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Research Project

Transformative Experience of Disability and Rediscovery of the Resonant Lifeworld

This project explores the transformative experience of disability through the lens of phenomenological concepts of resonance and lifeworld. It aims to go beyond the dominant social and medical models of disability, proposing instead a phenomenological approach that focuses on the subjective lived experience. Researchers argue that disability can lead to a profound existential transformation, characterized initially by alienation and disconnection from the world, but potentially giving way to a rediscovery of resonant lifeworld. The project seeks to understand the transformative experiences of disability and how it fundamentally alters one's embodied and mental experience, leading to an existential transformation of selfhood. This approach seeks to restore the lost resonance in the lifeworld of a person with a disability. The resonant relationship is not limited to interactions with other people, but extends to objects, artifacts, and material affordances as such. In order to understand various strategies that bring a disabled individual back into a resonant relationship to the lifeworld, we will draw our research focus on the concrete case study of blind football. The project suggests that rediscovery of resonant relationship can be better understood by drawing on phenomenological theorem of lifeworld, which is overlooked in the field of Disability Studies.

Lasha Matiashvili