Rachel Elliott

City University of New York, Philosphy, Faculty Member

University of Toronto, Philosophy, Alumna

University of Guelph, Philosophy, Alumna

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Rachel Elliott is a faculty member at CUNY College of Staten Island has been Visiting Researcher at the University of Exeter. From 2020-2022 she worked as an Assistant Professor at Brandon University (term position). She received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Guelph in 2019. Her research investigates music’s transformative potential using Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodiment. Rachel wrote and hosted an academic podcast about improvised music called 'Sound It Out.' She had done previous work in philosophy at McGill University (B.A.Hons.) and the University of Toronto (M.A.). Prior to undertaking her doctoral studies, Rachel taught in the Humanities Department of Montreal's Dawson College.

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Marieke Borren

Open universiteit

Christine Wieseler, Ph.D.

Santa Clara University

Corinne Lajoie

Penn State University

KU Leuven

University of Exeter

Ursinus College

SUNY: University at Buffalo

Sofie Boldsen

University of Copenhagen

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Papers by Rachel Elliott

Sharing Time with Misfits: We-Experience Across Bodily Difference

Puncta, 2024

One way that we connect with others in we-experience comes through sharing time. However, questio... more One way that we connect with others in we-experience comes through sharing time. However, questions have been raised as to whether time can be shared between normates and misfits. In this paper, I illustrate the concept of sharing time across bodily difference using Merleau-Ponty’s concept of body schematic temporality from the Phenomenology of Perception ([1945] 1962). I explore how we-experiences can be fostered through shared time across bodily difference in two contexts: becoming ill and playing music.

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Intercorporeality online: anchoring in sound

Continental Philosophy Review

Ambiguity in our experience of embodiment online has prevented us from confidently extending exis... more Ambiguity in our experience of embodiment online has prevented us from confidently extending existing scholarship to the domain of online sociality. In recent decades, research across the disciplines has been undergirded by themes related to embodiment, restoring to prominence a theme previously neglected in part thanks to the rise of feminist scholars within the academy. We have not, however, adequately appealed to this corpus when theorizing forms of life happening online. In this paper I hope to bridge this gap by bringing forward phenomenological evidence about the nature of online embodiment. This paper presents the findings from a research project that used phenomenological interviews to elicit descriptions of lived embodiment from participants singing in online choirs during the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that these descriptions reveal anchoring and discounting as central features of their experience, two dynamics of the body schema as described by Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception that underpin participant experiences of sensory disjunction. I furthermore take pains to show how the form of embodiment operative in the online choirs has the characteristics of intercorporeality, a reciprocal two-sided form of embodied subjectivity. After explaining how Husserl and Merleau-Ponty each define intercorporeality, I suggest that what I am calling an auditory intercorporeality underlies reported features of participant experience in the choirs, such as we-experience and coordination.

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Musical Introspection and the Affective Group-en-Fusion : Existential Reckoning with the Political and Climate Crises

American Music Perspectives, 2021

Music is a vital means of engaging with affect, one that many of us are relying upon to process t... more Music is a vital means of engaging with affect, one that many of us are relying upon to process the unthinkable political realities that confront us. However, insofar as we are doing this serially-for instance, listening alone to pre-recorded music on demand-we are missing out on a critical potential of such affective musical engagement. Jean-Paul Sartre identified seriality as a social formation marked by alterity, one that prevents mutual awareness of similar situatedness. However, whereas Sartre argued that broadcast radio possesses a serial structure, this article argues that it can engender an incipient form of collective, which Sartre calls the group-en-fusion. This argument is made through the example of The Stillness and the Dancing , Joel Cuthbert's campus and community radio program that plays ambient, experimental, and contemporary classical music on CFRU Radio Gryphon in Guelph, Ontario.

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Sharing Time in We-Experiences: A Critical Merleau-Pontian Re-Reading of Schütz’s Tuning-In Relationship

Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology, 2022

Recent scholarship about group ontology and collective agency seeks to understand experiences of ... more Recent scholarship about group ontology and collective agency seeks to understand experiences of togetherness and why they are important to us. Work by Michael Bratman (2014), Raimo Tuomela (2013), John Searle (2010), and Margaret Gilbert (1990), among others, has sought to identify the conditions under which we each severally enter a distinct mode of togetherness that philosophers call the "we-experience." Much of this scholarship focuses the nature of shared plans and commitments thought to occur in such experiences. Other approaches take a different focus altogether, seeking to identify a more basic level of connectivity out of which shared agential structures such as plans could arise. Alfred Schütz (1976), for example, points to a "mutual tuning-in relationship" as the basis for all communication (161). For Schütz, this tuning-in relation is achieved through sharing time, or "sharing of the other's flux of experiences in inner time" (173). Such sharing of inner time not only prefaces the assumption of communicative or, by extension, agential structures, but is also constitutive of a new form of higher-order unity, the "we." 1 A critical phenomenological approach to questions of social ontology and collective agency would seek to recognize how "quasi-transcendental social structures" and the "lived experience of power and oppression" inform the being of such a "we," to use Lisa Guenther's (2019) helpful terminology (12). One facet of identity-based social hierarchies is the exclusion or "othering" of targeted populations, and an adequate account of weexperiences must therefore grapple with the features of social reality that undermine weexperiences across intersectional power differentials. 2 Unlike the "planning" accounts noted above, Schütz's approach to we-experiences allows these salient features of social reality to be thematized. However, as I hope to demonstrate in this paper, this is only true if we give Schütz's account a Merleau-Pontian rendering by replacing the Husserlian notion Sharing TIme • 2 Rachel Elliott

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Suspending the Habit Body through Immersive Resonance: Hesitation and Constitutive Duet in Jen Reimer and Max Stein's Site-Specific Improvisation

Critical Studiesin Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, 2018

There is increasing appreciation for the role that location plays in the experience of a musical ... more There is increasing appreciation for the role that location plays in the experience of a musical event. This paper seeks to understand that role in terms of our habitual relationships to place. I ask how being musical somewhere can expand and transform our habituated comportment there, an inquiry sparked by the theory and practice of the late experimental music pioneer Pauline Oliveros. Grounded in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment, I argue that the site-specific improvised performances of Jen Reimer and Max Stein invite audiences into transformed relationships with places they habitually encounter. With sustained comparisons to the centrality of deep listening in Pauline Oliveros's lifetime of sonic innovation, and frequent reference to Alia Al-Saji's reception of Merleau-Ponty's account of the habit body, this paper contends that such site-specific improvised performances can elicit a sort of hesitation in our everyday style of sensory-motor conditioning, and, concomitantly, awaken a layer of sensory living amenable to radically new sonic and behavioural configurations.

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