While the concept of the life-world—among many other concepts, such as embodiment, space, time, selfhood, affectivity and intersubjectivity—has been employed in applied phenomenology to analyse such health and health care related experiences as illness and disability, use of technologies in health-care, and the patient-health care professional relationship, its has scarcely been used to analyse public health issues. In this context we want to explore the analytical potential of the concept of the life-world in the field of public health. More concretely, based on phenomenologically informed qualitative research (specifically, the methodological approach ‘Phenomenological interview’), our aim is to show how Edmund Husserl’s concept of the life-world can help us better understand vaccine hesitancy in the context of COVID-19 pandemic and, at the same time, how the interview material can generate material for more nuanced understanding of the concept of the life-world. We have identified two core determinations of the concept of the life-world which lie behind vaccine hesitancy. One of them is that the life-world is an embodied, perceptual world; and the other is that the life-world is the transparent, taken-for-granted background of our daily life. Discussing the ways these determinations of the life-world and their interplay lead to vaccine hesitancy, we will also argue for the potential of the empirical (interview) material to inform phenomenological thought in the form of the more nuanced understanding of the concept of the life-world. With reference to the interview material and Havi Carel’s concept of ‘global uncertainty’, we will argue that the life-world can be understood as a dynamically shrinking and expanding process, which we further clarify via the concept of ‘dys-appearance of the life-world’.
This research is funded by the Latvian Council of Science, project Hesitant Bodies: Phenomenological Analysis of the Embodied Experience of Vaccine Hesitancy (project no.: lzp-2021/1-0360).