Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This communication examines challenges and contributions of interdisciplinary research on phantom limb sensations through joint interviews with amputee participants, exploring how these methods shape bodily knowledge and raise ethical issues around the transformation of intimate sensory accounts.

Paper long abstract

Researching phantom limb sensations raises fundamental methodological obstacles as well as theoretical challenges. Whether the aim is to explain the physiology of this particularly unstable and elusive phenomenon, access its phenomenological expressions, make it disappear, or find functional use for it, researchers face significant epistemic obstacles. This proposal examines what is generated through interdisciplinary research on phantom limb perception in cases of upper or lower limb amputations. It brings together the perspectives of medical teams, a neuroscientist, a doctoral researcher in sport sciences, and an anthropologist, all collaborating within a larger robotics project.

Knowledge is not the only outcome produced through these practices. It is equally important to consider the ethical implications of how individuals’ intimate bodily experiences are being transformed through the questions asked by researchers. Based on the collection and analysis of specific vocabularies, different types of signs of existence, and modes of interpretation through which participants attempt to describe sensations which are often difficult to put into words or images, this paper examines what is produced at the intersection of these disciplines – both in terms of shared vocabulary and knowledge, and in the experience of the participant.

Finally, the paper asks how the phantom limb phenomenon becomes better understood through interviews conducted across multiple disciplines, and what remains inaccessible in this context, particularly with regard to subjective experience. This case highlights both the potential and the limitations of collaborations between disciplines and with so-called “participants”.