Nouveau visage à l'ISP │Kayleigh Timmer

Kayleigh Timmer is completing a PhD at Stellenbosch University and a Research Assistant at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, both in South Africa. Her areas of interest include feminist philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, Critical Theory, and the philosophy of emotions. Her current areas of research include existential analyses of femininity, complicity, and bad faith; the affective experience of gender-based violence; the relationship between social media and subversive socio-political praxis; and the development of a critical phenomenology through a return to first generation members of the Frankfurt School and a consideration of the compatibility of their thought with existential-phenomenology. 

Her PhD thesis is titled “Femininity, Complicity, and Bad Faith: Exploring the Tension Between Authenticity and Femininity Under Patriarchy” and explores these themes through the employment of a Beauvoirian existential-phenomenological framework. While at UCLouvain, she will be working on a project which revisits Walter Benjamin’s fragment “Capitalism as Religion” through the lens of Mircea Eliade’s phenomenology of religion and situates the fragment in Benjamin’s larger writings on the experience of the seemingly numinous within capitalist society. 

Kayleigh is Associate Editor for the Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, Editorial Assistant at the Journal of Philosophy of Emotion, and Managing Editor for the short-form philosophy magazine SideQuests: A Magazine of Philosophical Reflections. She is a member of the Organising Committee for the South African Society for Critical Theory.