Tristan Hedges

Tristan Hedges

Ph.d.-fellow

I am a PhD Fellow employed within the 'Who are We' research group. My research interests lie in both 'classical' and 'critical' phenomenology, social ontology, critical theory, and feminist philosophy. 

 

 

Current research

My project is titled Us and Them: A Phenomenological Approach to Collective Identity. Within this project, I investigate different forms of collective identity, the constitutive significance of the 'Them' or the 'Third', and how power relations modulate, motivate, and obscure the ways in which we identify with/against each other. Within the scope of the research group, my aim is to investigate experiences of the 'we' beyond dyadic, second-personal, and face-to-face encounters. I am also interested in critical reflections on the ways in which an experience of 'for-us-ness' or 'we-ness' is manufactured and exploited for problematic ends.

Besides my PhD project I have been working on two manuscripts which attempt to provide a phenomenological account of discrimination from the perspective of the discriminator. Within these papers I argue that a Husserlian account of normality can help uncover the proto-normative and affective-intentional structures underlying various acts of discrimination. This is a research topic I hope to develop further towards the end of my PhD.

Currently, I am working on a paper which argues for a phenomenological distinction between the experience of being part of a 'we' compared to an experience of being part of an 'us'. Drawing on Sartre and contemporary discussions of social identity, I outline two forms of us-experiences which, unlike we-experiences, are constitutively dependent on the Third: (1) the experience of being grouped and (2) the experience of seriality. My aim is to show how power obscures or produces experiences of collective identity depending whether you belong to a normative identity group or not.

 

 

Teaching

Fall 2022

Seminar in Ethics and Meta-ethics (BA Course)

University of Copenhagen, Denmark

 

Lecture/Seminar in Applied Phenomenology (BA Course)                   

University of Copenhagen, Denmark

ID: 291062810