Preface

In lieu of an Editorial during the interregnum between Professor Christopher Stones's stepping down as Editor-in-Chief of the Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology and the taking up of this position in 2020 by Dr Gregory Swer, this brief Preface serves simply to introduce and contextualise the four papers included in the current edition of the IPJP

This edition of the journal shaped itself around the foci of the papers included by authors based in Canada, the United Kingdom, Zimbabwe and North America. These are, respectively, the South Korean school teacher and educational activist Younkyung Hong's dialogic focus on alternative ways of conceptualising phenomenology both post-intentionally and interculturally, the British Professor Kathleen Galvin's explication of the sense of well-being experienced when reading poetry that speaks to the self within the theoretical frameworks provided by both Heidegger's fourfold and Gendlin's philosophy of "entry into the implicit", the Canadian educationalist Patrick Howard's exploration of the experience of collaborative professionalism in the teaching context, and the Zimbabwean psychologist Debra Machando and her colleagues' investigation of professional caregivers' lived experience of stress, compassion fatigue and burn-out in, in particular, the severely resource-constrained Zimbabwean socio-economic and cultural context.

While each of these papers is deeply thought-provoking, the only common thread among them is the emphasis in the more exclusively theoretical exploration of post-intentional phenomenology on the human being as a moral/ethical subject, and hence the human obligation to care for others. The other papers suggest that that quality inheres primarily in being need-responsive in both attitude and action.

That is, therefore, the theme of this final edition of the IPJP under the current editorial team: the need-responsiveness of phenomenology - and the question raised as to whether traditional phenomenology in fact has that capacity interculturally. We leave it to you, the reader, to ponder that question in light of the papers included in even just this edition of the IPJP.