BSP Podcast

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This podcast is for the British Society for Phenomenology and showcases papers at our conferences and events, interviews and discussions on the topic of phenomenology.

Episodes

Monday May 27, 2024

Michael Greer - 'On Oscillating Between Fatness and Thinness in a Fatphobic World: Weight-Cycling, Apprehensive Perception, and the Body You Might Have'

Monday May 27, 2024

Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Michael Greer, The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Michael Greer 'On Oscillating Between Fatness and Thinness in a Fatphobic World: Weight-Cycling, Apprehensive Perception, and the Body You Might Have'

Abstract: Content note: diet culture, eating disorders, fatphobia   Diets ostensibly function as reactions against and prophylaxis from “excess” body weight. However, diets rarely affect long term weight-loss. “Weight-cycling” (sometimes called “yo-yo dieting”) describes the phenomenon of losing weight and gaining it (and often more) back in repetitive cycles as a result of dieting behavior(s). The paradigmatic experience of what I call being a “weight-cycler” is therefore that of oscillation between being fat and being relatively thin(ner) in a fatphobic society. A phenomenological analysis of this experience of weight-cycling is missing from the interdisciplinary literature of Fat Studies. Using tools developed within the canon of critical phenomenology, which has historical roots in Merleau-Pontian, Sartrean, and Beauvoirian existential phenomenology, I fill this gap.   Weight-cyclers commonly experience disordered relationships with their own bodies and the things that sustain it: food and exercise. I examine weight-cyclers' troubled relationships with food, exercise, and their bodies, alongside their oscillation between different body-sizes, to argue that the phenomenology of the weight-cycler creates the conditions for an “apprehensive perception” towards the futurity of their own embodied selves. This feeds into further weight-cycling. I contend that part of the weight-cycler's difficulty is that they focus on the body they “might have” instead of the body as lived.

Bio: I am a white cis-woman PhD student in Philosophy at CUNY. Broadly speaking, I work in moral and social philosophy. More narrowly, my projects typically involve questions at the intersections of feminist philosophy, existential phenomenology, bioethics, social epistemology, philosophy of language, and fat studies. 

This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.

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. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?

Friday May 24, 2024

Bence Marosan - 'Towards a Phenomenological Theory of Animal Emotions. A Husserlian Perspective'

Friday May 24, 2024

Bence Marosan 'Towards a Phenomenological Theory of Animal Emotions. A Husserlian Perspective'

Abstract: Edmund Husserl and other classical authors of phenomenology (such as Heidegger, Scheler, Plessner, and others) considered the problem of animal being a particularly important topic. As far as I know, however, none of these authors (including Husserl) devoted special attention to the problem of animal emotions. In this conference presentation, I would like to sketch out a phenomenological theory of animal emotional life from a Husserlian perspective. Just as the phenomenological study of emotion has contributed to understanding the essence of consciousness, it is my contention that the study of animal consciousness can similarly offer crucial insights. Both of these subjects help us to examine certain crucial features of consciousness in a sharper light. Animal consciousness represents a more elementary level of consciousness. Emotions, in turn, play a fundamental role in organizing conscious life; they underlie our goals, they also disclose the world in a fundamental way. In these respects, I believe that a better understanding of animal emotions could serve research on consciousness in general.   In this presentation, I take Husserl's theory of emotions, as presented in his unpublished work, “Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins”, as a point of departure, and I apply this conception to the case of animals. In Husserl's work, there are three principle levels of affectivity and emotion: feeling-sensations, “moods” or “dispositions”, and acts of feeling and emotion. I show that this schema is applicable to various kinds of animal consciousness, since wherever animal consciousness is concerned there are, at the very least, minimal (feeling-sensations) present. On this point, I also engage with contemporary scientific and neuroscientific research – especially the works of Jaak Panksepp. This makes it possible to explore how, while mammals have a quite rich and sophisticated emotional life, even insects might plausibly have certain elementary feelings (Perry, Baciadonna, & Chittka 2016). 

Bio: Name: Bence Peter MAROSAN Date of Birth: 01. 04. 1978. Place of Birth: Budapest, HUNGARY BA and MA Studies: Philosophy, Theory of Arts and Media. Institute: Eötvös Loránd University PhD Studies: Philosophy, Phenomenology. Institutes: Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary). Affiliation: Budapest Business School, Pázmány Péter Catholic University More important international publications: 1) “Levels of the Absolute in Husserl”. In Continental Philosophy Review. 2021. 2) “Husserl on Minimal Mind and the Origins of Consciousness in the Natural World”. In Husserl Studies. 2021.   Research interests: Phenomenology (Husserl in particular), Hermeneutics, Philosophy of Mind, Political Philosophy, Eco-ethics, Eco-politics 

Thursday May 23, 2024

Joe MacDonagh - 'Daseinic elements of the ethicality of nursing practice'

Thursday May 23, 2024

Joe MacDonagh 'Daseinic elements of the ethicality of nursing practice'

Abstract: This paper will examine the ethical basis of nursing using the prism of Heidegger's idea of dasein. It will look at how, in the nursing ‘moment' between a nurse and their patient, a nurse is called upon to be ethically responsive to the patient in a manner that engages in a dialogue with all those nurses who have provided care theretofore, are currently doing so and who will do so in the future. In direct patient care a nurse is responding to the ‘other' in front of her, with their specific personhood and needs, but also to the generalised other person who may fall into one or more disease categories. This toggling between a specific and generalised patient ‘other' presents dilemmas for nurses of how to shape care that attends to the needs of that individual patient while observing care guidelines and professional ethical precepts that are required by hospitals and professional nursing bodies. Data will be presented from interviews with nurses and from field notes observing nursing practice to substantiate the above and to show how nursing practice is not simply the observance of set and invariant modes of activity. Rather, nurses have to navigate the needs of: their professional training, their empathy with an often empained patient other, the changing expectations of those receiving care, the embodiedness of the other and their own embodiedness as well as supporting the patient to wellness, a less empained existence or through palliation to death. An understanding of nursing will be presented in which hermeneusis is suggested as a central part of nursing practice, wherein nurses- acting ethically- continually interpret the needs of their patients in providing the most appropriate care, against the backdrop of a constantly shifting personally and professionally accumulated knowledge of their role in providing care.

Bio: Dr Joe MacDonagh is a Chartered Psychologist and a member of the research ethics boards of two acute hospitals in Dublin, Ireland. He is also a member of the Life and Medical Sciences committee of the Royal Irish Academy. He has a particular interest in bioethics, and has been involved in the organisation of seminars and webinars on this area. Finally, he is a former Honorary Secretary of the History and Philosophy of Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society.

Wednesday May 22, 2024

Tristan Hedges - 'Towards a phenomenology of discrimination'

Wednesday May 22, 2024

Tristan Hedges 'Towards a phenomenology of discrimination'

Abstract: As I walk down the corridor, I barely slow my pace, extend my arm, and am then thrown by the wholly unanticipated experience of my body crashing into the unbudging door. I typified the door as a ‘push-door' and approached it with the presupposition that my expectation of it opening upon being pushed would be fulfilled.  I argue that this all-too-familiar experience illuminates a tendency toward concordance which underlies the most pernicious and unintentional discriminatory practices. Concordance, understood as the cohering of experience with one's expectations, provides us with a sense of normality which is fundamental for epistemic, normative, and doxic familiarity. In this talk, I bring Husserl's phenomenological understanding of concordance-normality into dialogue with social scientific and philosophical work on discrimination. Historically, phenomenology has concerned itself with the lived experience of the discriminatee. However, it is also well-equipped for thematising the ways in which we discriminate at the pre-reflective levels of perceptual experience and bodily being. Discriminatory practices manifest in the unintended turning of heads, prolonged looks, or prejudicial ways of seeing and hearing. Drawing on examples of stereotyping, cognitive biases, and spatial exclusion, I show how discrimination is often a naïve, normalising attempt to stabilise concordance at the expense of new, revised, and dialogically established ways of seeing. To these ends, I begin with Husserl's understanding of normality and its constitutional significance for our typifying experience of the world. I then illuminate the attitudinal character of discrimination and argue that there is a normalising tendency toward concordance underlying discriminatory practices. Lastly, I want to problematise this tendency toward concordance by arguing for the normative, epistemic, and experiential richness of discordance. Despite their disorientating and unfamiliar character, discordant experiences allow us to revise, critically reflect on, and expand our horizons of expectation.

Bio: Tristan Hedges is a PhD fellow at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. He is working under Dan Zahavi as part of the Who Are We research project, for which he is exmaning the phenomenological notion of we-identity. Within this context his research is interested in the Us/Them dichotomy, and how we-identities can be antagonistic and exclusionary, but also provide senses of belonging and political solidarity. 

Tuesday May 21, 2024

Knowles & Melo Lopes - 'How to Dress Like a Feminist'

Tuesday May 21, 2024

Knowles & Melo Lopes - 'How to Dress Like a Feminist'

Abstract:   From Mary Wollstonecraft to Sandra Bartky, feminist philosophers have historically denounced women’s attention to clothes as a form of complicity with patriarchal hierarchy. Through self-objectifying and laborious forms of dress, women constitute themselves as passive objects, rather than active subjects. The key to liberation, then, has been said to lie in ‘opting out’ of care for one’s appearance. However, this strategy problematically dismisses the pleasure and the sense of creative self-fashioning that women experience in selecting, wearing, and making clothes. Feminist philosophers face therefore an impasse: either we acknowledge the oppressive function of clothes, but risk ignoring women’s lived experience; or we recognise the genuine pleasure and expressive freedom derived from clothes but undermine our ability to critique them. What then, if anything, can we say about what it is to ‘dress well’, in an ethical sense, in a patriarchal society? To answer this question, we adopt a phenomenological perspective, focussing on the relational, dynamic and embodied nature of meaning. We argue that the meaning of clothes is never entirely fixed and that they sit within a relational whole of significations (a ‘world’). Therefore, complicity with gender hierarchy is not a matter of what one wears, but primarily of how one wears it: of one’s relation to clothing and to the world. We develop a phenomenological account of Effortless Dressing that seeks to do justice to feminist critiques, whilst also recognising the pleasure and possibilities that can be found in practices of dressing. We argue ‘effortlessness’ involves: 1) a recognition that clothes have meaning, but that this meaning is not entirely fixed, 2) a critical awareness of the social scripts around dressing, and 3) a relation to clothes that values them for how they enable us to do things in the world, rather than as ends in themselves.

Bio:

Charlotte Knowles is an Assistant Professor in Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Groningen. Her primary research areas lie in feminist philosophy and phenomenology, particularly Heidegger and Beauvoir. These interests come together in her work on complicity where she explores issues of freedom, responsibility, agency and oppression from a phenomenological perspective, in order to examine why women sometimes reinforce or uphold their own subordination.

Filipa Melo Lopes is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, where she researches feminist politics, sexual ethics, social philosophy, and the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir. Her recent publications include Beauvoirian analyses of incel violence and the #Metoo movement.

Sunday May 19, 2024

Pritchard & Tovey - 'Ecophenomenological Perspectives on Human Augmentation'

Sunday May 19, 2024

Pritchard & Tovey - 'Ecophenomenological Perspectives on Human Augmentation'

Abstract: Just as the Anthropocene marked a geological epoch that, for the first time, would be attributed to actions according of a single species, Homo Sapiens is on the precipice of another epochal transition through Human Augmentation (HA) whereby, through technological alteration, a single species is decoupling its own evolutionary trajectory from that of its natural environment. Through HA we should anticipate major disturbances concerning the classification of what it is to be human- taxonomically, socially and importantly, phenomenologically – owing to the intrinsic relational basis of our evolutionary-biological models with nature and their effects on perceptions of selfhood. By extension, this affects what it is to be a non-human and therefore has important ethical implications beyond an anthropocentric purview, to a more-than-human world whose only opportunity for augmentation arises in tight ecological symbiosis with its natural ecosystem. HA therefore represent a sociotechnical pivot point whereby the construct human is existentially disrupted through assimilation with either the purely machinic (i.e., Cyborgs) or the animalistic (i.e., Chimeras) both leading to what we coin as ‘ecophenomenological self-disruption’. We highlight HA’s self-disruptive potentiality through re-examining Wood’s (2001) rich dimensions of ecophenomenology - the plexity of time and the boundaries of thinghood – to reveal how these technological augmentations in our physiological structures (including our sensory modalities) threaten to either entrench ontological anthropocentrism or offer a promising opportunity to transition away from it towards ecocentrism.

Bio:

Dr Matt Pritchard is Visitor to the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford University. He has BA and MPhil degrees in Archaeology and Anthropology from Cambridge University and a DPhil in Embodied Cognition and Religious Naturalism from Oxford. He was Co-Chair of the Civil Service Environment Network for 2021/22 and is on the Government Office for Science's Expert Advisory Group for Resilience.

Philip Tovey is the Head of Futures in the public sector organisation. He holds a MSc by Res in Policing from Canterbury Christ Church University and his research focuses on the cognitive phenomenology of time and futurity. Phil is a strategic partner of the University of Bristol’s ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures, whereby he focused on interdisciplinary research to address environmental issues of strategic importance to the UK.

Friday May 17, 2024

Maxim Miroshnichenko - 'The Painful Incorporation: Hybrid Intercorporeality in the Case of Dialysis and Chronic Kidney Disease'

Friday May 17, 2024

Maxim Miroshnichenko 'The Painful Incorporation: Hybrid Intercorporeality in the Case of Dialysis and Chronic Kidney Disease'

Abstract: I am going to collide two approaches to technology in disability and chronic kidney disease: extension and incorporation. For the 4EA view, the metabolically considered living systems can include resources and processes beyond their bodies. The individual enacts autonomous self-monitoring, control of internal regulation, and exchanges. This ‘hybrid intercorporeality' exists with graded norms of vitality – health, sickness, stress, and fatigue. It is an incorporation that affords the individual to enact her sense-making through the integration of technologies, artifacts, and prostheses into her body schema. This view emphasizes the body-as-subject, in contrast to the extended cognition thesis characterized by the tendency to objectify the body. The central problem of this approach is its view of incorporation as fruitful and enabling. I want to concentrate on the case of dialysis in chronic kidney disease as painful and discomforting integration of technology. This shows the intertwinement of the lived body and biomedical body-as-object. Dialysis is prescribed for persons with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) – kidney failure. The patient needs to rid her blood from toxins. This leads to the need for a regular course of long-term dialysis accomplished with an artificial kidney–dialysis machine. Based on the phenomenological interviews with the patients going through dialysis, I will analyze their view of technology as a life-supporting machine and a trap. The patients feel disgust and abjection towards the body due to the aggressive and painful presence of equipment – tubes and needles, fluid filling the body, changes in body shape and weight, nausea and fatigue, immobility, and limited social activities. Based on the materials of the phenomenological interviews with the patients going through dialysis, I want to show how the incorporation of technology and bodily integrity is enacted through pain and discomfort.

Bio: I am a Senior Lecturer in Bioethics at Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University. Also, I am a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Philosophy at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University (remotely). I hold a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Higher School of Economics (2019). The dissertation committee included Catherine Malabou and Adam Berg. My recent studies revolve around embodiment, disability studies, bioethics, and media theory. Currently, I am finishing phenomenological research on relations between doctors, patients, and technologies in palliative care. Also, I am conducting the phenomenological interviews with patients going through hemodialysis under the condition of chronic kidney failure.

Thursday May 16, 2024

Liesbeth Schoonheim - 'Posters, protests, and reclaiming the streets'

Thursday May 16, 2024

Liesbeth Schoonheim 'Posters, protests, and reclaiming the streets'

Abstract:   Street protests create spaces of appearance (Arendt) that galvanize public support for hitherto hidden forms of precarity and oppression. Put in these terms, street protests raise questions about their duration, as they rely on the physical proximity of people; they also raise issues of who can and cannot participate in this space of appearance and in what way, as public space is subject to various forms of policing(Butler). In this paper, I investigate these  limits of embodied resistance by looking at a different form of street protest, namely the feminist collectives that put up posters in the streets of Brussels denouncing gender-and sex-based violence. Some of these target street harassment by imploring passers-by to “laisse[r] les filles tranquilles”, while others focus on feminicide, publishing the name of victims of domestic violence. In different ways, these interventions relate isolated and privatized experiences of violence to patriarchal structures. First, deploying Arendt's political phenomenology, I argue that these artefacts are intended as a (semi-)permanent mark on the public space; and they invoke the victims of various forms of gender-and sex-based violence, reclaiming the streets as a site of commemoration and of free movement. Secondly, I show how they also presuppose passers-by that stop, read and respond to them. I suggest this interpellation should be understood as a moment of critique, in the sense in which critical phenomenologists (Guenther, Al-Saji, Salamon) have defined it as the suspension of everyday comportment and the exposure of historically contingent structures of oppression. Thirdly, I argue (contra Arendt) that protest does not always require the physical proximity of a group of people engaging in purposeful action-in-concert, but can also develop as a series (Sartre, Young), in this case, as the interpellation of passers-by as possible agents of social change, engaging in acts of indignant remembrance and of leaving women and other targeted groups alone.

Bio: Liesbeth Schoonheim is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University, Berlin, working on the intersection of political theory, feminism, and social theory. Previously, she held a postdoctoral research fellowship at KU Leuven (Belgium) and an appointment as a lecturer at University of Amsterdam (Netherlands).  

Wednesday May 15, 2024

Eugenia Stefanello - 'Empathy, Narrative Medicine, and (Mis)Representation of Illness: A Phenomenological Perspective'

Wednesday May 15, 2024

Eugenia Stefanello 'Empathy, Narrative Medicine, and (Mis)Representation of Illness: A Phenomenological Perspective'

Abstract:   It is often argued that mutual understanding is crucial in clinical encounters. In particular, narrative medicine proponents strongly believe that through mutual understanding and doctors' narrative skills it is possible to increase both empathy in the doctor-patient relationship and affiliation within the community of healthcare professionals (Charon, 2017; DasGupta & Charon, 2004). However, although empathy appears to be one of the main aims of narrative medicine, it has not been extensively analyzed by its supporters. For this reason, I argue that narrative medicine should discuss on the one hand what the role of empathy is in narrative medicine's proposal and, on the other hand, what kind of empathy should be involved in the clinical encounter. In this regard, I show that if the type of empathy involved in narrative medicine is understood as synonymous with the doctors' ability to simulate the patients' perspectives as proposed by Simulation Theory (Goldman, 2006), narrative medicine and the clinical encounter can be negatively impacted (Gallagher, 2007). In addition, when empathy is reduced to a simulation-plus-projection mechanism, it can not only radicalize the other's alterity triggering possible harm towards others (Bubandt & Willerslev, 2015) but also disregard whether and how deeply people want or need to share their perspectives and ignore the situatedness of the empathic understanding exacerbating existing inequalities (Hollan, 2008, 2017). Finally, I suggest that narrative medicine should explore alternative accounts of empathy. Specifically, the phenomenological approach (Scheler, 1913; Stein, 1917) offers one that is multifaceted and layered in which empathy has a specific but partial role in understanding others (Throop & Zahavi, 2020). Accordingly, I will try to show that phenomenological empathy seems able to provide healthcare professionals guidance to improve their narrative skills and achieve the ultimate goal of affiliation, without having to face the objections raised against a simulationist concept of empathy (Vendrell Ferran, 2015; Zahavi, 2014).   References Bubandt, N., & Willerslev, R. (2015). The Dark Side of Empathy: Mimesis, Deception, and the Magic of Alterity. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 57(1), 5–34. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417514000589 Charon, R. (2017). The principles and practice of narrative medicine. Oxford University Press. DasGupta, S., & Charon, R. (2004). Personal Illness Narratives: Using Reflective Writing to Teach Empathy. Academic Medicine, 79(4), 351–356. https://doi.org/10.1097/00001888-200404000-00013 Gallagher, S. (2007). Simulation trouble. Social Neuroscience, 2(3–4), 353–365. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470910601183549 Goldman, A. I. (2006). Simulating minds: The philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of mindreading. Oxford University Press. Hollan, D. (2008). Being There: On the Imaginative Aspects of Understanding Others and Being Understood. Ethos, 36(4), 475–489. Hollan, D. (2017). Empathy across cultures. In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy. Routledge. Scheler, M. (1913). The nature of sympathy (W. Stark, Trans.). Routledge and KPaul. Stein, E. (1917). On the Problem of Empathy (W. Stein, Trans.). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-5546-7 Throop, C. J., & Zahavi, D. (2020). Dark and Bright Empathy: Phenomenological and Anthropological Reflections. Current Anthropology, 61(3), 283–303. https://doi.org/10.1086/708844 Vendrell Ferran, Í. (2015). Empathy, Emotional Sharing and Feelings in Stein's Early Work. Human Studies, 38(4), 481–502. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-015-9346-4 Zahavi, D. (2014). Empathy and Other-Directed Intentionality. Topoi, 33(1), 129–142. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9197-4

Bio:  

Eugenia Stefanello is a PhD Student in Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology (FISPPA), University of Padova, Italy. Her research focuses on Phenomenology, Moral Philosophy, Bioethics, and Philosophy of Mind with a particular interest in empathy and its influence on the deliberative process.

Tuesday May 14, 2024

Joshua Bergamin - 'When is ‘my truth' true? Interpreting lived experience in phenomenological interviews'

Tuesday May 14, 2024

Joshua Bergamin 'When is ‘my truth' true? Interpreting lived experience in phenomenological interviews'

Abstract: Many topics and methodologies for investigating subjectivity that have become widespread in the social sciences – for example, an emphasis on ‘lived experience' – have been significantly developed by applied phenomenologists. Yet phenomenology's own commitments often bring it into tension with giving full voice to its subjects. For example, the ‘bracketing' of prejudices may not take into account how those prejudices are constitutive of the subject herself. Furthermore, researchers are rarely trained to self-reflect on how their own history – cultural, sexual, professional – might colour their interpretation of a subject's ‘bracketed' responses. A risk therefore is that a subject's experience be distorted by the researcher's own interests. But at the same time, the latter's immersion in a broader investigative discourse offers insights to which their subject may have little access. My paper examines this tension as it manifests in an ongoing interdisciplinary research project, working with improvising musical ensembles. Centred on the co-creation of a ‘hermeneutic circle' between artwork, artist, and analysts, the project aims not only to render the research process itself transparent, but to consciously blur the distinction between researchers and research subjects, treating subjects as partners in a creative process in which all participants have a voice and an opportunity to learn/grow. After briefly outlining our methodologies, I dig deeper into the problems of truth and interpretation that this process exposes, namely: – At what points do ‘lived experience' accounts reach limits that might be better informed by critical distance or historical consciousness? – Is it essential to reconcile contradictions between levels of analysis? If so, how do we give weight to values like truth while doing justice to different lived realities? If not, can we avoid reperpetuating power imbalances between researcher and subject? I examine these questions with reference to particular case studies, while suggesting potential generalisable conclusions.

Bio: Joshua Bergamin is a philosopher at the University of Vienna and co-PI of the interdisciplinary artistic research project (Musical) Improvisation and Ethics, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). He has a PhD from Durham University, where he worked as an ‘applied phenomenologist,' an MA from the University of Queensland for work on Heidegger and cognitive science, and BAs from the University of South Australia. His academic work is supplemented by training and practical experience as a physical artist and musician (mostly percussion), and he has choreographed and performed at many festivals and immersive events.