For most of us, learning to communicate is as effortless as breathing, and like air, communication skills are elemental; integral to our human existence in this world. Our communicative competencies might be seen as a bridge, facilitating our relationship with the world we are immersed in. But what happens when a child has difficulty learning to communicate effectively? What happens when their most basic messages of hunger or thirst fail to be understood or they are unable to jointly share in (...) everyday experiences of curiosity, joy, frustration, or anger? In these situations, it is the role of the Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) to span the distance between a child and their family, a child and the world, building a route for life experiences and understandings to cross over. An SLP often begins with assessment and after a brief interaction, an SLP may come to a ‘naming’ such as delay or disorder. While the caring professional may intend this naming to be helpful in better understanding a child or facilitating access to valuable support, this naming may also place an immeasurable weight upon the child and their family. The act of naming is therefore an ethical concern. Through observation and interviews, this paper presentation explores SLP’s experiences of coming to a diagnosis through the human lens of phenomenological inquiry. It seeks to enhance thoughtful and conscientious practice by considering the ‘ethical experience of caring responsibility’ as applied to SLP (van Manen, 2016). (shrink)

Like the human mind, the human body is the medium by which we represent ourselves, whether we are patients or healthcare providers. This paper concerns the significance of understanding the existential phenomenological side of a patient’s body within healthcare. To care for a patient’s body, one needs to be aware of how the body appears to itself, to others, and in a lager environmental reality. We think and feel and observe the world with our body, especially with the brain and (...) nervous system, but also with other dimensions of the body manifesting itself as a somatic tonus. The healthcare providers’ body does not only represent a profession, but also who they are as a person and what kind of environment they are affected by. The same applies to the patients' body. As a tool for experiencing, a tool inseparable from our very being, our physical body functions as a surface open to and in contact with the healthcare environment that surrounds it. In the modern healthcare regime, the human body is nearly always visible and under constant surveillance. In the environment of control and visibility bodies become psychologized and normalized to fit into sociocultural demands of economic adaption, social participation, and communication, which in certain situations seem hostile to the ideology of care, freedom, and humanity. We should realize that all our ethical concepts and norms, even the very notion of humanity that underwrites them, depend on social forms of life involving the ways we experience our bodies in different medical and sociocultural situations. (shrink)

Based on Merleau-Pontys’s philosophy of flesh, this paper outlines possibilities for organisational practices towards sustainability development. In order to elucidate these en-fleshed practices, the paper begins by presenting Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body and perception as well as his ontology of ‘flesh’. In particular, flesh is interpreted as elemental ‘carnality’ and formative medium. As such, it is processed through sensual and reflexive doubling as a reversibility and chiasm of the sentient and the sensible. This understanding opens for the path to (...) a post-dualistic, transformative approach towards processes of post-dualistic ‘wild being and ‘inter-be(com)ing’ in organisations. These concepts of Flesh are related to affect and imagination as well as organization and sustainability. The paper then offers some practical and political as well as research implications and concludes with some final perspectives on possible enfleshed inter-practices of sustainability. (shrink)

This article reviews Stephen K. Levine’s 2019 book, Philosophy of Expressive Arts Therapy: Poiesis and the Therapeutic Imagination. The book, complete with poetry and anecdotes is connected to larger concepts in psychology, phenomenology and philosophy. The article summarizes the books contents and offers a review from the perspective of phenomenology and the expressive art practice.

The present essay offers a phenomenological examination of peoples’ experiences of place memory. What is it like when the memory of a place is awoken in the event of daily life? What is it about the experience of certain places that make them significant? How might the experience of strong place memory be described so that it may become better understood? What features anchor a memory of place to our experience of the present? To ask these questions requires an orientation (...) to the lived experience of resonant place. For the purposes of this piece­­­­­­­, two themes – resonance as the realization of independence, and resonance as unsettled expectation – are described as unique structures of human experience. (shrink)

This is a review of Michael van Manen's & Max van Manen's (Eds.) Classic Writing for a Phenomenology of Practice, published by Routledge.

Our own animately e/motional bodies are yearning for relationships with other bodies of the more-than-human kind. To support this opinion, I describe an intra-action caring for three rescued piglets that led to an awareness of human animal and animal-other relationships. The following questions are addressed: 1) What is involved corporeally, e/motionally, and sensorily in interspecies intra-actions? 2) What are the affects and telling effects of these intra-actions? I describe how my intra-action with the piglets manifested an awareness of the liveliness (...) of other animals, and an understanding of interspecies kinship. To further understand interspecies kinship, I explore the role of the body, and the e/motional and sensory affordances of the intra-actions involving me and the piglets. The concepts of corporeality, inter-corporeality, and trans-corporeality are considered. In the second part of the paper, I describe tensions of human exceptionalism that were revealed in caring for the piglets. (shrink)

Absent mechanisms of restorative justice, victims of sexual harassment, particularly those within the LGBT+ community that are already frequent targets of relational aggression, are unlikely to either report or reckon with the consequences of inappropriate workplace behaviors and discrimination. Written from the perspective of a masculinized bisexual whose encounter with a pervasive culture of sexual harassment and psychological abuse provoked suicidal ideation, this paper employs the artistic practices of illustration as a means of first re-cognizing and recognizing phenomena, a Ricœurean (...) construct of narrative and a palimpsest of multivocal text and images to evoke the lived experience of harassment and an analytic layer to invoke the phenomenon. By drawing, writing, and thinking through the phenomenon, the marriage of artistic and phenomenological approaches allows both researcher and reader to confront the ‘painful truths’ that otherwise resist easy analysis. (shrink)

What is it like to interact in a clinical setting when a technological device is participating? This inquiry was conducted in a primary healthcare setting, with the aim of shedding light on clinicians’ and patients’ experiences regarding the use of a tablet-with-app, intended for a more systematic assessment, as well as electronic registration and storing of patient data. In this paper, we present an account of four experiential exemplars of adopting an eTool in a clinical setting. The “faciality” of the (...) digital device seems to be important to both patients and clinicians, as well as the interaction between them. The “face” can be used for engaging in conversation, addressing awkward topics, communicating, or inviting involvement. The face can also be used for just resting the eyes or lowering the gaze to maintain a low profile during the clinical encounter. Concurrently, the size, the shape, and the backside of the eTool’s face can mediate distance. We expand the notion of “screen sharing” and suggest that humans’ ability to move from one mode to another and embody digital spaces in the clinical encounter seems enhanced by their ability to include the eTool’s face in their interaction. This knowledge can be used in the development of digital tools for teaching, as well as for health professions. (shrink)

This article highlights the lived experience of the relationship between the mental health nurse and the patient in institutional treatment. The premise for a relationship between persons in professional settings is the awareness of the responsibility that the relationship is a possibility rather than a tool, and that the relationship is a lived encounter additional to being a factual experience. Any relationship – personal and professional – in this understanding is an action as well as a re-action, as both parties (...) are at mercy of each other and thus they can only partly plan and predict the process and the outcome of their relationship. We explore the relationship between nurse and patient, in terms of the tension between difference and togetherness, and suggest solicitude to be a core quality in mental health relations. (shrink)

“Friedrich Schleiermacher [wrote]: ‘for every domain that can be called an art in the narrow sense of the word …practice always precedes theory’ (2021, p. 5). Art is meant here in the sense taken from the Middle Ages, as one speaks of a healing art, the art of statecraft, etc. This means that there has always been—indeed since the beginning of humankind—a kind of education which is manifest in certain practices and [later] in certain institutions such as schools. This all (...) existed before any disciplinary or scientific theory of education had been formed. Schleiermacher continues: ‘The dignity of practice exists independently from theory. Theory only makes practice more conscious’ (p. 6). The task of such a theory, in other words, is to make us aware of what is already given to us. One can put this succinctly: Being a part of an educational science, pedagogy is the theory of a practice, a practice that builds on a previously existing practice, and that is then related back to theory.". (shrink)

The mystery of death is part of the enigma of life itself. In nursing, being next to someone dying makes us more aware of our strengths and limitations while caring for someone who walks into the unknown. As nurses, we are affected by these experiences, so how do we deal with them? What is the essence of caring for someone dying in the ICU? What makes each experience unique? Through the experience of being with someone as they are dying, we (...) discover our limits, our finiteness. We cannot deny death’s disruptive and silent spirit that embodies us, yet death, like other aspects of life, is unique; it appears to teach us that life goes on, that life cannot wait for us. (shrink)

Published in 2021 as part of Sage Publications’ Qualitative Research Methods Series, Katarzyna Peoples’ How to Write a Phenomenological Dissertation: A Step-by-Step Guide provides budding phenomenologists a practical framework with which to engage a phenomenological research design and craft a quality doctoral dissertation. Peoples offers a point of entry for a novice looking to understand the purpose and machinations of phenomenological research, believing that phenomenological philosophy and research design can be grasped if it is presented in a straightforward manner. Peoples’ (...) book does not overreach, and is both accessible and engaging; it will be helpful for any doctoral student looking to write a phenomenological dissertation. (shrink)

This paper aims to show how a phenomenological theory of empathy can be used to achieve a close interpersonal relationship that serves to support shared decision making and recovery from mental health problems. This framework can also be seen as a way to maintain a professional distance in such relationships. First, the paper briefly describes the basics of shared decision making and recovery-oriented practice. Second, the paper presents the notion of second-person perspectivity, the “we-relation”, and the phenomenological term epoché as (...) a background to discussing the possibility of performing a specific kind of epoché, which actively brackets taken-for-granted presuppositions and notions and instead facilitates a focus on the meaning of the other’s experience: a special kind of intentionality directed toward the other’s intentionality. Third, the paper notes that the aim of actively assuming an empathic attitude paves the way for a passive ethnographic epoché that allows for an exploration of the other’s personal world, which constitutes the context for meaning. In this way, we can increase the possibilities of developing a professional “we-relation” and minimizing the risk of emotional contagion. This is a skill that can be learned through training, and that can increase the possibility of developing a deeper interpersonal understanding that will be of value to recovery-oriented practice. (shrink)

This is a book review of D.Carr’s Historical Experience: Essays on the Phenomenology of History.

What does moral disquiet mean to professional human practices? The phenomenon of moral disquiet comes to awareness in concrete lived human experiences and might be described with the help of examples from practice. The article explores lived moral disquiet in nursing, teaching and caring practices. It highlights moral disquiet from direct descriptions in which the phenomenon arises as an event in students’ lifeworlds including professional human relationships in societal institutions like a hospital, nursing home and kindergarten. We suggest that moral (...) disquiet, expressed as the human sensitivity toward others, does not depend on success or failure of outcome, but is a quality of belief and hope in the lives of others that offers possible moments of humanness. (shrink)