3rd PhenoLab Summer School in Umbria (Italy)
Phenomenology and Medicine. Exploring the Lived Experience of Illness and Care
When: June 8-12, 2026
Venue: Palazzo Mauri in Spoleto (PG)
Keynote Speakers (in alphabetic order):
- Dr. Roxana Baiasu, University of Birmingham (UK)
- Dr. Francesca Brencio, University of Birmingham (UK)
- Prof. Dr. Matthew Broome, University of Birmingham (UK)
- Prof. Dr. Havi Carel, University of Bristol (UK)
- Dr. Lorna Collins, Expert by experience (UK)
- Dr. David Crepaz‑Keay, FRSPH, The Mental Health Foundation, London (UK)
- Prof. Dr. Magnus Englander, Malmö University (Sweden)
- Prof. Dr. Susi Ferrarello, California State University (East Bay) (USA)
- Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Fuchs, Heidelberg University Hospital (Germany)
- Prof. Dr. Ashok Handa, St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford (UK)
- Prof. Dr. Guilherme Messas, Santa Casa de São Paulo Hospital (Brasil)
- Prof. Dr. René Rosfort, University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
Call for papers
Medicine today stands at a critical juncture. While biomedical advances have produced unprecedented diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities, there is growing recognition that the reductive frameworks dominating contemporary healthcare often fail to capture what matters most to patients: the lived experience of illness, the meaning of suffering, and the human dimension of care. The biomedical model, with its emphasis on measurable pathophysiology and evidence-based interventions, has achieved remarkable success in treating disease. Yet this same model tends to objectify the body, reducing it to a collection of systems and mechanisms that can be observed from the outside, and the person. The patient's subjective experience - how illness actually is experienced, what it means, how it disrupts one's life-world – frequently becomes peripheral to clinical concern. This objectification creates the "crisis of presence" in medicine. Patients often report feeling unseen, unheard, or reduced to their diagnoses. The result is a medicine that may cure disease while failing to heal people.
Illness disrupts this lived bodily experience in ways that purely objective descriptions cannot capture. The person with chronic pain does not simply have damaged tissue; their entire way of inhabiting space, time, and social relations is transformed. The cancer patient does not merely carry abnormal cells; they experience a fundamental alienation from their own body, which has become both intimate and strange, both self and threat. Similarly, phenomenological analyses of temporality illuminate how illness disrupts biographical continuity. The healthy body typically "disappears" in action, functioning as a transparent medium for our projects and intentions. Illness forces the body into thematic awareness, disrupting the natural flow from past through present toward future. Chronic conditions create biographical disruption, a rupture in one's life narrative that demands new forms of sense-making and integration.
Phenomenology offers conceptual and methodological tools uniquely suited to recovering what the biomedical model overlooks. By bracketing naturalistic assumptions and attending carefully to the structures of lived experience, the phenomenological method reveals dimensions of illness and care that are clinically and ethically crucial. The phenomenological concept of the lived body, for instance, distinguishes between the body as we experience it from within - as the medium through which we engage the world - and the body as an object of external observation.
Beyond theoretical insight, phenomenology has direct implications for how medicine is practiced. The phenomenological tradition in psychiatry is very well-known, but the merits and possible positive outcomes of the phenomenological approach extend beyond mental health sciences. In nursing, phenomenological research has illuminated the textures of caring relationships, revealing how presence, attentiveness, and skilled bodily engagement constitute essential dimensions of therapeutic care that resist standardization or protocol. In palliative medicine, phenomenological accounts of dying challenge conventional frameworks and open space for more authentic engagement with mortality and finitude. In rehabilitation, phenomenological perspectives on disability challenge deficit-based models and recognize alternative modes of embodiment as different rather than merely deficient.
Phenomenology also deepens ethical reflection on medicine by foregrounding human vulnerability and interdependence. Where much medical ethics focuses on principles, rights, and autonomous decision-making, phenomenological approaches emphasize the fundamentally relational character of human existence.
One of phenomenology's distinctive contributions is its capacity to bridge philosophical reflection and empirical investigation. Phenomenological research methods, including in-depth interviews, participant observation, and various forms of interpretive analysis, allow researchers to systematically study lived experience while remaining faithful to its qualitative richness. These methods have proven valuable across health sciences, from nursing and allied health professions to public health and health psychology.
Yet tensions remain between phenomenology's philosophical rigor and the demands of empirical research. The aim of the 5 days of Summer School is to explore the critical role of phenomenological approaches in healthcare research, emphasizing the importance of transdisciplinary methodologies and qualitative research strategies.
This call for papers is aimed to explore the above issues. We welcome contributions that engage with these themes and questions including, but not limited to:
• Lived experience of illness: the phenomenology of pain, suffering, and chronic illness; transformations of bodily experience and self-understanding through illness; temporal disruptions and biographical interruptions; the loss and recovery of agency and capacity.
• Embodiment and medical practice: the lived body versus the objective body in clinical encounters; intercorporeality in the therapeutic relationship; touch, presence, and attunement in caregiving; technologies and their effects on embodied experience.
• Clinical phenomenology: applications of phenomenological methods in psychiatry, nursing, and primary care; phenomenological psychopathology and its relevance to diagnosis and treatment; descriptive approaches to understanding mental illness and distress.
• Care and relationality: the phenomenology of caring and being cared for; vulnerability, dependency, and human dignity; home care, hospitalization, and institutional spaces; family caregiving and professional care relationships.
• Ethical and existential dimensions: meaning-making in the face of illness and mortality; dignity, autonomy, and quality of life from phenomenological perspectives; end-of-life care and the experience of dying; disability and alternative modes of being-in-the-world.
• Methodological contributions: phenomenological research methods in health sciences; qualitative approaches to studying patient experience; bridging phenomenology and empirical research; challenges and innovations in phenomenological informed methodology.
We encourage contributions from philosophers, healthcare practitioners, sociologists, social workers, scholars from medical humanities, PhD scholars working at the intersection of phenomenology and medicine. We welcome both theoretical papers and empirically informed studies that draw on phenomenological frameworks.
We invite authors to submit two separate files:
· One file, with their short bio and affiliation;
· Another one with 1000 words abstract
DEADLINE: February 15, 2026
Notification of acceptance will be communicated to the authors by email by April 15, 2026
Contributions for oral presentations are requested to be sent by email to info@phenolab.academy specifying in the subject CALL FOR PAPERS – PHENOLAB SUMMER SCHOOL
Registration fees:
Early birds for oral presentations 610 euros VAT included (until May 15, 2026)
Fees for oral presentations: 793 euros VAT included (after May 15, 2026)
Fees for non-presenting participants: 244 euros VAT included (possibility of enrolment until June 1st, 2026)
Non-presenting participants are invited to participate in the discussions and engage in the activities
Both presenting and non-presenting participants will receive a Certificate of Attendance
For any query or information please contact info@phenolab.academy
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