Phenomenology Of The Newborn

Many children spend their first days, weeks, and sometimes months in a neonatal intensive care unit as a consequence of prematurity, congenital anomalies, or birth complications. Their medical needs are thoughtfully appraised and attended to, yet some questions are rarely asked: What experiences do these newborns have? What experiences are we giving them? How can we and do we understand what their lives are like? What are the interventions and actions of medical care actually like for them? Michael van Manen explores the experiential life of newborn infants with particular consideration for those newborns who require medical care. Drawing on contemporary research findings from physiology, psychology, biology, and other disciplines, he offers phenomenological insights and raises thought-provoking questions as to how we ought to understand and care for such young children. In our contemporary world, it is often the experiences of inception, of first contact, with those who seem most distant, foreign, or even alien that we need to try to apprehend and understand. The inceptual lives of newborn infants challenges us to explore those experiences phenomenologically – to investigate the originary meanings of early life experiences. Phenomenology of the Newborn is an essential text for researchers seeking to employ phenomenology for the study of neonatal life and related concerns that may seem inaccessible to other more traditional qualitative and quantitative methods.

From the time of conception, through the gestation of pregnancy, to the birth of a newborn child exists an extraordinary, emergent ethics. How does this ethics come into being when a child is conceived? How does the appearance of ethics in pregnancy differ from its emergence after birth? How does the original meaning of ethics relate to modern morality in decision making? In this book, Michael van Manen explores these ethical moral complexities and conceptualizations of life’s beginnings. He delves into perennial and contemporary aspects of conception, pregnancy, and birth to present ethics as a fundamental phenomenon in the experiential encounter between parent and child. Even in the context of neonatal-perinatal medicine, where all manner of medical technologies and illnesses may potentially complicate the developing relation of parent and child, ethics is always already present yet also enigmatic in its origin. And yet, to approach ethical moral questions, we need to understand the inception of ethics. The Birth of Ethics: Phenomenological Reflections on Life’s Beginnings is an essential text not only for health professionals and researchers but also for parents, family members, and others who care and take responsibility for newborns in need of medical care.

Max van Manen offers an extensively updated edition of Phenomenology of Practice: Meaning-Giving Methods in Phenomenological Research and Writing to provide an eloquent, accessible, and detailed approach to practicing phenomenology. Phenomenology of practice refers to the meaning of doing phenomenology on experiences that are of significance to those in professional practice such as psychology, health care, education, and in contexts of ordinary living. A special feature of this update is the role of examples, anecdotes, stories, and vignettes, and the singularity of fictionalized empirical fragments in making the unknowable knowable. Accordingly, the various chapters are enriched with many intelligible examples of phenomenological essays and excursions on ordinary and extraordinary topics. These examples show that a phenomenological method can be engaged to explore virtually any lived experience or event. Max van Manen provides penetrating portrayals of depthful insights by brilliant phenomenologists. He identifies and distinguishes a variety of phenomenological orientations that are alive and current today. This book is relevant to scholars, students, and motivated readers interested in the originary meanings and methods of phenomenological human science enquiry. Max van Manen’s comprehensive work is of significance to all concerned with the interrelation between being and acting, thoughtfulness and tact, in human sciences research and the phenomenology of everyday life.

Qualitative Research in Midwifery and Childbirth brings together a range of phenomenological methods and insights into one accessible text. Illustrated with plenty of examples of successful phenomenological research, it keeps the focus applied to midwifery and childbirth and makes clear the links to practice throughout.

Classic Writings for a Phenomenology of Practice features examples of newly translated classic phenomenological texts that have been largely forgotten or misunderstood. The writings are unique in that they speak to the practice of doing phenomenological research for the purpose of gaining insights and better understandings regarding aspects of professional practice and ordinary life phenomena and events. Phenomenology does not have to be impenetrable philosophy, dealing with tedious technical issues. Instead, phenomenology may offer relevance, value, and enduring allure to readers and researchers who are engaged with the quotidian life experiences and events of students, patients, clients, friends, and other individuals. This phenomenological approach aims to stay as close as possible to the ordinary events of everyday life: seeing the first smile of a child, feeling compulsive, being humorous, having a conversation, experiencing childhood secrecy, encountering new things—topics that span a manifold of life experiences. In this collection of classic phenomenological writings, each author is thoughtfully introduced, and each text is followed by a conversational descant: a reflection on the phenomenological reflection. The presentation of these classic writings and their reflections aims to show us what it means to do phenomenology directly on the phenomena that we live—thus asking us to be attentive to the fascinating varieties and subtleties of primal lived experiences and consciousness in all its remarkable complexities. This book is relevant for scholars and students who are interested in human science research and the origins and practices of the phenomenological method.

Phenomenological Inquiry in Education is an edited collection of 16 chapters that offers a fascinating and diverse range of approaches and views about phenomenological inquiry as applied in educational research. Written by a group of international scholars concerned about understanding lived experience, the editors assemble theoretical ideas, methodological approaches and empirical research to create a distinctive transdisciplinary outlook. Embodying many unique and useful insights the book provokes thought about the possibilities for phenomenology in contemporary educational research. The international contributors highlight what an exploration of lived experience can offer qualitative research and extend on methodologies commonly used in educational research. By grounding phenomenological inquiry in the complexities of doing research across discipline areas in education, the writers of the book forge links between theory and empirical research, and give their unique perspectives about how phenomenological ideas are being and might be employed in educational research. The book is thus carefully crafted to address both phenomenology as a philosophical tradition and its possibilities for educational research. This scholarly work will appeal to educational researchers, as well as those in broader social research. It taps into the growing international interest in phenomenological research in education which brings attention to lived experience and the highly important affective dimension of learning.

To be at the birth of a baby is special, yet there is an increasing secularisation and reliance on technology in contemporary maternity care, particularly in the western context. Through exploration of experiences at birth this book explores joy at birth, which is often ignored and overlooked beyond the activities that help to ensure survival. This book draws on a collection of stories of birth from mothers, birth partners, obstetricians and midwives, that demonstrate joy at birth across professional groups and in different types of births and locations with or without technological interventions. Each chapter introduces stories of joy that highlight embodied, spatial and relational meanings. Employing the Heideggerian notion of a human being, it sketches out an ontological focus that draws our gaze to the everyday taken-for-granted ways of being at birth. Based on phenomenological experiential data and rigorous interpretive analysis underpinned by seminal philosophical writings, this book calls for readers to attend to the wholeness of birth in all situations and at all births in ways not attempted before. It will be of great interest to midwives, and those working in and studying maternity, obstetrics and neonatology, as well as social and medical anthropology, sociology, cultural, organisational and clinical psychology and spirituality.

Dieser Band beleuchtet die mannigfaltigen Aspekte von Intersubjektivität und bringt verschiedene Philosophen miteinander in einen fachlichen Dialog. Der Autor setzt sich mit den verschiedenen Ebenen und Dimensionen von Husserls Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität auseinander und vergleicht diese mit Ideen von Scheler, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Schutz, Buber und Habermas. Einen direkten Bezug stellt Nam-in Lee zwischen den Positionen von Husserl und Levinas zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität her und bringt sie in einen fruchtbaren Austausch miteinander. Darüber hinaus regt der Band auch einen interkulturellen philosophischen Dialog zwischen Philosophen an, deren Denken vorrangig westlich beziehungsweise fernöstlich geprägt ist, wie etwa Husserl und Konfuzius, Scheler und Mencius oder Hutcheson und Chong Yak-Yong.