The inaugural meeting of the Interdisciplinary Coalition of North American Phenomenologists (ICNAP) was held at Ramapo College, New Jersey, on May 8-9, 2009 and welcomed a large group of researchers from the United States and Canada in a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, psychology, sociology, architecture, political science, communicology, health, law and social work.

The newly formed coalition is for phenomenologists who are committed to learning from the research of colleagues in other disciplines within the phenomenological tradition. The coalition leadership will be working with its membership to promote the goals of interdisciplinarity in phenomenological scholarship and research. This year’s editorial board included such noted scholars as Robert Bernasconi, Scott Churchill, Christine Daigle, Lester Embree, Hwa Jol Jung, Richard Lanigan, Frank Macke, Dennis Skocz, and Frederick J. Wertz.

This year’s conference was dedicated to Mary Rogers (1944-2009), a phenomenological sociologist who was a co-founder of ICNAP. Dr. Rogers was involved in research examining the feminist ethic of care informed by the work of Alfred Schutz, Carol Gilligan and Jane Addams.

Several keynote and paper presentations at the two-day ICNAP meeting were important to policy, research and practice with older adults. Dr. Frederick J. Wertz of Fordham University opened the conference with an account of trauma and recovery in illness comparing phenomenology in psychology as a research method with grounded theory, discourse analysis, narrative research and intuitive inquiry. Dr. Wertz’s beautiful phenomenological analysis of the phenomenon of trauma presented at the conference made the contributions of phenomenology in psychology as a method to the descriptive and qualitative study of experience clear and suggested the fruitfulness of the method for research in other disciplines. Leonard Lawlor, the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University, presented a keynote lecture entitled, “The Husserlian Limitation to the Mathematization of the Qualitative: A Critical Response to the Project of Naturalizing Phenomenology.” Dr. Lawlor’s address focused on important social problems of human suffering and powerlessness in the human sciences, the crisis of naturalizing phenomenology, coming to terms with who we are and who we are becoming, and how such problems can be addressed within the phenomenological tradition. Mary Beth Morrissey of the Fordham Ravazzin Center on Aging, bridging the disciplines of law, health and social work, presented a paper on the “Phenomenology of Pain and Suffering: An Ethical Perspective in Gerontological Social Work.” In challenging legal and ethical frameworks at the end of life, she identified central concerns for health and social work professionals working with older adults with life-limiting illness, offering a phenomenological account of pain and suffering that reframed assessment of suffering and end-of-life decision making in an ethics of sociality and relationality. Dr. Jacqueline Martinez of Arizona State University, representing the discipline of communicology,  closed the conference with a keynote lecture on “Interdisciplinary Phenomenology and the Study of Gender and Ethnicity.” Dr. Martinez argued for an interdisciplinary and decolonial phenomenology in the social sciences recognizing the intersubjectivity of the human condition.

The next meeting of ICNAP will be posted on the organization’s Web site at www.icnap.org. Scholarly research papers will be accepted from various disciplines for presentation at the next meeting. Please check the ICNAP Web site for more information.

[Editor's Note: According to Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, phenomenology is the science of the subjective processes by which phenomena are presented, with emphasis on mental prcesses and essential elements of experience. A phenomenological study emphasizes a person's descriptions of a feelings about experienced events.]