Phenomenology & Practice

Aims & Scope

Phenomenology & Practice is a human science journal dedicated to the study of the lived experience of a broad range of human practices. These include (but are not limited to) the professional practices of pedagogy, design, counseling, psychology, social work, and health science. Increasingly, researchers and practitioners in these and other fields are adapting interpretive methodologies to address questions related to practice. Phenomenology & Practice is intended to serve as a forum for such research. Correspondingly, "phenomenology" is understood in this context in broad and eclectic terms. Phenomenology has been practiced in various guises for centuries, but it came into its own in the early 20th century in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas; and it has been developed as a method by various individuals and groups, such as the Utrecht School. Phenomenology affirms the primacy of lived experience and of the lifeworld - everyday contexts which we inhabit as natural and taken-for-granted - over the conceptual and theoretical. It works to regain a fuller grasp of the nature and significance of our lived experiences. Merleau-Ponty (1962) called this the program of "re-learning to look at the world" by "re-awakening the basic experience of the world" (pp. 8, 11). Experience can be best understood integrally, using evocative, descriptive language that is neither analytic nor conceptual. It is, as Luijpen (1960) says, a question of "restoring to experience its ontological weight" (p. 88). Proceeding from these premises, phenomenology is understood here as a context-sensitive and transdisciplinary form of inquiry into lived experience that is employed both inside, outside and across of traditional disciplinary boundaries. 'Practice,' the second word in the journal's title, has complex and interrelated meanings. In one sense, it refers to professional and other domains: "the explicit and tacit dimensions of the rules, precepts, codes, principles, guides, commitments, affects, and behaviors that one observes or recommends within a domain of action" (OED, 1989). Practice is also understood as the application of theory; in practice we operationalize methods, techniques, knowledge, skills, and competencies. Additionally, practice can be viewed as having an integrity all of its own. Instead of deriving exclusively from theory, it can be characterized as non-cognitive, as residing in the body, in the world, in relations, and in action, rather than being explicitly known or formalized (van Manen, 1999). Knowing, in this sense, is co-emergent with practice in different situations, actions and relations; together, this practice and knowledge-in-action is manifest, for example, as habituation, demeanor, dwelling and intimacy. All three of these meanings of practice listed above - as profession, as opposed to theory, and as 'non-cognitive' - are central to this journal. Phenomenology & Practice consciously exploits the resonant and symbiotic relationship between the orientation of phenomenology to lived experience and the notion of practice as non-cognitive knowledge-in-action. It is this orientation in phenomenology and this dimension of practice to which this journal gives priority.

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