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
  • Our Indignation Drives Me – Affects and Politics During The All-Poland Women’s Strike 2020-21

    Our Indignation Drives Me – Affects and Politics During The All-Poland Women’s Strike 2020-21
    Jan 23 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 Teresa Fazan of the University of Warsaw, Poland Abstract: I would like to propose a contribution discussing the phenomenology of resistance that emerged in 2020 after the Constitutional Tribunal de facto banned abortion in Poland from the perspective of analysis of participants’ affects and emotions. First, I wish to discuss the current situation of abortion in Poland and familiarise listeners with social mobilisation defending reproductive justice, which emerged during the All-Poland Women’s Strike. Then, I wish to engage in a deepened analysis of the interviews I conducted with the protesters during the mobilisation at the break of 2020 and 2021. At the time, I interviewed them in order to understand how singular acts of resistance gained social and political meaning, granted agency to the participants, and helped understand the ends of the movement (Bennet & Segerberg 2012, Korolczuk 2018, Majewska 2021). For this particular presentation, I want to look at how the interviewees described their emotions and shifts in their changing attitudes, how they experienced the relationship between the bodily presence at the site of the protests, personal affects, and collective action with its broader meaning-making processes (Butler 2015, Fraser 1990, McNay 2000). The very specific situatedness of their experiences exposes the power dynamics between different agents (government bodies, police force, activists, citizens), the different strategies of resistance, and the way new possibilities for expression and opposition emerge during lived protest action. In my analysis, I wish to employ a feminist approach to phenomenology in order to treat affects and emotions as political tools shaping attitudes and mobilising agents to take stands and engage in the social movement. Biography: Teresa Fazan — a Ph.D. candidate at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw. I studied philosophy and gender studies at the University of Warsaw and Central European University in Vienna. In my research, I am particularly interested in feminist philosophy, postcolonial studies, and issues regarding the politics of reproduction. 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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    17 mins
  • Who is the subject of collective shame?

    Who is the subject of collective shame?
    Jan 21 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 Sepehr Razavi of University of Edinburgh, UK Abstract: A breakthrough conceptual distinction in the interdisciplinary research on self-conscious emotions concerns the difference between shame and guilt: whereas guilt concerns circumscribed deeds, shame is a negative evaluation of the self as a whole (Lewis 1971; Tangney 2002; Cavell 2003). This has drawn the interest of classical phenomenologists from Scheler, Levinas, and Sartre to more contemporary ones such as Felipe León, Dan Zahavi, and Luna Dolezal insofar as this distinction grounds a robust understanding of the self. Although disagreements emerge at the level of assessing the degree of social mediation involved in shame and whether the “ugly feeling” can lead to self-improvement (Tangney and Dearing 2004, 3, 55; Deonna, Rodogno, and Teroni 2012, 35), shame’s reflexive function in face-to-face and social encounters has been stressed by the phenomenological tradition. However, an instance of shame that has been far less studied within this tradition, especially in light of a reflexive dimension, is in shame as the triadic object of collective intentionality. As a case study, I will elaborate on the national shame following the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports on the state violence towards Canada’s indigenous population in “residential schools.” What will transpire is that empirical testimonies show ambiguity and cross-contamination where research had tried to neatly delineate between emotions of a common semantic field that includes embarrassment, denial, shame, and guilt, among other negative emotions (Regan 2011, 55). However, these mixed emotions are demonstrative of a process of narrative identity that ties the non-native population of Canada as standing opposed to first nation communities. Biography: Sepehr Razavi is an MSc student in Mind, Language and Embodied Cognition at the University of Edinburgh. Using the frameworks of classical and contemporary phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, he is interested in the concept of normality as it relates to research on emotions and pathologies. 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
  • Menstrual temporality: Cyclic bodies in a linear world

    Menstrual temporality: Cyclic bodies in a linear world
    Jan 19 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 Sarah Pawlett Jackson of the University of London and St Mellitus College, UK Abstract: In this paper I will explore a phenomenology of the menstrual cycle, focusing on the cycle’s rhythm as a form of lived temporality. This is an underexplored area of phenomenological and philosophical analysis yet is of far-reaching empirical and social significance. I will consider ways that the subject can be alienated from this rhythm as a result of a dominant cultural narrative of ‘linear time’. Whilst most phenomenological analyses of temporality have majored on Husserl’s ecstatic time-consciousness, Henri LeFebvre focuses on a conceptual and phenomenological analysis of temporality as rhythmic, where this is ‘founded on the experience and knowledge of the body’ (LeFebvre 2004, 78). In a similar vein, Thomas Fuchs (2018) lays out a series of ways that human embodiment is cyclically rhythmed. This fundamental cyclicity, he argues, finds itself in discordance with ‘the linear conception of time [that] finds its shape in the scientific-technological advances of modernity’ (Fuchs 2018, 48). Neither LeFebvre nor Fuchs look specifically at the embodied rhythm of the menstrual cycle. Nor do they look in any significant detail at how different bodies may disclose different rhythms. Building on their insights, I will consider aspects of a variable but identifiable rhythm through the lived experience of the ‘seasons’ of pre-ovulation, ovulation, pre-menstruation and menstruation. In this I will draw on the insights of the ’menstrual cycle awareness’ movement – a practice of attending to the lived experience of moods and energies in each quadrant of the cycle (Pope & Hugo Wurlitzer 2017). I will argue that the lived rhythm of the menstrual cycle is a specific form of Fuchs’ ‘cyclical time of the body’ that finds itself in tension with modernity’s ‘linear time’. I will argue further that this dissonance between the menstrual body and the social and political world tends to be compounded by a lack of ‘menstrual literacy’ in education and culture. This analysis therefore hopes to bring phenomenological analysis into conversation with normative and socio-political issues, contributing to the idea that the phenomenology of temporality is a feminist concern (Schües, Olkowski & Fielding, 2011). Biography: Sarah Pawlett Jackson is a Tutor at the University of London and a Lecturer at St Mellitus College. She has also lecturers and tutored at Heythrop College, The Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford and the University of Roehampton. Her primary research to date has been on the phenomenology of intersubjectivity. Her other research interests include embodiment and 4E cognition, phenomenology of emotion, ethics and philosophy of religion. 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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    23 mins
  • The original intercorporeality of the Self

    The original intercorporeality of the Self
    Jan 16 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 Nicole Miglio of the State University of Milan, Italy Abstract: In this talk, I examine the process of pregnancy as a sense-making experience, taking seriously its significance both for the gestating self and for the fetal-other. Drawing on recent developments in phenomenology of pregnancy (e.g., Depraz, 2003; Heinämaa, 2014; Lymer, 2016; Miglio, 2019), as well as the flourishing interest in cognitive science (e.g., Ciaunica et al. 2021), my talk aims to show how in utero tactile and olfactory experiences are original to the being-in-the-world of the human self. In the womb, the subject experiences a unique co-constitution together with their environment, which is, at the same time, the “inside” of another self (the pregnant person). In considering the gestational experience, I argue that the concept of intercorporeality allows us to grasp a common feature of the human being – namely, the fact that our own embodiment is not a private affair, but originally intercorporeal (cf Moran, 2017) The human self finds themselves in an intercorporeal dimension even before their own birth, and conversely the gestating self has some experiences of the fetal-other as living organism inside her – namely kicking, moving, and being with(in) her. By challenging a widespread spatial conception of human pregnancy (in terms of “container” and “inside” see e.g. Dolezal, 2018), my analyses seek to open up a way to address the subject which starts from the phenomenological reality that we are not born as adult and indipendent subjects. Keywords: pregnancy; critical phenomenology; touch; intersubjectivity. Biography: Nicole is a Postdoc Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, State University of Milan. She earned a Ph.D. in Feminist Phenomenology at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University (Milan), during which she did research visiting stays in the US (George Washington University) and in the UK (University of Exeter). After her Ph.D. discussion in September 2021, she held a postdoctoral position at the Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Haifa. Dr. Miglio’s main research areas are contemporary aesthetics, critical phenomenology, and feminist philosophy. She is currently publishing her first monograph, “Gestational Phenomenology. The Radical Intercorporeality of Pregnancy” (forthcoming with Lexington Books). 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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    23 mins
  • Embodied, Situated, Entangled: Iris Marion Young and 4E-cognition

    Embodied, Situated, Entangled: Iris Marion Young and 4E-cognition
    Jan 14 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 Julia Zaenker of the Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, Denmar Abstract: In the last decades, 4E approaches to cognition have made a strong case for the premise that our social perception originates from our interactions and hence presupposes an inherently engaged perspective. To make this case, embodied and situated cognition are thought of as complementary programmes: Situated cognition is embodied, embodied cognition situated. Depending on the authors and, more crucially, the phenomena under study one has been emphasized over the other. However, these programmes are only meaningful tools for analysis if it is clear how they are different and how they relate to one another. Recent work in critical phenomenology has helped to bring politically and ethically relevant phenomena to the attention of 4E-cognition research. In light of these “critical issues”, it has been argued that situatedness needs to be taken (more) seriously (Maur). What does this imply for the relation of situated and embodied cognition? In what sense, if at all, should situated cognition become the primary concern? To address these questions, I draw on Iris Marion Young’s phenomenological contributions to feminist and political theory. Her work should be of interest for 4E-cognition research because Young maintains a nuanced balance between the notions of embodiment and situatedness across her phenomenological work. For example, her seminal paper ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ emphasizes situated embodiment over situatedness, while ‘Gender as Seriality’ highlights the role of experiences of anonymity due to situatedness. I argue that Young’s perspective on situatedness and embodiment is not straightforward and brings out a genuinely phenomenological and political perspective of what it is like to experience situatedness and situated embodiment. I advocate that this perspective can enlighten critical 4E-cognition approaches: Firstly, because it emphasizes the importance of a multifaceted approach to situatedness. Secondly, because it can highlight potential limits of addressing critical issues within an exclusively cognitive-epistemic framework. Biography: Julia Zaenker has studied Philosophy and Chemical Engineering in Edinburgh, Darmstadt and Copenhagen and is currently a PhD-Fellow at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. In her PhD project, she investigates the interrelation of second-personal engagement, communicative engagement, reciprocity and recognition with communal and collective experiences. She is affiliated with the ERC-advanced grant project “Who are We?” directed by Dan Zahavi. 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