relations (Merleau-Ponty), on bare life and the care of premature infants (Agamben and Arendt), on dying (Heidegger), and Nancy’s heart transplant.
Please address any questions concerning the panel or workshop to Astrida Neimanis and/or David Koukal.