Kristy Claassen

Conceptual disruption is typically theorised as a consequence of technological innovation: a new artefact or practice unsettles an entrenched category, and a conceptual gap, overlap, or misalignment results. This paper argues that disruption also occurs when conceptual schemes collide, that is, when concepts travel across geopolitical boundaries and moral frameworks. It introduces Intercultural Conceptual Disruption (ICD) to theorise this second source of disruption. By using the example of the concept of PRIVACY in the African relational ontology of Ubuntu, the paper illustrates that conceptual disruption is not uniform across contexts. What counts as severe in one conceptual scheme may be mild or unremarkable in another, depending on the flexibility of that scheme and its ontological commitments, and the movement of concepts is shaped by asymmetries of epistemic and political power rather than by conceptual need alone. ICD is articulated as three interlinked processes: (1) identifying the type, level, and severity of disruption within a given conceptual scheme; (2) decentering dominant frameworks by addressing the epistemic injustices that privilege some conceptual resources over others; and (3) decolonising concepts that carry undue colonial influence in postcolonial contexts.

Human beings are embedded in diverse social, cultural and political groups through which we make sense of our technologically mediated lived experience. This article seeks to reaffirm the postphenomenological subject as a primarily social subject. Critics maintain that the current postphenomenological framework does not adequately address the social, cultural and political context in which human-technology relations take place. In recent years, various additions to postphenomenology have been suggested in order to address this contextual deficit. In this article, I argue that a return to the phenomenological roots of postphenomenology reveals underexamined analytical tools that allow for greater socio-cultural and political sensitivity. I take Don Ihde’s supposed macroperceptual and microperceptual divide as a point of departure in claiming that postphenomenology has too hastily turned away from the subject as primarily socially situated. I draw upon the phenomenological tradition, particularly the social phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, to develop a social postphenomenological approach. This approach is informed by the Schutzian notions of action, the stock of knowledge at hand and consociates. In the resulting account, the postphenomenological schema of _I—Technology—World_ is reconstrued as _We—Technology—World_.