PhD Courses in Denmark

Welcome to: Existential Healthcare Communication as an Aesthetical and Philosophical Practice

Course responsible: Professor Finn Thorbjørn Hansen finnth@ikp.aau.dk

Date: November 25-28, 2024

Deadline: 23 October 2024

Place: Aalborg University, Department of Communication & Psychology, Research Section ‘Arts, Aesthetics & Health’

Max participants: 20

Course language: English

ECTS: 3

Requirements:

Before the course:

We will ask each participant to write and send a short description (4 pages) of their research project and describe in what way they find phenomenological dimensions in their research and what their main phenomenological question and wonderment currently is.

After the course:

We will ask each participant to make a 7-pages reflection on the notion of ‘Existential Health’ as they see it now, and where and how they see the relevance as well as challenges in working with existential healthcare communication through inspiration from aesthetical and philosophical  (contemplative) practices.

Lecturer(s):

·       Professor Finn Thorbjørn Hansen, Head of TEN, Aalborg University

·       Professor Carlo Leget, Chair of Care Ethics, University of Humanities, Utrecht, The Netherlands

·       Associate Professor Rasmus Dyring, Department of Philosophy, Aarhus University

·       Senior Researcher Mai-Britt Guldin, Research Unit for GP and Department of Public Health, Aarhus University

Professor Finn Thorbjørn Hansen is full professor of applied philosophy and head of the research group TEN (Time, Existence & Nature connectedness), Art, Aesthetics & Health, Department of Communication, University of Aalborg (Denmark). He has been a Visiting Professor at Agder University in Kristiansand (Norway) where he was head of an international research project ‘Wonder, Silence and Human Flourishing’(Hansen et al, 2023). His research focus and specialty is the phenomenology and ethics of wonder, existential and ethical phenomenology and ‘philosophical and phenomenological action research’. He has been heading several external funded research projects in the field of Health Care, Higher Education, Innovation and research on Artistic Creation. He is the founder of the Danish Society for Philosophical Practice and have written several books on wonder and philosophical counselling practices. For more information:

https://vbn.aau.dk/en/persons/123561

Professor Carlo Leget is full professor of care ethics and research director at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and director of the Center for Loss and Existential Values in Aarhus. As chair of the care ethics department, he is responsible for the Master in Care Ethics & Policy at his university, and his research focuses on the intersection of care, meaning and end of life issues. Since 2015 he is a member of the Health Council of the Netherlands and the Care Ethics Research Consortium. For more information:

https://www.uvh.nl/contact/vind-een-medewerker?person=nhrjrsEsHowOfbPwC

Associate Professor Rasmus Dyring is associate professor of philosophy at Aarhus University. He works in the cross section between medical anthropology and the philosophy of healthcare doing mainly phenomenological research in conversation with ethnographic material. His main research interests are aging and dementia in a phenomenological perspective with a focus on potentiality and creativity. Dyring is the principal investigator of a VELUX HUMpraxis-project devoted to investigating, and developing practice that facilitates, everyday creativity in life with dementia.

For more information: https://pure.au.dk/portal/en/persons/rasmus-dyring(ed0be392-1816-42d4-bd7d-d8885a31860c).html

Senior Researcher Mai-Britt Guldin is a psychologist and senior researcher at Research Unit for General Practice and Department for Public Health, Aarhus University, Denmark and director of Center for Loss and Existential Values in Aarhus. Her research focus is on loss, grief, and end of life issues and for years she chaired her own research program and authored several books about loss and grief. Currently she is running the Center for Loss and Existential Values in Aarhus.

Course description, incl. learning objectives and prerequisites:

In the research section ‘Arts, Aesthetics & Health’ at Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, we are in different ways inquiring into the relationship between how liberal arts, aesthetical experiences, and health (or well-being) might be interconnected.

In this four days PhD-seminar we will focus on the phenomenological and existential dimensions of communication and search for meaning in healthcare professions, and professions where both the interhuman (person- and human-centered), worldly and interspecies (nature- and phenomenon-led) care are central.

For decades, professionals and researchers in healthcare and human-centered professions have called for a re-humanization in health, education and welfare. This has been described as responding to an unsettling tendency in these professions of feeling “out of tune with life” or “out of resonance” with the core values of their professions (Kitson et al. 2010; Galvin & Todres, 2013; Uhrenfeldt et al., 2018; Martinsen, 2018; Rosa, 2019; Hansen & Jørgensen, 2020). Lately, this quest for a re-humanization of health, education and welfare has now also been connected to a deeper ontological and existential connection with the world as such (Biesta, 2022; Dyring & Grøn, 2022, Dyring, 2023; Hansen, Eide & Leget, 2023).

The concept of Health and what it phenomenological is like to feel healthy in contrast to naturalistic theories of health have also for some years been connected to a state of “homelike being-in-the-world”(Sevenaeus, 2000, 2011, 2016), “Authentic Homecoming” (Galvin & Todres, 2013), “Existential Rootedness”(Ücok-Sayrak, 2019) or “Ontological Homecoming”(Hansen & Jørgensen, 2020; Hansen, Eide & Leget, 2023).

However, what is meant by authentic or ontological “homecoming” or “world-centered”, “world-open” and “nature- and phenomenon-led” care differ because of different understandings of what an ontological and existential relation and resonance (Rosa, 2019) with the world is. Seen from an eco-phenomenological perspective: How are dignity, humanness, care ethics, care aesthetics (Thompson, 2023) and spiritual care as important concepts and practices in existential health communication to be understood from a non-anthropocentric world-care perspective? What is meant by health in existential and spiritual care if we need to involve such an eco-phenomenological approach (where health is more than what we mean by bio-medical (physical) health and psycho-sociological (mental) health? Why is it for example that Hans-Georg Gadamer in his reflections on truth, methods, and health (2004, 2006, 2007) puts such an emphasize on the experience of art and philosophy as portals to another ontological and existential connection to Being or Nature as such? Is it possible through deep experiences of wonder and presence that we as human being can learn to get into more healthy relation and resonance with the world and the meaningfulness, we may experience by co-being-in-the-world?

On this PhD-course we are going especially to inquire into three questions:

1)     How do we in Existential Healthcare Communication work in theory and practice with a new notion of ‘Existential Health’ (or Existential Sustainability), which on the one hand is closely connected to what Hartmut Rosa coins as ‘Existential Resonance’(Rosa, 2019), and Svenaeus (2000) and Todres & Galvin (2010), and Hansen & Jørgensen (2020) through Heidegger (Heidegger, 1995) describe as a kind of “ontological homecoming”, and on the other hand with the experience of feeling connected to nature seen from an eco-phenomenological perspective (Sallis, 2016; Abram, 2017; Nelson, 2021;Verducci & Kule, 2022)?

2)     Why is it that especially ‘art experiences’ (song, music, art works, dance, poetry) and ‘philosophical experiences’ (such as philosophizing and wondrous conversations and dialogical communities of wonder) and sometimes also more spiritual rituals and practices seem to create a special kind of soul-nurturing and spirit-strengthening ‘non-time’ and ‘non-space’ when indwelling into existential questions and experiences of people in care, their relatives or of caretakers? How are we to understand the enigmatic relation between Health Humanities and Environmental Humanities, or between human health and planetary health (Wahl, 2006; 2016)? 

3)     How do we do research on the existential, spiritual, and eco-phenomenological dimensions in healthcare communication? How can you through theoretical studies pave the way for new orientations in understanding existential care ethics and healthcare communication in a non-anthropocentric perspective that rests on ontology and phenomenology that puts the aesthetical and philosophical experiences in the center? And how do you do qualitative and empirical research on these subjects through practice phenomenology (Van Manen, 2014, 2023), action research (Dinkens & Hansen, 2016; Hansen, 2022) or art-based research (Visse, Hansen & Leget, 2019, 2020)?

Each lecturer on the course will take his/her departure from a specific healthcare context and health issue and show how he/she work in this context and with this health issue through aesthetical (or everyday creativity) experiences or/and philosophical (dialogical) experiences.

On the first day Carlo Leget and Mai-Britt Guldin will set the stage by a methodological reflection on existential and spiritual communication in healthcare in three lectures: 1) Introducing the healthcare sector as a place where different disciplines and paradigms meet. What are the challenges and obstacles for existential communication from a psychological perspective and from a spiritual perspective? 2) Crossing the boundaries of paradigms: How to connect knowledge from different disciplines and professions in healthcare: the example of the Integrated Process Model of loss and grief, its scientific foundation and its methodological underpinning; 3) Spirituality, hermeneutics and the arts: Focusing on the development of the Diamond Model for spiritual conversation (Leget, 2017, 2022, and 2023) the spiritual dimension will be explored, the importance of the non-cognitive dimensions of meaning, and the role of the arts, opening the way to a phenomenological approach.

On the second day Finn Thorbjørn Hansen and Rasmus Dyring will focus on what can be meant by existential health as “Ontological Homecoming” and ‘World- and Phenomenon-led Care”.

Hansen will take his departure on the research on ‘Culture on Prescription’ and the new notion of ‘Culture Medicine’. He will especially show how the phenomenology of wonder and practices of being in ‘Communities of Wonder (Hansen, 2015, Hansen & Jørgensen, 2020; Hansen, et al., 2023) can nurture what can be understood as health through the notion of ‘ontological homecoming’ based on Late Heidegger and eco-phenomenological perspectives. On the practice-methodological level he will describe how he works with the interplay between art experiences and philosophical dialogues (through the dialogue model ‘the Wonder Compass’, Hansen, 2022, 2023) when working with parents in grief and with cancer patients and their relatives and care takers.

Dyring will focus on the creative and existential dimensions of communication when working with people in care of dementia. (Dyring 2022a, Dyring 2022b), and 2) how to facilitate the sharing of a world that includes people who are many different places in their dementia (Dyring and Grøn 2021). Together these issues call for “world-open care” (Dyring 2022a, Dyring 2023) as a critical supplement to the reining paradigm of “person-centered care” (Kitwood 2019).

On the third day, the four lecturers will give each a methodological description of how they in practice work as researchers-in-the-field with phenomenology, philosophical practices or art-based research.

On the fourth and final day, the PhD-students will participate in the morning session in a Wonder Lab Session led by Hansen and Leget experiencing different forms of working with their research questions in wondrous aesthetical, philosophical, and contemplative ways. In the afternoon session, the PhD-students’ will in groups reflect upon self-chosen methodological or theoretical questions that have been awoken during the course and in relation to their own research project. 

Teaching methods:

The course will be organized along lectures, dialogues and interactivity through workshops.

The organizer of this course is Professor Finn Thorbjørn Hansen.

Morning and afternoon lectures in Day 1 & 2 will be thematically organized in order to address the

questions listed above. The lectures will be followed by questions and discussions in groups and in class.

On Day 3 the participants will be divided into groups of 5-6 participants. It is expected that every

group member has read all abstracts and key questions in their group prior to the course. Before the course starts the participants will be asked to do two things:

1) write an abstract that describes their research project and their main research question (wonder), and

2) to list at least 5 questions that have come up while readings the mandatory literature of this course.

Important information concerning PhD courses: We have over some time experienced problems with no-show for both project and general courses. It has now reached a point where we are forced to take action. Therefore, the Doctoral School has decided to introduce a no-show fee of DKK 3.000 for each course where the student does not show up. Cancellations are accepted no later than 2 weeks before start of the course. Registered illness is of course an acceptable reason for not showing up on those days. Furthermore, all courses open for registration approximately four months before start. This can hopefully also provide new students a chance to register for courses during the year. We look forward to your registrations.

For inquiries regarding registration, cancellation or waiting list, please contact the PhD administration, aauphd@adm.aau.dk

Key literature:

Please see Moodle.