BSP Podcast

British Society for Phenomenology
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This podcast is for the British Society for Phenomenology and showcases papers at our conferences and events, interviews and discussions on the topic of phenomenology.

  1. 2 hr ago

    Janko Nešić - 'Peculiar landscape (of affordances) architects: Situating the autistic individual'

    Season 9 continues with a presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Janko Nešić   Abstract: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a psychopathological condition characterized by persistent deficits in social interaction, social communication and restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour and interests (APA 2013). To build an integrative, ecological-enactive account of autism, I propose we should endorse the skilled intentionality framework (SIF; Rietveld, Denys, & van Westen 2018). SIF connects a number of disciplines - ecological psychology (landscape of affordances), phenomenology (selective openness to and relevance of affordances, optimal grip), emotion psychology (states of action-readiness), and embodied neurodynamics (self-organizing affordance-related states of action-readiness). In SIF, embodied cognition is understood as skilled engagement with affordances (possibilities for action) in sociomaterial environment of the ecological niche by which an individual tends toward the optimal grip. An important part of SIF is an ecological-enactive interpretation of the free energy principle and predictive processing (Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014). Predictive processing accounts point out that in ASD too much precision is assigned to prediction errors (Van de Cruys et al. 2014; Constant et al. 2020; Miller et al. 2022).  Autistics suffer from suboptimal generative models that do not reach high levels of abstraction and generality (they have “overfitted” models). I will show that in SIF`s terms, autistic patterns of action-readiness pick out very specific solicitations in the environment and achieve optimal grip only in well-known situations and specifically constructed niches. They make interventions in the environment with reliable cue-effect relations. Autistic individuals lack the openness (pathological embodiment) needed to be responsive to the relevant affordances, pilling up habits and skills that are rigidly applied without adjustment to the changing environment. I argue that autistic persons favour social environments that increase predictability through ritual behaviour and routines (XXX et al. 2022) and design monotonous landscapes of affordances.   Biography: I am a junior postdoctoral researcher on The Sciences of the Origin Project (University of Oxford project ‘New Horizons for Science and Religion in Central and Eastern Europe’ and John Templeton Foundation) at the Institute for Philosophy (Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade). My research is located at the intersection of Philosophy of Mind, Phenomenology, and Philosophy of Psychiatry. I focus on studying pathologies of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in autism spectrum disorder and building an integrative approach to autistic disturbances that combines phenomenological, enactivist, ecological and neuroscientific (predictive processing /free energy principle) perspectives.    Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

  2. 2 days ago

    Natalia Burakowska & Danielle Petherbridge - 'Beyond the Narrative Self: Questions of Personhood in Dementia'

    Season 9 begins with a presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Natalia Burakowska & Danielle Petherbridge   Abstract: The notions of what constitutes self and personhood are philosophically disputed, with different accounts focusing on narrative construction, others on a pure identity pole, or different phenomenological accounts pointing to a minimal or experiential notion of self in contrast to personhood, which includes habitual, social and culture aspects. In this paper, we problematise these various accounts based on the consequences for persons with neurological illnesses, such as dementia. The paper, however, has a more important aim. We draw on research arising out of engaged phenomenological workshops conducted with carers and persons with dementia to investigate the implications of assumptions about what constitutes the self and personhood in health care settings. In recent years, the ‘person-centred’ approach to dementia, first developed by Tom Kitwood (1997), has gained prominence within healthcare settings. However, we identify ways in which the person-centred approach to dementia is limited and potentially problematic. In many settings, it relies on a narrative construction of personhood, whether prior to memory loss or reconstructed from family members (McGreevy, 2015). We suggest persons with dementia should be considered to maintain personhood even after the onset of memory loss or seeming loss of narrative and linguistic capacities. We reflect on the ways in which our engaged phenomenological workshops have informed new understandings of: i) persons with dementia as dynamic and developing persons capable of expressing themselves in embodied ways; ii) the ramifications of defining what constitutes persons in the context of dementia in terms of narrative selves iii) how such reassessments might inform the practice of carers. This research will demonstrate that a shift away from understanding persons merely as narrative constructions and equipping carers with an embodied understanding of personhood can shift some of the power and dignity back to the patient.      Biography: Natalia Burakowska is a PhD student in Philosophy at University College Dublin and an Irish Research Council postgraduate scholar. She works in the areas of phenomenology, philosophy of mind and applied philosophy. Her doctoral work is focused on a phenomenological approach to dementia that conceptualises it as both a cognitive and bodily condition, taking account of the lived experience of dementia, vulnerability and forms of ethical responsiveness and care.  Danielle Petherbridge is Ass. Professor in Philosophy at University College Dublin. Her primary research interests include phenomenology and social philosophy, medical humanities and ethics. She writes in the area of phenomenology and illness, critical phenomenology, and social philosophy. She is currently working on a research project on phenomenological approaches to dementia, and is PI of an Irish Research Council New Foundations funded project BodyDementia. She is a team member of the EU Funded Horizon 2020 grant Policy, Expertise and Trust (PERITIA) and co-founder of Health, Ethics and Narrative Ireland.       Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

  3. 10 Jul

    Maya Mukamel - Black Academics’ Embodied Histories of Institutional Racism in Psychotherapy Education Settings

    Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a presentation from Maya Mukamel   Abstract: In this research, we employed a phenomenological inquiry into our embodied histories to develop an account of our collective experiences of institutional racism in the fields of psychology, counselling, and psychotherapy in th UK. We approached this as Black tutors and allies, who are educators, trainers, practitioners, and former students and trainees. The study is based on six interviews conducted by and with three participants. In the interviews, we utilized Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing technique to access our embodied experiences of racism and institutional racism. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used to analyze the data.   The research findings show that institutionalized racism within the psychotherapeutic field is a prevalent lived experience among the Black academics who participated in this study. They have been profoundly affected by institutional racism, through race-based traumatic stress and racial trauma. Institutional racism emerged as a lived reality in their narratives concerning participation in psychotherapy training environments, both as trainees and academics. They described institutional racism as fostering hostile and unsafe environments, where racial microaggressions were pervasive, prompting coping mechanisms associated with survival and self-preservation. Similar experiences have been documented in prior research on trainee experiences.   Several protective factors were identified: participants leveraged their awareness of racial dynamics to recognize and navigate these dynamics, in a way that contributed to their personal and professional development. Supportive relationships among Black staff and students during training, as well as relationships with academic and professional staff who demonstrated a deep understanding of these issues, were deemed highly beneficial, even essential. Participants also drew on resources outside of professional settings for support, and engagement in research and critical bodies of knowledge aided in contextualizing their experiences and generating knowledge on these issues.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

  4. 17 Jun

    Emily Hughes - Boredom, static-time and alienation during lockdown

    Season 8 concludes with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Emily Hughes   Abstract: In this paper I interpret the experience of boredom during the Covid 19 pandemic in light of Heidegger’s analysis of profound boredom, wherein time slows down and the world in its entirety becomes boring for one. For Heidegger, the experience of profound boredom is distressing, in that it involves a feeling of not being at home in the world. And yet it is also a revelatory experience, because it is disclosive of the structure of temporality and thereby new futural possibilities. Drawing on long-form questionnaire responses to the experience of social distancing during the pandemic, I will demonstrate that the experience of profound boredom during lockdown in many ways conforms to Heidegger’s account. I will argue, however, that in lockdown the revelatory capacity of profound boredom is constrained by an accelerated, technological conception of chronological time, which is imposed by the constantly shifting timelines for the easing of restrictions, the administration of the vaccine, the opening of borders, etc. As a result, I will argue, the revelatory capacity of profound boredom is undermined in lockdown such that, instead of disclosing new futural possibilities, it has resulted in the proliferation of alienation, despair and disillusionment.   Biography: Dr Emily Hughes is a postdoctoral research associate in philosophy at the University of York, working on the AHRC-funded project ‘Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience.’ She completed her PhD at the University of New South Wales. Her 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.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

  5. 15 Jun

    Alessandro Anzà - Transgenerational Responsibility and Phenomenology of Revolution. The Future as a Present Challenge to Education

    Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Alessandro Anzà   Abstract: Before becoming a subject in philosophical and political studies, transgenerationality is a genetic or generative approach that reflects upon the ‘process of becoming’ of phenomena and their constitutive systems, and conceives this as a process that occurs over the generations. This term refers to transgenerational inheritance of epigenetic markers from one organism to the next or the psychological term, which asserts that behaviours of trauma can be transferred in between generations. Questioning generative phenomenology in the contemporary scenario means embracing the legacy of the concept of ‘generation’ in the history of philosophy and also exploring its potential for different fields of knowledge, such as politics, ethics, education. The first meaningful occurrence of the concept is in Aristotle’s Περ γενσεως κα φϑορς (On Generation and Corruption), wherein γνεσις means that things come into being from not being through causes, or that everything is generated purely through alteration. In 1924, Heidegger claimed that in research into history we find unclarified phenomena, such as that of generations, of the connection between generations. As he wrote, the historicity of Dasein grounded in the possibility according to which any specific present understands how to be futural (GA 64). In the Heideggerian philosophy of time and in the Arendtian phenomenology, we find a connection between the project of education and the revolutionary power of the future (Hodge, 2015; Loidolt, 2018, Parekh, 2008). In recent years transgenerational approaches contributed to philosophy by providing ethical frameworks based on the analysis of the contemporary world as well as on the prediction about the future of the Earth and the fate of globalised humanity (Andina, 2020; Nixon, 2020). The aim of this paper is to present transgenerationality as the obligations to future generations, but also the call of present-day humanity has an historical challenge to education.   Biography: Alessandro Anzà (1992) earned a BA and MA in Philosophy with distinction from the University of Palermo. He is an Alumnus of the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies in Naples, with a scholarship in Political Philosophy (2019), and an Alumnus of the Harvard Kennedy School, Executive Education in Social Sciences (2020). His field of specialisation is phenomenology, 4 hermeneutics, political theory, and interdisciplinary studies on education and social inequality. He is publishing his thesis on time and education in Heidegger’s work. Waiting for a PhD, his research is about fundamentals concepts, such as humanity, education, and freedom, in Heidegger and Arendt’s philosophical legacy.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

  6. 12 Jun

    Ileana Bortun - Witnessing the Future. A Temporal Perspective on Arendt’s Political Judgment

    Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Ileana Bortun   Abstract: I approach the theme of the future as a present concern from an ethico-political perspective, through an existential reading of Arendt’s account of judgment. From this perspective, “witnessing the future” is the human ability to envisage a possibility not yet fulfilled which, albeit rooted in the past, does not follow necessarily from it. There is an interplay between reproductive and productive imagination which opens up the space of freedom necessary for reflecting on future possibilities and choosing among them. I begin by showing why Arendt’s conception of political judgment is relevant for relating to the future beyond the passive expectation of the not-yet to happen. To assume the future as a present concern is to assume the responsibility for the future – not only for our personal future, but also for that of others and of the common world we share with them. Ontologically speaking, it is a responsibility that we always already have; ontically speaking, however, we can assume it or not. I argue that judging or what Arendt calls “representative thinking” is a way in which we can assume this responsibility: by looking at a particular situation or a possible course of action from the viewpoints of all involved in it or potentially affected by it, we can discriminate between right and wrong and thus choose how to act, taking as a reference point the potential agreement of others. Nevertheless, the ability of judging to guide future action is undermined by a widespread thesis that Arendt’s work would contain two different, even contradictory, models of judgment: one practical and future-oriented (involving the agent), one contemplative and past-oriented (involving “the spectator”). By connecting Arendt’s conception of judging to Heidegger’s interpretation of temporality, I argue that this separation is artificial, because the past and the future cannot be separated.   Biography: Dr Ileana Bortun received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Bucharest (in 2014), with the thesis “Shaping an Existential Ethics by Identifying the Connections between Metaphysics and Totalitarianism”, arguing for the possibility of developing an ethics starting from Heidegger’s 6 existential analytic, by taking the kinship between metaphysics (in Heidegger’s interpretation) and totalitarianism (in Arendt’s interpretation) as a negative reference point. In a post-doctoral project (2018-2020), she developed further this existential ethics through a phenomenological approach to political judgment (in Arendt’s conception). She is currently involved in the project “I was there. Laying the Foundations for a Comprehensive Phenomenology of Testimony”.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

  7. 10 Jun

    David Deamer - Polysemous futurity in the cinematics of Cloud Atlas and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil

    Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from David Deamer   Abstract: Luisa Rey is reading the letters of a dead man: ‘I’m trying to understand’, she says, why ‘we keep making the same mistakes over and over’. Somewhat abashed, Adam Ewing recites a question from memory, ‘how do we know what we can change, and what things must remain sacred and inviolable?’ Sonmi-451 is in magnetic shackles facing the Archivist. Fabricants, she responds accusingly, ‘have just one possible future’. Zachry listens in dread to the Abbess; possessed, she warns him of the dangerous days ahead: ‘Bridge a broken, hide below. Hands a bleedin, can’t let go. Enemy’s sleepin, don’t slit that throat’. In a cheap hotel, Robert Frobisher signs a letter to his lover with ‘Yours Eternally’, then shoots himself with a stolen Luger. Timothy Cavendish beams. After all the awfulness of the last few days, yes, ‘tomorrow life can begin afresh, afresh, afresh!’   Cloud Atlas (Wachowskis, Tykwer | 2012) concerns six very different characters traversing very different times and very different spaces across the world over some 500 years. These vectors are a loop composed of a disjunctive mosaic of images rendering a complex narration of disparate genres and tones, where the life of each character is captured in the crisis of their present while synchronously effecting and affecting the future vector. Accordingly, I argue, Cloud Atlas has a narrative that sees futurity as polysemous – a perspectival simultaneity of stasis and flux; anticipation, destiny, and novelty; circularity, progress, revolution, and decay.   To make this argument I employ Nietzsche, expressly Beyond Good and Evil (1886), sub-titled as it is Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Such resonance with the film, in turn, provides a lens on Nietzsche’s text, as staging the problems of the subject, society, drives, bodies and will in the present as a concern of a fundamental philosophy of the future: beyond brute oppositions of open or closed, static or dynamic, freedom or necessity (§2;§24).   Biography: Dr David Deamer is a free scholar whose research focuses upon cinema, culture, and the philosophy of Deleuze, Bergson, and Nietzsche. He is the author of two books on Deleuze (EUP 2016; Bloomsbury 2014). His most recent essay is ‘Deleuze’s Three Syntheses Go to Hollywood’ (2019), written for Film-Philosophy and shortlisted for the journal’s Annual Article Award 2020 (losing out to something far better). Deamer irregularly appears at conferences and invited seminars, tries to maintain a couple of blogs, and is co-presenter of the philoscifiz podcast (exploring on-screen sci-fi and philosophy). He has been working on a book on Nietzsche and cinema for some time.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

  8. 8 Jun

    J. Reese Faust - Writing a New Flesh of the World: Merleau-Ponty and Fanon on the Ethics of Futurity

    Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from J. Reese Faust   Abstract: Frantz Fanon closes his two major works with appeals to alter the flesh of the social world: Black Skin, White Masks pleas for a “sloughing off” of one’s skin (« un dépouillement »), while The Wretched of the Earth calls for us to “make a new skin” (« faire peau neuve »). Despite the clear influence that his notion of the body schema had on Fanon, it is surprising that Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the “flesh of the world” (« le chair du monde ») does not feature more frequently in scholarship—particularly so given Fanon’s sociogenic account of collective meaning-making. In this paper, I will read the diplopic ontology of Merleau-Ponty alongside the similarly deferred ontology that Fanon tacitly uses in Wretched of the Earth. I will argue that reading Fanonian sociogeny in terms of the flesh of the world renders his ethical and political demands all the more pressing, because it renders the future already pre-figured—although not totally determined—in the present. On this account, if the present quite literally consists in the socio-ontological grounding for any possible future, then embodied activity constructs and delimits those futures as part of the same ethico-ontological totality. In this sense, I argue that the future cannot be a “given,” since our embodied, intersubjective activity is what constitutes the horizons against which we act toward/in light of those futures. Since the ethical demands of the determinable future redound back onto those of the present, (in)capability is equivalent to futurity. I conclude by reflecting on how this reading alters Sylvia Wynter’s Fanonian call to (re)fashion the future of humanness, through (re)conceptualising “being human as praxis.”   Biography: J. Reese Faust is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at The University of Memphis. His primary areas of research are philosophy of law/critical legal theory and contemporary Continental philosophy, with interests in decolonial thought and social and political philosophy. He is currently writing a dissertation articulating a critical legal hermeneutic, using embodied phenomenology and Ronald Dworkin’s notion of dignity.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

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This podcast is for the British Society for Phenomenology and showcases papers at our conferences and events, interviews and discussions on the topic of phenomenology.

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  • Creator
    British Society for Phenomenology
  • Years Active
    2016 - 2026
  • Episodes
    196
  • Rating
    Clean
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    © Copyright 2020 All rights reserved.
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    BSP Podcast