Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Mariia Galkina, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris. 

Mariia Galkina 'Towards a phenomenology of environmental shame' 

Abstract: This contribution aims to study the phenomenon of environmental shame and its role in awakening of ecological consciousness. It starts with the problem of asymmetry of human power that marks the current ecological transition. On the one hand, the growing ecological footprint testifies to excess of human power over the environment which leads to the sixth mass extinction and endangers planetary balance. On the other, facing ecological crisis, human, paradoxically, finds himself more powerless than ever. Powerless to slow down and to challenge his daily production and consumption practices by refusing to take their consequences into account. In a word, powerless to suspend his own power. One should ask then how to catalyze this suspension. My argument is to consider shame as such a feeling that turns an excess of human power over the environment into “potential-not-to”. Making use of this ontological concept developed by Agamben in order to think the negativity of human power that shame activates, the paper elaborates a phenomenology of “environmental shame”. Since suspending power requires to challenge its ethical justification by measuring the extent of its destructive consequences for other species, it is nothing but shame where freedom becomes aware of its murderous character that answers the need of self-limitation of human power over the environment. My concept of “environmental shame” develops Levinasian approach that defines shame as a discovery of injustified facticity of power and freedom, but rethinking it from the human relation to other endangered and vulnerable living beings. Shame, I argue, is a revolutionary feeling able to operate a conversion of environmental consciousness and transform our manner of being in the world by actualizing the “potential-not-to”, i.e. the negative potential that allows inoperativity of human power. 

Bio: Maria Galkina is a pre-thesis student in philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris (PSL). Her research interests cover phenomenology of emotions and environmental ethics. Her Master's thesis (2021, ENS-PSL) focused on the dialectic of negativity and creativity of shame, namely analyzing the works of Levinas, Agamben and Dostoevsky. Next year Maria starts her PhD thesis under the supervision of Dr. Marc Crépon (Archives Husserl Laboratory, ENS-PSL). thesis will propose a phenomenology of environmental shame making use of both phenomenological and psychological methods and mobilizing, among others, the conceptions of Levinas and Günther Anders. 

This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project. 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? 

Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Paul Tuppeny, University of the Arts, London (Chelsea College of Art). 

Paul Tuppeny '“I didn't want their past to be a mark on them.”(R. Rauschenberg): A Sculptor's Investigation into the Phenomena of Objective Age' 

Abstract: It is in the nature of the world to be a place of constant change and transformation; trees grow, skin wrinkles and paint discolours. Every state of being is finite and all opportunity is fleeting.   In his insistence that his 1951 White Paintings be regularly overpainted, the artist Robert Rauschenberg recognised how such ‘natural' processes of change not only generate affect in our interpretation of physical objects but, in doing so, can make us ‘feel' time. Intrinsic to the apparatus of perception are pre-cognitive judgements concerning the transformative processes that define our world and which we experience as ‘age'; through these perceptual intuitions, derived from momentary observations, we are able to ‘chronicle' the flux and stabilise our environment . The paper sets down hypotheses concerning the mechanisms that underlie age phenomena, developed through a doctoral research project pairing traditional literature-based research with the practice of sculpture, proposing routes by which these structures adjust meaning and generate affect. Convergent aspects of several phenomenological primary sources, including Aristotle, Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, are interwoven to illuminate our interaction with the material-temporality of the world. Throughout the research, this relationship is given physical expression through three-dimensional artworks. Central to our experience of age are the processes through which we assimilate the changing nature  of entities (biographic mental object-files) around temporal-archetypes, the states in which objects carry greatest meaning, significance or use for us. Clearly an informed understanding of our experience of objective age is crucial not just for artists like Rauschenberg, but for anyone engaged with the physical world. Armed with a structured view of how age ‘moves' us we can progress toward being culturally comfortable with the phenomenon, both in ourselves and the things around us, leading to relationships within our society which displace damaging predispositions toward the young and the new. 

Bio: Formerly an architect, Paul Tuppeny completed his MA Fine Art in 2016, also receiving an award in the National Sculpture Prize that year. He was longlisted for The Ruskin Prize in 2017 and 2019 and has exhibited across the UK with outdoor venues including Broomhill and Cotswolds Sculpture Parks. Gallery exhibitions include Atkinson Gallery(Street), Sluice Art at Oxo Tower, Edge Gallery(Bath), ING Discerning Eye, Jubilee Library, Grand Parade Gallery(Brighton), and Murmuration Gallery and De La Warr Pavilion(Bexhill). Paul was invited to join the Royal Society of Sculptors in 2017 and is currently researching his PhD at Chelsea College of Art(UAL). 

This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project. 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? 

Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Adam Takacs, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest. 

Adam Takacs 'Ageing Being: Temporality, Corporeality, and Shared World' 

Abstract:   “The objective world is incapable of sustaining time”, writes Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception, and almost the entire phenomenological tradition seems to echo this thesis from Husserl to Heidegger and beyond. Besides the fact that this claim appears to be at odds with the findings of historical science, and archaeology in particular, it also blocks the way to explore a phenomenological possibility. The possibility of looking at the experience of temporality not in terms of ecstatic subjectivity, but in terms of material and corporeal ageing. This paper sets out to develop two arguments: 1) The first is that the phenomenon of “ageing” – taken as a synonym of temporal change or becoming – can be meaningfully presented in a phenomenological framework as a general ontological condition that is shared by all material and corporeal beings, including the human subject. 2) The second is that the manifestation of the shared nature of ageing can reveal implications for a new phenomenological understanding of already familiar experiential qualities. I will argue that the experience of growing old with things and with the material environment disclose a disposition that informs a common horizon of memory, empathy, and corporeality.  

Bio:   Adam Takács is Senior Lecturer in philosophy and humanities at Eötvös Loránd University Budapest, and currently Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta, Canada (2021-2023). His publications include Le fondement selon Husserl (Paris, 2014), Traces de l'Etre. Heidegger en France et en Hongrie (Paris, 2016), and more recently “Time and Matter: Historicity, Facticity and the Question of Phenomenological Realism”, Human Studies (vol. 41, no. 4: 661-676.). 

This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project. 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? 

Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Gage Krause, Fordham University. 

Gage Krause 'Desynchronization, Alienation, and the Social World in Grief' 

Abstract: Recent phenomenological approaches to grief have, understandably, focused primarily on the relationship between the griever and the deceased, describing grief as an experience of different kinds of losses and as a transformation of various structures of subjectivity. In addition to the griever-deceased relationship, phenomenologists have even more recently begun to attend to the cultural and social aspects of grief (e.g. Køster and Kofod 2021). However, phenomenologists have yet to provide a thorough examination of the social dynamics and the sense of social isolation and alienation that can appear in grief. In order to address these issues, this paper will clarify the interplay of temporality and sociality in grief. Building on Thomas Fuchs' account of ‘contemporality', I argue that grief involves a desynchronization between the griever and their social world, which diminishes the griever's sense of belonging with and ability to relate to non-grieving others. Further, I argue that a griever's implicit or explicit awareness of their desynchronization from the social world accounts for the sense of alienation and estrangement often experienced when engaging in daily routines, projects, and social interactions. That is, the transformations in temporality in grief also involves an awareness that the griever temporally inhabits the world differently than others, causing the griever to experience once-familiar activities and social engagements as alien and strange. To make this argument, this paper will draw on literary-autobiographical accounts, namely Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Notes on Grief, Denise Riley's Time Lived, Without Its Flow, and C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed, with a focus on their descriptions of social interaction, performing daily routines, and self-understanding. Attending to these intertwined temporal and social aspects will provide a clearer understanding of how grievers renegotiate their relationship to their social world in the wake of their loss. 

Bio: Gage Krause is pursuing a PhD in Philosophy at Fordham University. His research focuses primarily on Phenomenology and Social & Political philosophy, working at the intersection of Critical Phenomenology, Phenomenological Psychopathology, and Philosophy of Disability. 

This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project. 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? 

Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Ronja Griep, University of Cambridge. 

Ronja Griep 'When Does Bodily Shame Turn Unjust? The Case of Menstrual Shame' 

Abstract: A concern with menstrual shame has occupied policymakers, educators, and charity workers abroad for decades (ActionAid 2021, Amnesty International 2019). Increasingly, the ‘fight against period shame' has been discussed within the UK, amid news of the Scottish government scrapping the ‘tampon tax' and the award of an MBE to Amika George for her activism in offering free period products in schools (BBC 2021). 

What is it that troubles many about menstrual shame? What exactly are activists fighting against? I argue that these questions are best answered by attending closely to the phenomenology of menstrual shaming - this phenomenology not only reveals menstrual shaming to be insidious, but to constitute an injustice. I argue, drawing on Iris Marion Young and Julia Kristeva, that menstrual shaming takes place mainly at the level of habits and unconscious behaviour in everyday social spaces. It reaches all corners of life - from personal to interpersonal and institutional. The phenomenology itself plays a crucial part in discovering just what the injustice consists in: I argue that habit-formation influenced by shame and institutional failures, as I highlighted, leads to women's self-respect being undermined before they even begin to engage in projects. It undermines their self-respect at early yet important stages of women's lives, while remaining often invisible and highly normalised. 

This account of injustice arising from the phenomenology of menstrual shaming, I conclude, gives us important insights into which other forms of bodily shaming constitute injustice and why they do so. This allows me to answer one of the most powerful objections to my argument, namely that we all conduct certain bodily needs in private and would be ashamed if discovered, yet do not think of this as an injustice. The specific phenomenology of menstrual shame, I contend, allows us to differentiate different forms of bodily shaming. 

Bio: Ronja Griep is a PhD Student in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Her research focusses on menstrual shaming, starting from its phenomenology to its status as an injustice and ending with thoughts on possible empowerment. She is especially interested in FemTech's promise to ‘empower' women from menstrual shame, e.g. by offering them to track their periods. Her research is funded by the Gates Cambridge Scholarship Programme and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. 

This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project. 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? 

Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Oskar Otto Frohn. 

Oskar Otto Frohn - 'Shame and Depression – A Phenomenological Qualitative Exploration of Shame in Depression' 

Abstract: The individual suffering from depression is prone and susceptible to normative, precise, rigid ways of being, and expectations in social and societal spheres induce exceptional strong feelings of obligation towards oneself, others, and society – as though they are constantly in debt and owe something of value. Ways of how one ought to be and act quickly becomes performative tasks for the person with depression, and failing to perform or falling short of their self-established duties in social interactions, even when alone, evoke feelings of existential shame. Taking the shape of something irrevocable, and becomes part of the individual’s essence, a character trait, or even a state of being, a shame for existing. Shame, then, is an integral part of depression and the lived experience. Therefore, based upon phenomenological qualitative interviews of people with depression, I argue in this talk, firstly, that the shame of not living up to self-imposed, rigid, specific normative ways of being drastically affect the lifeworld of the person with depression with a hypersensitivity, where otherwise local affordances has become global, threatening the ‘I’ in relation to itself – representing ways in which to either prove or disprove an identity, which potentially leads to what Thomas Fuchs (2013) calls the corporealization of the lived body, as a means to protect the ‘I’. Secondly, shame shows how people with depression, unlike commonly considered, live rich inner social lives. And although shame is a, seemingly, overly negative emotion, it also points towards meaningful personal relations with others, and just how valuable these are to people with depression, and how extremely hyperaware they are of the social dimension, even if they withdraw themselves.  

Bio: Oskar Otto Frohn graduated as an undergraduate in philosophy from University of Copenhagen, and recently obtained a M.A from KU Leuven. He has worked with and researched depression for almost four years as a scientific assistant in philosophy and has focused primarily on phenomenology of psychopathology and first-person lived experience in his master’s programme. 

This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project. 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? 

Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Emily Hughes, University of York. 

Emily Hughes '"Heavier, and less mine": grief and the modification of bodily experience' 

Abstract: This paper gives a phenomenological analysis of the impact of grief upon bodily experience. In the first half of the paper I will provide an analysis of responses to Question 7 of the ‘Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience' questionnaire, ‘Has your body felt any different during grief?' which was conducted with colleagues from the University of York. Using Braun and Clarke's qualitative method of thematic analysis, I will organise the descriptions of bodily experience into patterns of themes, including feelings of heaviness, emptiness, constriction, numbness and depersonalisation. In the second half of the paper I will critically evaluate these themes in light of the broader literature on the lived body and lived space, as given in the work of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Marcel, Minkowski, Bollnow and Schmitz. In so doing, I will explore the ways in which modifications to bodily experience in grief can be seen to impact spatial experience and, by implication, the way in which the mourner finds themselves in the world as a whole. 

Bio: I am a postdoctoral research associate in philosophy at the University of York working on the AHRC-funded project ‘Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience.' I completed my PhD at the University of New South Wales. My research is situated in the intersection between existential phenomenology and the philosophy of psychiatry and psychology, with a particular focus on phenomenological interpretations of affect and the way in which emotions modify temporal experience. 

This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project. 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? 

Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Pat McConville, Monash Bioethics Centre, Monash University. 

Pat McConville 'Phenomenology and Artificial Hearts: Three scales of temporal change' 

Abstract: Heart failure is a widespread and increasingly common disease. Its symptoms can be dramatic and debilitating. Serious heart failure is also incurable and represents a clear example of the kinds of serious illness and disability discussed by phenomenologists of health and illness. The gold standard treatment for end-stage heart failure is heart transplant. Increasingly, however, patients are offered artificial hearts – either Ventricular Assist Devices (VADs) or Total Artificial Hearts (TAHs) – as either a bridge-to-transplant or as a final or “destination therapy”. Artificial hearts supplement or replace the organic heart and perform the heart's blood-pumping function, or what might be described as in Albert Borgmann's “device paradigm” as the commodity of circulation. However, while they can provide this life-saving function, artificial hearts also generate both obvious and subtle phenomenological changes in their bearers. Incorporating a mechanical heart with both interior and exterior features is challenging. Artificial hearts produce and draw attention to new representations of otherwise felt or interocepted visceral states, and might interrupt pre-device motor intentionalities. Devices detach circulation from ordinary cardiac rhythms, while machine routines mark out new temporalities. In this paper, I introduce artificial hearts and why phenomenology is useful for considering them, then focus in on the three scales – short-, medium-, and long-term – of temporal change they may generate. 

Bio: Pat McConville is a doctoral candidate in philosophical bioethics at the Monash Bioethics Centre, Monash University, Australia. He principally draws on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to explore the phenomenology of medical devices, particularly artificial hearts. He has also published on phenomenology and congenital illness, phenomenology and reverse triage, and phenomenology and the aesthetics of the early arcade game Asteroids. 

This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project. 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? 

Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Penelope Lusk, University of Pennsylvania. 

Penelope Lusk '“It said the quiet part out loud”: Reshaping Shame in the #MedBikini Twitter Movement' 

Abstract: Becoming-a-physician through medical education is a process often mediated by shame (Bynum); that shame is not always as explicit or discriminatory as in July 2020, when the Journal of Vascular Surgery published an article classifying surgery trainee social media posts as either ‘professional' or ‘unprofessional.' Considered unprofessional: controversial social or political comments, and “inappropriate” attire including bikinis and swimwear. The article was interpreted as explicit shaming of gendered bodies within the profession and met backlash in the form of a Twitter campaign in which healthcare workers posted their bikini pictures with the hashtag #MedBikini. Here, I analyse Twitter discourse and popular coverage of #MedBikini as a surface reworking of the affective economy in medical training and suggest potential phenomenological implications of this shift (Ahmed). 

 The Vascular Surgery article made the nature of medical professional discipline visible, as it utilized surveillance and classification to manifest power and encourage normalization—and attempted to circulate shame among trainees. However, participants in #MedBikini re-signified bikinis (and their gendered and racialized bodies) as not-shameful, but valuable and resistant to dominant norms. Simultaneously, the #MedBikini movement highlights how racialized attire (hijab) and racialized bodies continue to be attached to negative feelings in the profession, complicating the potential meaning of the response as a social movement. Phenomenologically, the signification of bodies has potential impact on the experience of being- or becoming-a-physician. The revaluing of bodies within medical training reassigns group notions of shame and pride, reflecting Sedgwick's notion of shame as a mobile and identity-producing emotion. The reshaping of the affective economy at the discursive level highlights the potential role of ‘affective activism' in forming the power dynamics of medical training and the profession. That potential can be fulfilled when discourse translates into political and institutional responses which manifest change in the embodied experience of medical training. 

Bio: Penelope Lusk is a doctoral student in Education, Culture, and Society at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She was a 2020-2021 Fulbright student fellow at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research interests are focused on healthcare and professional education, affect theory, critical theory and philosophy. 

This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project. 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? 

Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Janna van Grunsven, Delft University of Technology. 

Janna van Grunsven 'Reimagining Embodied Well-Being: Quasi-Cartesianism, Crip Technoscience & 4E Cognition' 

Abstract: The aim of my paper is to show that insights from the field of embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition can be used to articulate a more inclusive socio-technical imaginary of human well-being. I borrow the notion of a socio-technical imaginary from Jasanoff and Kim (2015), who define socio-technical imaginaries as “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology.” I begin by arguing that a quasi-Cartesian conception of the mind and the body currently shape our sociotechnical imagination, informing widely held ideas of: 

1. what minds and bodies are 

1. what well-functioning minds and bodies look like & 

1. what it means to design technologies that purport to support, augment, cure, and rehabilitate minds and bodies that deviate from the widely shared view of properly functioning bodies and minds. 

I will discuss how developments in Crip Technoscience allow us to interrogate and critique this quasi-Cartesian socio-technical imaginary. I will then propose that these Crip Technoscientific insights can be bolstered with insights from the field of embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition, also known as 4E Cognition. After I discuss how 4E offers an alternative take on ideas 1-3, listed above, I offer a tentative sketch of a more inclusive sociotechnical imaginary centered around Crip Technoscientific and 4E insights. 

Bio: Janna van Grunsven is an assistant professor in philosophy of technology at TU Delft and a research fellow in the NWO-Gravitation research programme “The Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies”. Van Grunsven's work combines insights from philosophy of technology and the field of 4E cognition and examines how different theoretical accounts of the mind and different technological developments can have decisive ethical implications for how disabled people are brought in view in a moral sense. Her work has appeared in journals such as Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Topoi, the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology. 

This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project. 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?