This experimental session seeks to provide participants interested in postphenomenological methodology with experience doing postphenomenology. The presenters use postphenomenology in mixed-method qualitative research in their own work, combining postphenomenological analysis with standpoint epistemology, glitch feminism, post-humanism, actor-network theory, critical theory, and feminist ethics of care. They have organized this session in the belief that postphenomenological analysis can enrich other qualitative work in internet studies, whether that analysis is done as a formal method or more informally in researchers’ own thinking-through and theorizing of issues.
Experimental Session Activities
In the first section of the session the presenters will theoretically place—for the audience—postphenomenological methodology, founded by Don Ihde in the context of the phenomenological tradition, exemplified by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Iris Young. We will emphasize how postphenomenology focuses attention on how technologies modify and mediate embodied experiences.
In the second section, we turn the experimental session to more interactive methods. We will guide the attendees through a set of experiences, including visual art analysis, listening to vocal performance, interactive videos, and a participatory selfie exercise. These experiences will provide lived experiences of postphenomenological analytical tools, including multistability, priming, foregrounding/backgrounding, and phenomenological variation. These analytical tools will be presented through participatory phenomenological descriptions of our shared experiences.
In the final and least structured section of the session we will invite and lead discussion and embodied exploration of topics within attendees’ research, working through new perspectives and approaches to attendees’ ongoing work through participatory and embodied postphenomenological experimentation.
