ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the key aspects of relational phenomenology. It discusses the contexts of the field sites and describes the theoretical encounter with the field. Thinking phenomenologically about the encounters of social research with youth works as a series of invitations that shift the academic senses in subtle and incremental ways, rather than in prescriptive ways. Inviting people to reflect on their embodied and sensed experiences in the research field, phenomenology foregrounds unplanned events as part and parcel of research, rather than as failures that sit outside of systematic methodologies. This forces them to recognize their dynamic engagements with research fields and participants. Schrag's notion of "transversal rationality" seems particularly helpful in thinking through the practical outcomes of a politics of global research encounters. Moving transversally beyond the traditional dichotomies of universalism and cultural relativism, or across spatial divisions of the global North and South, new questions start to emerge.
