Phenomenology, Feminist Theory, and the Black Box between Fieldwork and Normative Theorizing

While recent work has defended the value of ethnography and fieldwork for political theory, we still lack a clear account of how to move from interviews, observations, and fieldnotes to abstract principles and theories of justice. In other words, the link between lived experience and normative theorising often remains a methodological black box. In this paper, we address this methodological issue by drawing upon phenomenology and feminist theory as two coherent and complementary approaches for thinking about a specific aspect of the empirical, that is the lived experience from the subjects’ lifeworlds, and the theory. On the one hand, phenomenology allows for political theory to re-center on the description of lived experience as illuminating for theoretical development. It obliges us to take into consideration how certain phenomena are described by those who live them, and to account for processes and not only strict definitions. On the other hand, we bring in feminist theory as it is already rich in concrete propositions and practices for linking the empirical and the theoretical. Through a feminist approach, we emphasize the necessity to address existing social problems; the importance of situating ourselves in the writing; and the inclusion of affect and emotions as constitutive of theorizing, rather than just empirical data. By combining phenomenology and feminist theory, we thus contend that exploring lifeworlds and adding such approaches to the toolkit of normative political theorists not only bridge gaps between empirical investigation and normative theorizing, but also yields highly valuable insights for the substance of normative theories of justice, equality, democracy, and so on. This paper seeks to illustrate the added value of using such a framework through the case of citizenship theory. Drawing on empirical work on lived citizenship, we show how attention to embodied practices, affects, attachments, and experiences of misrecognition can refine traditional accounts of citizenship theory centered on membership, rights, and formal belonging. Our claim is not that phenomenology or feminist theory replace existing methodologies, but that they provide innovative tools for bridging empirical research and normative political theory as well as uncover previously unexplored areas of normative theorizing. This contribution addresses two of the workshop’s guiding questions: how empirical research can expand the scope of normative debate, and which methodological issues arise when linking normative theory with political science. In putting together our experience in political theory and qualitative as well as ethnographic fieldwork, we offer a methodological proposition at the intersection of both fields.