WARSAW: Where it all began – one year later

My next stop this summer (or is it autumn already?!) is the Summer School in Genetic Phenomenology in Warsaw, organized by gPHEN – International Network for Genetic Phenomenology. A year ago, at this very event, I had my first proper encounter with phenomenology – an encounter that led me to change both my dissertation topic and my supervisors. Without exaggeration, it ranks among the top three decisions I have ever made in my academic life - and today, I'm here again.

Versus previous Copenhagen, Vienna, and Dublin, this school was by far the most theoretical. For an entire week, we meticulously dissected a single text – Husserl's Ideas II – and all but a few presentations offered interpretations of this very work. The sheer complexity and intellectual labor that these scholars invest is, to me, quite simply beyond imagination.

I tried to combine two pivotal concepts of my research project (the Stayer and Systemic Disruption) into one theoretical framework and introduce it to a new audience – more theoretical than applied and more Husserlian than Schutzian. On the one hand, this drives me into a greater fork between philosophy and sociology and multiplies the complexity of my project. On the other, it deepens both of my concepts and clearly proves that they indeed constitute an inseparable theoretical whole at the intersection of the sociological tradition of the Stranger and the phenomenological perspective on limits and alienness.

I hope my more applied project found its place in this context - perhaps as something of an outlier. So, for the next event – just days away in Darmstadt – I'll rework everything once again. More grounding in the classics, less sociology, minimum of applied examples. Pure Husserliana, only hardcore.

This is most likely not my path, and I do not intend to go that deep on a permanent basis. For now, I expect social phenomenology in the Schutzian style to be my intellectual homeworld. Something between the extremes of applied and pure phenomenology. Still, trying out my 'intellectual muscles' is exciting and intriguing. In fact, this is my primary goal this summer: not yet to professionalize within a narrow niche but to map the phenomenological landscape at large and position myself there. I'm experimenting with speaking different languages in vastly different communities – testing how my ideas land with them, and most importantly, how they taste to me. And this super-intensive voyage across so many phenomenological terrains has made this self-positioning possible. For a while I doubted whether it was too much for a single summer – but no. An absolute must.

The text is here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17302457