Living and Knowing: Phenomenological Analysis of the Embodied Experience of Covid-19 Vaccine Hesistancy

    Activity: Talk or presentation typesOral presentation

    Description

    Vaccine hesitancy, defined by the World Health Organization as ‘delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite availability of vaccination services’, is recognised as one of the major challenges of the global vaccination efforts against infectious diseases, including COVID-19. In our ongoing research we try to approach COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in Latvia by focusing on the embodied experience of vaccine hesitant persons, by carrying out a phenomenologically informed qualitative research study, based on the methodological framework called ‘Phenomenological interview’ (Høffding and Martiny 2016) which integrates the qualitative interview with phenomenological philosophy. In Phenomenological interview phenomenology provides a conceptual framework for data collection and analysis.
    At the moment we have concluded our data collection phase, during which we performed 16 semi-structured interviews, and we are now in the data analysis phase. But it is already possible to discern a number of important embodied aspects of vaccine hesitancy. One of our tentative findings is that one of the possible motives for vaccine hesitancy might lie in the way we as embodied persons live through events, and how this direct, concrete embodied experience differs from how science represents those same events.
    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.
    Høffding, Simon, and Kristian Martiny. 2016. “Framing a Phenomenological Interview: What, Why and How.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 15 (4): 539–64. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9433-z.. .. .. .
    Period30 Mar 2023
    Event titleRSU research week 2023: University Teaching and Learning
    Event typeConference
    OrganiserRīga Stradiņš University
    LocationRiga, LatviaShow on map
    Degree of RecognitionInternational

    Keywords

    • vaccination
    • Vaccine hesitancy
    • experience
    • phenomenology
    • embodiment
    • body
    • life-world

    Field of Science

    • 6.3 Philosophy, Ethics and Religion