| What is OPO? |
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The Organization of Phenomenological Organizations (OPO.) The publication in 1997 of the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology showed that philosophical phenomenology had taken root in over twenty nations across the planet since 1900 and that there were more than twenty disciplines beyond philosophy with phenomenological tendencies within them. And these numbers have kept growing.[1] These spreads of the tradition are more extensive than anybody seems previously to have thought. The process of bringing colleagues into greater interconnectedness then became deliberate and was happily accelerated by the development of emailing and e-publishing and of English as the shared language for researchers across the planet regardless of their mother tongues. A list of phenomenological organizations, which range in size from study groups of a dozen to national societies of 500 members, had reached a total of 161 by May 2007, with twenty-seven organizations in the Asia-Pacific area, twenty-two in Central and Eastern Europe, fifty-six in Western Europe, nineteen in Latin America, and thirty-seven in North America. The Newsletter of Phenomenology was begun in May 2002 and had over 3,150 subscribers from over fifty countries by May 2007. Beyond local and national organizations, regional organizations began to form with the Circulo Latinoamericana de Fenomenologia (CLAFEN) in Puebla in 1999, the Nordic Society for Phenomenology (NoSP) in Copenhagen in 2001, the Central and Eastern European Conference of Phenomenology (CEECOP) in Cluj-Napoca in 2002, and the Phenomenology in East Asia CirclE (PEACE) in Delray Beach in 2002. Other regional organizations are under development. And also in 2002 the worldwide Organization of Phenomenological Organizations (OPO) was formed in Prague. At the Prague meeting on November 9, 2002, fifty-nine representatives of Asian, European, Latin American, and North American phenomenological organizations met as a founding assembly in the restaurant where Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, last spoke in public. The purposes of communication and cooperation were decided on, as were a cycle of planetary meetings every three years in different areas, and an executive committee. The members of OPO are not individuals but organizations and each member organization that has paid its dues is entitled to send two representatives to the meetings to present papers, vote in the assembly, and contribute to the volumes of selected essays published afterwards. (Fifty-three essays from OPO I are published at www.o-p-o.net and this set of essays has been accessed over 9,000 times by May 2007.) In August 2005, the second meeting of OPO was held in Lima with organizations again from Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America. At the assembly meeting it was decided to merge the Central and Eastern and the Western European areas, to double the number of representatives from the four areas elected to the Executive Committee, to endorse the project of forming a Euro-Mediterranean regional organization, and to accept the invitation from Hong Kong for OPO III in 2008. A set of 140 essays in the five volumes of Phenomenology 2005 are forthcoming in 2007, with Europe divided at least for editorial purposes into Northern and Euro-Mediterranean parts, the latter including representatives from several predominantly Muslim countries. Besides becoming the chief sponsor of the Newsletter of Phenomenology, OPO established through its Executive Committee an electronic book publishing series with Zeta Books entitled Post Scriptum O.P.O. for the rapid and inexpensive publication in Castilian, Chinese, English, French, German, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and other languages of the collections of selected essays not only from the meetings of OPO but also from meetings of other phenomenological organizations. OPO is a "bottom-up" organization. The member organizations decide which one or two individuals will represent them in voting as well as in presenting and publishing papers and these representatives also nominate members for the Executive Committee that the whole assembly elects as well as the place of the next meeting, etc. Not only are many new professional relationships across the planet formed in OPO, but the state of development and high morale of the extensive, century-old, multidisciplinary, multilingual, and genuinely international tradition of phenomenology can be seen in its efforts.
[1] One can
now count fifty two countries with phenomenologists in them: Argentina, Australia,
Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia,
Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong,
Hungary, Iceland, India, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia,
Lebanon, Lithuania, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands. New Zeeland, Norway, Peru,
Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain,
Switzerland, Taiwan, Tunisia, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, and
Venezuela.
As for disciplines beyond philosophy, one can now count thirty six: Architecture, Cognitive Science, Communicology, Counseling, Cultural Anthropology, Ecology, Economics, Education, English, Ethnic Studies, Ethnology, Ethnomethodology, Film Studies, French, Geography, Behavioral, Geography, Social, Hermeneutics, History, Linguistics, Law, Literature, Medical Anthropology, Medicine, Musicology, Nursing, Philosophy of Religion, Political Science, Psychiatry, Psychology, Psychopathology, Religious Education, Social Work, Sociology, and Theology. |
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