DUBLIN: Lifeworlds in crisis

The conference in Dublin, Lifeworlds in Crisis: Applying Phenomenology, brought together a striking number of contributions framing crisis in terms of estrangement and alienation. What felt particularly significant was that many of these discussions approached estrangement in a phenomenological register – as a loss of pre-reflective familiarity, as the breakdown of what is normally taken for granted.

This context made it a natural place to articulate one of the central moves of my project. My presentation, The Stayer: Estrangement and Normality in Disrupted Lifeworlds, proposed a shift in how estrangement is understood. Rather than treating it as detachment of individuals from a stable world, I argued that in contemporary conditions it is increasingly the world itself that changes and becomes strange.

This shift becomes visible in the figure of the Stayer. Unlike the Stranger or the Homecomer, the Stayer does not move. They remain in place, embedded in their community, while the surrounding world undergoes radical transformation. What emerges is a collective, in-situ estrangement: being at home and yet no longer fully at home in one’s own world.

Empirically, I approach this condition through wartime diaries written in real time. These texts do not merely document events but actively reconstruct disrupted lifeworlds as they unfold. From this material, several phenomenological traits begin to appear – among them forced epoché, ambivalent belonging, and ambivalent normality, where everyday routines and extreme disruption become entangled in a single rhythm of life.

At the same time, I started to experiment with a more processual perspective – what I tentatively call normality cascades – tracing how the unthinkable gradually becomes livable and, at times, even ordinary.

The work is still in progress, but Dublin marked an important moment where several strands of the project came together: estrangement, phenomenology, and empirical material began to align into a more coherent framework.

The presentation transcript is here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19067934