Prof. M.Salter & Dr.K.McGuire
This presentation has been produced with the financial support of the
Daphne III Programme of the European Union. The contents are the
sole responsibility of the University of Central Lancashire and can in no
way be taken to reflect the views of the European Commission
Recovering lived experience as
data
 Discrepancy between formal academic / scientific analysis
of X, and evidence of how these topics are actually being
subjectively lived, experienced and interpreted.
 Academic / scientific analysis is typically grounded upon
an overlay of superimposed premises and specialist modes
of discourse that ignores evidence from the experiential
dimension.
 Husserlian phenomenological analysis involves a
systematic and philosophically-informed and rigorous
interrogation of lived experience of X precisely as X is being
subjectively encountered
“Hate Crime” in need of phenomenological clarification
 The very term “hate crime” is often deployed in an extremely loose and
unreflective manner - a shorthand term for almost any expression or act to
which a discriminatory motivation is being ascribed, and without addressing
questions of definition.
 a phenomenological approach is particularly useful as a corrective both to the
“natural attitude” of everyday life and to other scholarly approaches that gloss
over the meanings of such experiential data, or even the data itself.
 Edmund Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenological theory and
research methodology, has argued that, in order for any type of natural or
social science to 'begin at all,' that is, before any theorising about specific topics
can even occur, a major condition must be fulfilled.
 Namely, that researchers ought first secure an in-depth qualitative awareness of
the particular type of objects and themes that make up the distinctive fields of
research in question: one that is grounded in the intuitive evidence of firsthand
lived-experience.
Suspending unreflective policy
commitments
 Phenomenology does not analyse, say, the experience of X in a manner that presupposes
an already given type of "solution" or policy response to which the researcher is already
committed from the start.
 Analysis stem from a process of discovery, not the self-fulfilling vindication of the
researcher's own superimposed prejudices concerning how X ought to be.
 Concerning the starting position and aims of experiential research: Must researchers
uncritically adopt and apply cultural stereotypes forming part of taken for granted
interpretations or official statistics, as their starting point?
 Or -as Husserl insists - as far as humanly possible, and subject to limitations actively
suspend (or "neutralise," "disengage" and "bracket out") these assumption-rich starting
points in order to begin experientially-grounded research?
 Husserlian analysis takes the second option and its analysis is therefore critical not
merely descriptive
A different form of “explanation”?
 Husserl's approach rejects quantitative / positivistic explanations
in terms of material causes in favour of a different and distinctly
interpretative-hermeneutical type of "explanation.“
 That is, an explanation where one's consciousness of X as
something experienced (phenomena) is accounted for in terms
of the ("transcendental") sense-making dynamics and activities
of consciousness itself, including its material embodiment.
 These include the interests, concerns and orientations of
different individuals and wider communities of interpreters
located within various intersubjective "life-worlds“.
Structural analysis
 A Husserlian approach analyses a number of those core structures, general
patterns and principles that can be found within, or - as deep-seated structures
- underlie, such experiences, and does so through what-if “imaginative
variations” of scenarios.
 Take a factual scenario and ask:
 1/. Which of its features appears to be operating as "essential preconditions" for
its identification as X not Y;
 2/. Which of the experienced qualities are "optional," such that their absence
would not have affected this interpretative classification; and
 3/. What other potential features had they been identified as present would
have undermined or exploded the very possibility of this interpretive
classification, calling for an alternative?
 This allows us to identify underlying principles shaping the social construction
of the realities that comprise research topics
4 levels of questioning
 The first question is an elucidation of what is it that is being experienced as X?
– the “hatefulness” of hate crime, its “criminality” etc.
 The second addresses the specific “manner of appearance” of experienced X,
the multiplicities of modes of appearing and their interpretive structures, or
"ways of being-directed-towards" this topic ("intentionality“), including
degrees of relative certainty, ambiguity and clarity.
 The third question is the how-question: the interpretive processes and
dynamics that underlie & enable the interpretation of X as something
meaningful consisting of combinations of interpretative acts of perception,
recollection, anticipation, judgment, expression. Perception - relative priority.
 The fourth is to uncover the structures of subjectivity – interests, concerns,
values, pre-judices, hopes, stereotypes and emotional commitments – shaping
how X is experienced & interpreted both at individual, group and social levels.