Developing post-ableist music therapy: An autoethnography exploring the counterpoint of a therapist experiencing illness/disability

<p>This PhD examined a therapist’s experience of illness/disability to see if any new light could be shed on music therapy whilst also finding ways to navigate disability as a practitioner. There has not been adequate research attention given to the experiences of music therapists who have an illness/disability. The position is often negotiated in isolation with minimal tools and resources. An arts-based autoethnography was used to determine how the close examination of one’s personal experience with illness/disability can impact on practice, how the work can be negotiated, and to uncover any new practical or theoretical meanings. Furthermore, it looked to determine what arts-based autoethnography could offer one’s practice. A poststructural lens was used that drew on social constructionism, feminism, and the work of Michel Foucault. Data generated from a music therapist’s practice, experiences of illness/disability, literature, and professional documents were analysed using Foucault’s “critical ontology of ourselves” (Foucault, 1984b, p. 47). Hidden processes of problematic ableism were found within the practice examined as well as in some educational and professional encounters. These regimes of ableism were supported by universalising and dichotomising discourses, namely humanism, western normativity, limited observable understandings of disability, and the enforcement of able/disabled divide through many binaries. The methodology provided the tools to reposition the practice to politicise disability and address ableism. Addressing ableism was found to be more complex than simply incorporating disability issues into existing contemporary frameworks. The analysis led to the development of Post-Ableist Music Therapy (PAMT). PAMT extended the relational ethic beyond what was present in the prior practice by drawing on aspects of posthumanism, agonistic plurality, and increasing the visibility of disability studies and crip theory. Therefore, PAMT offers a different lens to the critical orientations’ apparatus: a social justice practice not based on empowerment and humanism but on agonism and posthumanism instead. As there is a lag in the theorisation of ableism, PAMT provides an alternative framework that can be applied to current approaches to increase our professional consciousness of ableism. By repositioning the practice and exploring alternative subjectivities, the professional and personal narratives of a therapist experiencing illness/disability became more integrated, working with–not against–each other in a shared activism. The methodology fostered an increased ethical care of the self; offered tools that critiqued what we are; experimented with going beyond the limits imposed on us. The use of such tools could have wider application in the everyday practices of therapists. The findings have significant implications for practice and training, as the challenges people and societies face cannot be adequately dealt with without tools to explicitly uncover and address normalisation and ableism.</p>

Developing post-ableist music therapy: An autoethnography exploring the counterpoint of a therapist experiencing illness/disability

<p>This PhD examined a therapist’s experience of illness/disability to see if any new light could be shed on music therapy whilst also finding ways to navigate disability as a practitioner. There has not been adequate research attention given to the experiences of music therapists who have an illness/disability. The position is often negotiated in isolation with minimal tools and resources. An arts-based autoethnography was used to determine how the close examination of one’s personal experience with illness/disability can impact on practice, how the work can be negotiated, and to uncover any new practical or theoretical meanings. Furthermore, it looked to determine what arts-based autoethnography could offer one’s practice. A poststructural lens was used that drew on social constructionism, feminism, and the work of Michel Foucault. Data generated from a music therapist’s practice, experiences of illness/disability, literature, and professional documents were analysed using Foucault’s “critical ontology of ourselves” (Foucault, 1984b, p. 47). Hidden processes of problematic ableism were found within the practice examined as well as in some educational and professional encounters. These regimes of ableism were supported by universalising and dichotomising discourses, namely humanism, western normativity, limited observable understandings of disability, and the enforcement of able/disabled divide through many binaries. The methodology provided the tools to reposition the practice to politicise disability and address ableism. Addressing ableism was found to be more complex than simply incorporating disability issues into existing contemporary frameworks. The analysis led to the development of Post-Ableist Music Therapy (PAMT). PAMT extended the relational ethic beyond what was present in the prior practice by drawing on aspects of posthumanism, agonistic plurality, and increasing the visibility of disability studies and crip theory. Therefore, PAMT offers a different lens to the critical orientations’ apparatus: a social justice practice not based on empowerment and humanism but on agonism and posthumanism instead. As there is a lag in the theorisation of ableism, PAMT provides an alternative framework that can be applied to current approaches to increase our professional consciousness of ableism. By repositioning the practice and exploring alternative subjectivities, the professional and personal narratives of a therapist experiencing illness/disability became more integrated, working with–not against–each other in a shared activism. The methodology fostered an increased ethical care of the self; offered tools that critiqued what we are; experimented with going beyond the limits imposed on us. The use of such tools could have wider application in the everyday practices of therapists. The findings have significant implications for practice and training, as the challenges people and societies face cannot be adequately dealt with without tools to explicitly uncover and address normalisation and ableism.</p>

Nicolai Hartmann und die Gestalttheorie. Ein Vergleich unter dem Aspekt “Kausalität”

Summary In 1919 Nicolai Hartmann (NH) convincingly justified that there cannot exist a “general law of causation” as A. Meinong had in mind. For him Meinong’s understanding of causation (linear, successive in time) was bound on the region of the physical layer of being, simultaneously postulating it as the only possible causation there. This is the starting point of the comparison between N. Hartmann‘s understanding of causation and that of the Gestalt Theory, for which neither in psychic nor in natural (physical) context linear-successive causality plays a part. Therefore NH’s conception of 1919 was still completely incompatible with that of the Gestalt Theory despite the fact that he was distancing himself from the “general law of causation” sensu Meinong. 20 years later he changed this by adding the “Wechselwirkung” (interaction) to the linear successive causation in the physical layer. In doing so he approached the Gestalt theoretical position but failed it insofar as for it his linear-successive understanding of causation generally has had its day with regard to natural processes, also consequently for the physical (instead interaction between system and border conditions applies, an interaction of field forces). Thus the term “causation“ had become free for a dynamic concept of causation which is equally appropriate for the physical and the psychic. NH makes this move not until 1949, shortly before his death, by writing: ... (see original quotation in the German summary above). It is the opinion of the author of this work that the ingenious systematics of NH‘s Critical Ontology (which is not a closed system) should make it possible to execute the necessary corrections in some details of his theory of layers without questioning the structure of his systematics, thus carrying out what NH was not able to do himself due to his death.

On the Sources of Critique in Heidegger and Derrida

According to Lisa Guenther’s concise account, critical phenomenology seeks to expose not only the transcendental conditions of seeing and making the world (such as subjectivity, embodiment, and temporality), but the “quasi-transcendental” ones we find in contingent historical and social structures, such as white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity (2020, 12). This excellent formulation raises the question of its central distinction: from what position would the critical phenomenologist be able to distinguish transcendental from quasi-transcendental conditions, or universal from contingent structures? This question recalls post-Heideggerian treatments of transcendental historicity (Crowell & Malpas 2007) and the possibilities of critical theorizing, e.g., the Habermas-Gadamer debate on lifeworld and critique (How 1995). These issues also remind us of earlier attempts to forge alliances between (post-)phenomenology and critical theory by scholars shuttling between Freiburg (or Paris) and Frankfurt. At times, these went under the label “critical ontology” and often sought to develop a coherent vision out of Western Marxism and phenomenology, with a special focus, it seems, on Adorno and Heidegger (Dallmayr 1991; Guzzoni 1990; Mörchen 1981; Macdonald & Ziarek 2008).

Silencios y repeticiones de la violencia en Colombia. La novela histórica como ontología crítica del presente

This paper addresses the contemporary historical novel as a practice of critical ontology of the present. That is to say, a field of reflection that investigates the current ontological status. In the Colombian case, historical fiction has been attentive to interpret the past of violence and armed conflict in an aesthetic way as a mechanism to understand the future of the present. This essay proposes that historical novels, despite being located in a space-time already travelled, maintain a matrix of meaning anchored in the present reality's interpellation. To this end, this paper analyzes the novels The Crime of the Century (2006) by Miguel Torres and So much blood seen (2007) by Rafael Baena.

From devotion to commitment: Towards a critical ontology of engagement

This article approaches the notion of engagement from the perspective of critical ontology. With language as the starting point of its hermeneutic task, it commences with an etymological analyses of diverse Indo-European words gravitating around the semantic field of the notion of engagement. From these introductory insights obtained by an exercise in comparative linguistics, devotion and commitment are mapped as two opposite, yet inseparable, modes of being of engagement. Both of these modes seem to condition engagement in an ontologically disparate manner. While examining their fundamental structures, some of the canonical concepts of history of philosophy such as being, existence, subjectivity, or world - and also some of its constitutive binary oppositions such as body/mind, individual/collective, transcendence/immanence, light/darkness and sacred/secular - will be reconsidered through the prism of different ontological dispositions that devotion and commitment impose respectively on engagement. The overall aim of this investigation is to bring forth the main existential characteristics of being-engaged, by interpreting the roles of who, where, and what of engagement, and in order to provide a fundamental conceptual apparatus for a critical ontology of engagement.

Kant’s Pre-critical Ontology and Environmental Philosophy

In this paper I argue that Kant’s pre-critical ontology, though generally dismissed by environmental philosophers, provides ecological lessons by way of its metaphysical affinities with environmental philosophy. First, I reference where environmental philosophy tends to place Kant and highlight his relative marginalization. This marginalization makes sense given focus on his critical works. I then outline Kant’s pre-critical ontological framework and characterize the ways in which it is ecological. Finally, I conclude with some ecological reflections on the pre-critical philosophy and its possible relevance for contemporary environmental issues.

Towards a critical ontology of socio-economic transformation processes: Marx’s contribution

The aim of the article is to contribute to a critical ontology of socio-economic transformation processes. Elements for such an ontology, it argues, can be found in the interaction between three foundational aspects of Marx’s thought: the notion of labour as a human social activity; the meaning and implications of the notion of alienation; and the relationship between quantitative and qualitative changes. After analysing these elements, the article discusses possible developments for an ontology of socio-economic transformation processes and concludes that Marx’s fundamental contribution to such an ontology is to show that the emergence of a new system of division of labour as a qualitative transformation requires a change in the relationships between the entities of an already existing system of division of labour that gives it a new functionality and a new direction. Marx teaches us that we need to identify the turning points in change processes and that, in this last respect, emergence is not a gradual process. The article argues that, in more general terms, the notion of emergence as a process of change in the functionality of an existing system of relationships to which a new direction is given can be used as a method to analyse socio-economic transformation processes at different levels of social reality. Thus understood, emergence involves the rejection of any form of reductionism in the social sciences.

Alltägliche Lebenswirklichkeit und ontologische Theorie

The aim of this paper is to discuss the relation between our experience in everyday life and ontological reflection. While many accounts in contemporary ontology still defend the idea that the world consists only of material objects, some new views on everyday metaphysics or social ontology which try to articulate the specific properties of the objects used and found in ordinary life have been established during the last years. In the critical ontology of Nicolai Hartmann, the social and cultural dimension of our life is situated in the sphere of spiritual being [Geistiges Sein]. By investigating the methodical relation of phenomenology and critical ontology as well as specific entities (objective spirit, cultural objects), it is established that Hartmann offers a wide and methodologically reflected view which could be able to satisfy the practical significance of these entities.