Future Directions in Feminist Phenomenology

Essays from this event have been published in Helen A Fielding and Dorothea E Olkowski, Feminist Phenomenology Futures, Indiana University Press, 2017.

Available here

This international interdisciplinary conference on feminist phenomenology brings together researchers working in the area of feminist phenomenology to exchange and present their research in order to have a picture of the current state of feminist phenomenology, and to better understand its future directions and possibilities as an interdisciplinary methodology. Although a majority of the researchers are housed in philosophy departments, their work is interdisciplinary, drawing on psychology, health studies, political science, leadership studies, and cognitive science; this open exchange will contribute to understanding more precisely how feminist phenomenology can be drawn upon as a theoretical methodology to forward feminist research in a variety of fields. Feminist phenomenology has emerged as an interdisciplinary methodology in its own right, and it is time to assess its current contributions and future possibilities. Phenomenology is focused on the phenomena, that is, the appearances that comprise the social and lived world; feminist phenomenology focuses in particular on the gendered aspects of social relations. Although the phenomenological methodology has its roots in twentieth-century continental philosophy, it is only in the last decade that it has begun to emerge as a significant feminist theoretical and methodological approach in its own right. Because phenomenology is directed towards embodied, lived experience, it lends itself well to help making sense of a wide range of feminist concerns such as the gendering of racialization, the intersubjective and gendered nature of democratic citizenship, the lived experiences of contemporary biotechnologies and medical practices, and an embodied understanding of the findings in neuroscience and cognition.

Thanks to our supporters: The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, The Department of Women’s Studies and Feminist Research, The Faculty of Arts and Humanities, The Office of the VP Research, The Department of Philosophy, The Rotman Institute of Philosophy, The Faculty of Health Sciences, The Centre for Theory and Criticism, The Faculty of Information and Media Studies, Western University