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BSP Podcast

BSP Podcast

By: 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.Copyright 2020 All rights reserved. Philosophy Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Broken rhythms: a walk, a wheelchair, and disability discoveries

    Broken rhythms: a walk, a wheelchair, and disability discoveries
    Feb 2 2026
    Season 7 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 Davidson of University of South Florida, United States Abstract: I seek to bridge an experiential and representational chasm between people with significant disabilities and their caregivers by exploring the intercorporeal connections between my son and me on a walk through our neighborhood. Through the materiality of the wheelchair, I consider the embodied knowledge we share of the spaces we traverse and how the contours of those spaces shape our knowledge(s) of our bodies thereby informing my knowledge of disability as both a social construct inscribed on my son’s body and as a shared lived experience. Starting with Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the body as the “point of view upon the world” and utilizing his notion of “flesh,” I reflect upon the connections and exchanges between our bodies and with the world of our walk, all mediated through the simple technology of the manual wheelchair. The rhythms and anticipations, the obstacles and mishaps, and the transformation of the visual all give rise to knowledge of the disabled body, disability experience, and of disabling structures in the world. Through my contact with him and his chair and with the world, I discover my own experiential connections to his experience of disability. This phenomenological reading of our walk recenters the body in discourse on disability that often locates disability in social structures and institutions and risks marginalizing the lived experience of people with significant impairments. This work also offers a counter-narrative that foregrounds the interdependence and intercorporeality of caregiving and disability experience and opens up new possibilities for representation. Finally, my account reinforces phenomenological connections between the disabled body and the technologies that support and facilitate life and movement in and with the world. I challenge conceptions of technology as the new, digital, or innovative and reinforce the everydayness of fleshly contact between bodies and a simple machine. Biography: Adam is an adjunct faculty member in the Judy Genshaft Honors College at the University of South Florida (USF) and writer on disability issues and parenting. In 2020, he co-led a semester study abroad program for USF students to the University of Exeter. His educational and research background includes musical performance, popular music studies, cultural studies, and Christian theology. He teaches courses on knowledge and ethics, popular music, and walking and civic engagement. His current research interests include parenting and caregiving for children with significant disabilities, conceptions of fatherhood, and walking as a cultural and creative practice. 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/
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    19 mins
  • The Normate Body Schema and Assistive Technology: What Merleau-Ponty gets wrong about the "blind man’s cane"

    The Normate Body Schema and Assistive Technology: What Merleau-Ponty gets wrong about the "blind man’s cane"
    Jan 28 2026
    Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Rhona J. Flynn (University of Vienna, Austria) & Martin Huth (Messerli Research Institute, Vienna / Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Austria) Abstract: This talk will highlight classical phenomenology’s epistemic and ethical pitfalls in how it conceives of disabled and non-normate embodiment. Because Merleau-Ponty uses non-normate bodies primarily as contrast foil he runs the risk of misrepresenting non-normate embodiment and reinforcing ableism. The famous example of the blind man’s cane illustrates this well: (1) In imagining blindness as mere lack of sight, rather than a “world-creating” form of embodiment (Reynolds, 2017), Merleau-Ponty gets blindness wrong. Although Merleau-Ponty’s broader account provides us with the means to theorize any form of embodiment as full-blown existence, in misrepresenting blindness, and failing to account for variegated forms of embodiment with particular, non-normate capabilities, he tacitly falls prey to ableism and oculocentrism. (2) The description of the white cane as being included in the body schema mistakes object annexation or extension for incorporation (Reynolds, 2018); this is the result of an imaginative failure by a sighted agent regarding how visually impaired people relate to the world, their own embodiment, and how they use assistive technology. (3) Merleau-Ponty underestimates the social world in which the visibility of assistive technology can expose the body to others as non-normate and, thus, to stigmatization. In omitting “the social dimensions of disabled experiences” (Shew, 2020), he misses important aspects of how disabled people relate to assistive technology precisely because of that sociality. These investigations serve as a starting point for a reconsideration of phenomenology’s potential for the analysis of disability. Imaginative failures can perpetuate ableist stereotypes about disability and lead to epistemic failures. A more plural understanding of the body as vehicle of our being toward the world will recognize the ableist underpinnings of classical phenomenology, and build on the perspectives and experiences of disabled people. Biography: Rhona J. Flynn is prae-doc with the FWF-funded research group “The Limits of Imagination: Animals, Empathy, Anthropomorphism” at the Messerli Research Institute (Vienna), and a member of the Vienna Doctoral School of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. Their current research brings into contact feminist epistemology, philosophy of mind, and critical disability theory, to consider whether empathy (or something like it) could be considered a social-epistemic practice. Martin Huth has been graduated from the University of Vienna with a dissertation on biomedical ethics from a phenomenological perspective. Since 2008 he is a lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. Until 2011 he has also been working with people with cognitive disabilities and mental illnesses. In 2011 he became a Post Doc at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna. His research interests comprise theories of vulnerability, empathy, political theory, disability studies, biomedical ethics and animal ethics. Since 2021 he is PI of the third-party funded project The Limits of Imagination: Animals, Empathy, Anthropomorphism. 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/
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    19 mins
  • Memory, Modernity, and the Muslim Question

    Memory, Modernity, and the Muslim Question
    Jan 26 2026
    Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Riad Alarian of The University of Toledo, United States Abstract: The deployment of nostalgia as a neutral term of expository proportions has become common in political discourse. The promise of objectively analyzing the persuasions and activities of modern subjects for whom the past is apparently important largely explains the term’s discursive appeal. But it is not clear that the political deployment of nostalgia can be “neutral” in the way users hope for at least three reasons: (1) because debates over the term’s exact meaning remain central in enduring tensions over the boundaries of “modernity,” (2) because the term typically functions, in practice, to offer a partisan diagnosis of others’ memoric standpoints, and (3) because the term’s use seems to encompass a particular imagination of the “modern self” and the “un-modern other.” This paper probes these contentions by interrogating recent discourses on so-called Muslim nostalgia. I focus on these discourses for the simple reason that we live today in the age of the Muslim question which, in the words of the political theorist Anne Norton, is a time when “the figure of the Muslim has become the axis where questions of political philosophy and political theology, politics and ethics meet.” I argue that the diagnosis of “Muslim nostalgia” presents one of the clearest expressions of the term’s pejorative deployment, and I claim, in conclusion, that this allegedly neutral use of the term is not only encumbered by a variety of political impressions about time, history, memory, and modernity, but also works to corroborate a certain story about the world and the nostalgic subject’s place in it. Such discursive deployments of nostalgia act not only to dismiss the nostalgic subject’s claims in and about the world, but also to affirm the epistemic regime of a provincial form of modernity—often in the endeavor to deny the desire for radical transformation. Biography: Riad Alarian is a part-time lecturer in philosophy at the University of Toledo. He holds an MA in philosophy from the University of Toledo, an MSc in political theory from the University of Edinburgh, and a BA in philosophy from the George Washington University. 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/
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    21 mins
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