Cheryl Mattingly

Bodymind diversity, disability scholars argue, contributes to community and to ideals of human flourishing. Phenomenologists like Nancy and Arendt, meanwhile, foreground our human pluralism. But what does it mean to inhabit (and invent) a plural “we” across significant bodily difference? And why is the experience of surprise important to it? A phenomenological investigation of Ginsburg and Rapp's cultural imaginary, “disability worlds,” reveals how surprise can catalyze new forms of potentiality and community, a “we‐ness” beyond sameness that Nancy calls the “singular plural.” This is evident in the experience of Andy, a child with profound intellectual and physical disabilities, whose ways of responding often unsettle expectations. His parents’ surprise during his first ski trip—a joyful, irreducible, singular event—expands their sense of what Andy's body can do and draws them into new forms of community and flourishing. Their surprise also engenders heightened critical awareness of social norms that restrict community and underestimate capacity.

How do we offer critiques of social marginalization and the politics surrounding it without reducing people to mere victims or, at the least, “tokens of a type”? Phenomenology offers a useful way to address this problem. Focusing on the concept of stigma, this article proposes an errant phenomenology informed by Arendt's concern to “defrost” canonical moral and political concepts and Glissant's errant poetics of opacity. Centering upon an African American mother raising a child diagnosed with autism, it argues that an errant version of critical phenomenology can both illuminate the workings of stigma in this child's life and, at the same time, provide resistance to any simplistic classification of his social identity. But the article also makes a more radical claim by addressing the meta problem of concept reification in critical social theory. It offers an avenue for disturbing category thinking itself in generative ways, enriching how we envision social critique and deepening our critical capacity.

There are two possible solutions to the problem, that of the fundamentalist and that of the sage. The fundamentalist overcomes the problem of multiplicity by a return to the One. Truth can be restored only if rivals are eliminated and false pretenders unmasked. Truth and order are founded on the tyranny of the One. The solution of the sage is founded on the metaphysics of absence … Under these conditions, multiplicity cannot be overcome. It has to be endured, tolerated. It is a permanent reminder of the fact that absolute truth is not for this world as we know it. To put it in a paradoxical way: it is the discovery of enlightenment that we are all groping in the dark.

Waiting is one obvious form of anticipation. This article considers waiting for death. Drea, a mother whose five-year-old daughter was diagnosed with a virulent form of brain cancer, experiences a shifting anticipatory terrain as death looms large. Calling upon phenomenology, I ask two primary kinds of questions that connect time, narrative and relationality in considering Drea’s experience of waiting. First, I ask what Drea is waiting for and what kind of time horizon this waiting opens up. My second question is less obvious for an article on anticipatory time: who does she wait with? To put this phenomenologically: how might we consider ‘waiting with’ as a form of experience? I bring to bear phenomenological considerations of narrative time, drawing especially on Carr, as well as Nancy’s phenomenology of relationality.

Comment on Keane, Webb. 2016. Ethical life: Its natural and social histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

The Mental Health Commission of Canada worked collaboratively with stakeholders to create a new framework for a federal mental health strategy, which is now mandated for implementation by 2017. The proposed strategies have been written into provincial health plans, hospital accreditation standards, and the annual objectives of psychiatric departments and community organizations. This project will explore the decision-making process among those who contributed to Canada’s first federal mental health policy and those implementing this policy in the clinical setting. Despite the centrality of ethical reasoning to the successful uptake of the recent national guidelines for recovery-oriented care, to date, there are no studies focused exclusively on the ethical tensions that emerged and continue to emerge during the creation and implementation of the new standards for recovery-oriented practice. This two-year Canadian Institute of Health Research Catalyst Grant in Ethics (2015–2017) consists of three components. C-I, a retrospective, qualitative study consisting of document analysis and interviews with key policy-makers of the ethical tensions that arose during the development of Canada’s Mental Health Strategy will be conducted in parallel to C-II, a theory-based, focused ethnography of how mental health practitioners in a psychiatric setting reason about and act upon new standards in everyday practice. Case-based scenarios of ethical tensions will be developed from C-I/II and fed-forward to C-III: participatory forums with policy-makers, mental health practitioners, and other stakeholders in recovery-oriented services to collectively identify and prioritize key ethical concerns and generate action steps to close the gap between the policy-making process and its implementation at the local level. Policy-makers and clinicians make important everyday decisions that effect the creation and implementation of new practice standards. Particularly, there is a need to understand how ethical dilemmas that arise during this decision-making process and the reasoning and resources they use to resolve these tensions impact on the implementation process. This catalyst grant in ethics will (1) introduce a novel line of inquiry focusing on the ethical tensions that arose in the development of Canada’s first mental health strategy, while (2) intensifying our focus on the ethical aspects of moving policy into action.