What was expected to be just another conference became pivotal to my dissertation. The train Warsaw-Vienna, late April. One day before my presentation at the Schutz Circle conference. I planned to talk about Multiple Realities - the central conference theme in honor of the 80th anniversary of the renowned essay. So, it was a good time to read two other Schutz's essays, The Stranger and The Homecomer. Dan Zahavi had suggested them after my presentation at the Copenhagen winter school, but I still hadn’t gotten around to opening them.
This reading ruined my well-written presentation. Here is the Stranger, and there is the Homecomer - I mentally drew a map of Schutzian topology. What felt missing? The one who doesn’t move. ”The Remainer”? Or, better, “the Stayer.” But why is this figure significant? They simply live in place - and so what? Maybe their world changes? Like mine when war began - this indeed made me feel like a stranger in my homeland.
My perspective, then, clearly belongs to the sociological tradition of the Stranger that begins with Simmel and runs through the entire history of sociological thought - including Schutz, bridging it to phenomenology. Schutz inverts the Stranger concept with his Homecomer, and I go further: it's not I who becomes strange, but my homeland that becomes strange to me. The Stayer, thus, is the one who remains in their disrupted lifeworld together with their community. The Stranger that does not “strange” - if we dare to derive such a verb.
I worked all night and shared these contemplations at the conference the next morning. They sparked interest. So many people helped to refine the concept - both at the conference and during my subsequent monthly stay in Vienna! Comments by Krzysztof Konecki, Barton Buechner, Tarushikha Sarvesh, and others enabled me to grasp what had previously been fleeting intuitions. My hosts - Anna Pospech Durnova’s team - were deeply engaged, and Dagmar Vorlicek invited me to give a guest talk at her Sociology of War seminar. Johanna Kiermaier and Agnes Dürr arranged a workshop to discuss my text, and - absolutely life-changing! - Michaela Pfadenhauer came, opening what I hope will become an ongoing dialogue.
That's how "The Stayer" came to life.
Full text is here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17308453
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My visit to Vienna was supported by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA) - the NAWA PROM mobility grant.
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