A peer-reviewed paper by Omoregie Abiemwense Edokpayi, published in the Journal of International Students, uses critical African phenomenological inquiry to examine how racism constructs racialized bodies as objects, a process the author, drawing on Frantz Fanon, calls 'thingification.' The analysis is built around autoethnographic vignettes from the author's own experience of racial slurs as a Black international student in Canada, theorized through the frameworks of Husserl, Fanon, and Paulo Freire. The paper also introduces the concepts of a 'telephonic curriculum,' describing the intergenerational transmission of racial ideologies, and 'geo-racism,' applied to the pathologization of Black bodies during the 2014 to 2016 Ebola outbreak.
What the study does show is that phenomenological and autoethnographic methods can articulate, in philosophically precise terms, how racializing social schemas may alter the structure of embodied self-experience. The author argues that epidermalization, the marking of a body through visible difference, is not merely a social event but an intrusion into the first-person structure of consciousness and selfhood. The paper calls for international education to adopt decolonial practices grounded in Freirean conscientization, treating the classroom as a site for challenging racial constructs.
What the study does not show, and does not claim to show, is any of this in a generalizable or reproducible empirical sense. The method is a single-author phenomenological account supported by theoretical synthesis; there is no systematic data collection, no comparison group, and no outcome measurement. The theoretical claims about telephonic curriculum and geo-racism are conceptual arguments, not hypotheses that were tested. Evidence quality is low to moderate by conventional empirical standards, and because only an abstract was available, the full methodological detail cannot be assessed.
For consciousness studies the paper is relevant because it directly addresses how social and historical frameworks, specifically racialized schemas, may shape the structure of self-awareness and embodied experience rather than leaving them intact as purely internal phenomena. Whether those arguments hold at the scale implied requires evidence beyond a single phenomenological account, including, for instance, systematic documentation of how institutions respond to racial slurs and longitudinal data on how racialized experience affects self-conception over time.
Source: https://doi.org/10.32674/ycwa7058