Faultlines of Experience in Social Transformations

Faultlines of Experience in Social Transformations

Early-Career-Workshop of the DGAP (German Society for Phenomenological Anthropology, Psychiatry, and Psychotherapy)

Heidelberg, March 24, 2023

Our everyday life is characterized by interpersonal interactions that are in multiple ways determined by norms. Written and unwritten rules open up and structure social spaces, but they also have a delimiting and exclusionary effect. Not only states of exception such as wars of aggression or a pandemic can temporarily suspend these orders; gradual cultural shifts, technological developments, and virtualization are also changing social interactions. Thus, the role of corporeality for interpersonal relationships is changing in an increasingly virtualized world. Likewise, the acceleration of the lifeworld affects how we interact with others or care for ourselves. These changes in our social coexistence, in turn, also affect the ways we experience the social environment, that is, they have an impact on the structures of subjectivity.

As far as distressing changes of experience are concerned, we should be careful not to locate their formation neither solely in the subject or the organism nor in an abstract sphere of "the society". Rather, it seems advisable to zone in on how the experience of individuals, up to clinical alterations, is contingent upon specific interaction patterns and social contexts. The rejection of a one-sided diagnostic individualism also raises the question of whether and to what extent reorganizations of social contexts can reduce psychological suffering and do justice to individual and social vulnerability.

To investigate these aspects in more detail, the DGAP would like to invite to an early-career-workshop and bring together perspectives from philosophy, phenomenology, psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy.

Possible topics include:

- Limit situations in (digital) everyday life

- Changes in social interactions due to increasing virtualization

- Digital well-being and embodied subjectivity

- Phenomena of resonance and alienation

- Social norms and emotion regulation

- Loneliness, social isolation, and invisibility

- Feelings of solidarity or belonging

- Vulnerability and resilience (and its critique)

- Phenomenology and conspiracy theories

- The experience of social crises, trauma, and stressors

- 4E-approaches and psychopathological phenomena

- Phenomenological psychopathology in social contexts

- Potential links between social psychiatry and phenomenology

Submission:

We invite advanced graduate students (master's degree/state examination/magister), PhD students, and early post-doctoral researchers to give a short presentation (25-30 minutes), followed by a discussion (20-25 minutes). Contributions can be in English or German. Anonymized and detailed abstracts (max. 500 words) can be submitted by December 11, 2022 to [email protected]. Applicants will receive feedback about acceptance by December 20, 2022. The workshop is planned as an in-person event in Heidelberg.

We will invite all participants to prepare their contributions for publication as articles in a special issue of the open access journal "InterCultural Philosophy".

We look forward to enriching discussions!

Miriam Feix, Daniel Vespermann, and Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Fuchs

(Scientific Organization)