Phenomenology and the Political: Experience, Power, and Methods

The relationship between phenomenology and politics has long been complex and contested. While Husserl famously positioned phenomenology as a rigorous science of essences, focused on the structures of consciousness and the epoché, he also emphasized the inseparability of experience from its temporal, cultural, and historical horizons. His methodological rigor has often been interpreted as apolitical, privileging descriptive clarity over engagement with collective life. Subsequent phenomenologists—ranging from Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Arendt to Fanon, Young, Levinas, Butler, Schutz, and Derrida—have demonstrated that these structures of meaning, intersubjectivity, and experience carry profound political implications. Their work shows that politics is not only enacted in institutions but lived, embodied, and experienced, and that power, legitimacy, and social norms are shaped through both visibility and concealment, presence and absence.

This conference builds on these insights, exploring the reciprocal transformation between phenomenology and politics: phenomenology illuminates political phenomena, while political realities—inequalities, conflicts, and power asymmetries—reshape phenomenological inquiry. The conference seeks to foster dialogue on how political worlds are constituted, contested, and transformed through experience, social practices, and collective recognition. Particular attention will be given to the relational and structural dimensions of power, the temporal and historical constitution of political life, and the ways in which phenomenology can both reveal and be reshaped by these realities.

By foregrounding experience, structural dynamics, and methodological innovation, the conference aims to create a space for international dialogue among scholars investigating how phenomenology and politics transform one another, offering insights into authority, legitimacy, inequality, and the lived dimensions of political life.

We welcome abstracts addressing, but not limited to:

·      Methodological Innovation: How phenomenological methods evolve when applied to political phenomena, and how engagement with political realities reshapes conceptual and analytic frameworks.

·      Experience and Embodiment: Lived, bodily, and affective dimensions of political life, including trust, conflict, solidarity, exclusion, and resistance.

·      Power, Presence, and Absence: How visibility, concealment, and structural asymmetries shape political authority, legitimacy, and relational dynamics.

·      Political Ontology and Structures: How social, institutional, material, and historical conditions constitute political realities, making them intelligible, contestable, and transformable.

·      Temporal and Historical Dimensions: Memory, anticipation, rupture, and the opening of political futures.

·      Subjectivation, Emancipation and Agency: How political realities shape subjectivity, identity, and collective self-understanding, and how these processes inform phenomenological inquiry.

·      Technology and Mediation: The role of technology, media, and communication infrastructures in shaping political experience, authority, and participation.

·      Normativity and Epistemic Foundations: How phenomenology illuminates the frameworks through which political knowledge, critique, and understanding emerge.

·      Interdisciplinary Approaches: Contributions from political theory, cultural studies, media and communication studies, or related fields examining the reciprocal shaping of politics and phenomenology.