Editors' Introduction: Reflections on the First Issue

Abstract

We are happy to feature four invited submissions by Lisa Guenther, Kym Maclaren, Bonnie Mann, and Gayle Salamon, all of whom respond to the questions motivating our inaugural issue. Both Salamon and Maclaren offer a response to the question “What is critical phenomenology?” by exploring the productive relationship between critical theory and phenomenology. Salamon does this by tracing the history of the term critical phenomenology. Maclaren further explores the productive relationship between critical theory and phenomenology en route to her analysis of intimacy. Focusing on the phenomena of shame and long-term solitary confinement, Mann and Guenther take up that question by performing the work of critical phenomenology. Mann also offers suggestions regarding critical or, as she calls it, feminist phenomenology’s relation to the tradition—both of classical phenomenology and feminist philosophy. Guenther shows how the work of critical phenomenology is already at play in the practices of resistance among prisoners in the Security Housing Unit of Pelican Bay State Prison in California.