My last scholarly event this year was the XV International Congress of the Spanish Society for Phenomenology (SEFE) at the University of the Balearic Islands, Palma de Mallorca.
The congress on "Normality, Normativity, Lifeworld" was the perfect place to summarize the path we have passed this year. I say “we” because so many faces were the same as in Copenhagen, Warsaw, Dublin, Darmstadt. I am beginning to feel like part of the community – scattered across the globe yet tightly knit! Plus, escaping to the warm seaside in chilly November was a lovely bonus.
My presentation titled Ambivalent Normality: The We-Experience of Destroyed Lifeworlds, was shaped by recent conversations with Professor Maren Wehrle from Erasmus University Rotterdam. I built my presentation as a response to some of her works. I attempted to extrapolate Wehrle's analysis of fragile normality from individual psychopathology to the collective level and apply it to my central research focus – collective disruptive experiences, such as wars or disasters.
War, my primary case, appeared, thus, as a condition where the entire community loses a stable common ground. Like in psychopathological cases, but not an individual experiencing breakdown while others remain stable – rather a collective experience of a lost world. I examined this through Husserlian framework of normality and introduced one of my analytical concepts – ‘ambivalent normality.’
Maybe this will grow into a journal article, but for now, I'm heading back to Kyiv to continue the empirical work and enjoy being at home – however challenging and painful it may be in this time.
The guy on the photo is Guillem Sagrera, a 15th century architect of Gothic Mallorca, crafted by the Mallorcan sculptor Jaume Mir and placed on the University of Balearic Islands campus.
The presentation transcript is here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17914727
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