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.