Dr. Hendar Putranto, M. Hum.
Assisstant Professor in Strategic Communication Ethics
Master of Communication Science Program (MIKOM-UMN)
Tuesday, May 12, 2026, late evening marches toward dusk. A casual, week 12 in my graduate Strategic Communication Ethics class, turned into something memorable. Communication ethics phenomenology breathed fresh air.
Three students from Timor Leste shared their disappointment after conducting a small phenomenological field inquiry in Suai, East Timor. They had travelled far, spent their own money, and emotionally prepared themselves to meet survivors and families whose lives had been shaped by an economic-oriented project marred with socio-political conflict years ago. Yet when they returned to class, what they brought was not a triumphant account of “rich data,” but rather a sense of failure.
“The feeling was no longer there,” one student admitted softly. “We asked questions, but the answers felt short. Sometimes when we stayed silent, they stayed silent too.”
At that moment, I sensed that what stood before me was not merely methodological confusion. It was a collision between students’ expectations of qualitative research and the phenomenological reality of human experience itself. Like many beginning researchers, they unconsciously imagined data as verbal abundance: long narratives, emotionally expressive testimonies, dramatic confessions. They expected experience to appear transparently through language.
But lived experience rarely arrives in such orderly form.
Phenomenology, I told them, begins precisely where certainty about “good data” starts to collapse. A trembling voice, a sudden pause, a gaze withdrawn from eye contact, or a prolonged silence after hearing a particular word may already reveal more than coherent sentences ever could. Trauma does not always narrate itself fluently. Sometimes it hesitates. Sometimes it withdraws. Sometimes it survives only as atmosphere.
I remember telling them that “what remains unsaid may itself become phenomenological evidence.” At that point, I realized I was no longer merely teaching research method. I was inviting them into a different disposition towards human inquiry. Touching upon this subject matter, I recalled some lines from van Manen’s book titled Researching Lived Experience (2016). He described this form of inquiry not as a closed system. “There are many paradoxes that mark the routes of a human science journey … The things we are trying to describe or interpret are not really things at all-our actual experiences are literally ‘nothing.’ And yet, we seem to create some-thing when we use language in human science inquiry” (van Manen, 2016, pp. xvii-xviii)
This distinction matters deeply in Communication Ethics. The field often risks collapsing into moralizing tendencies: abstract reminders about what organizations or individuals “should” do. Yet ethical inquiry becomes meaningful only when researchers are willing to dwell within ambiguity, discomfort, and the fragile textures of lived experience. Methods, therefore, cannot merely function as technical instruments. They shape how we encounter others in their humanness, their fragilities, their humanities at their best and worst. “The choice of method has profound implications for our understanding of humanity,” cites Lanigan of Paul Ricoeur’s work (1977). The “destiny of communication” depends on recognizing that social entities are defined by the meanings they have for a subject and a community.
Lanigan (1994) suggests that when methods are used as rigid technical instruments, they risk reducing the “other” to a mere object of measurement. Conversely, a phenomenological method allows for an encounter that respects the “otherness in general” that is essential to our humanity. Flowing from this reflection and recalling the classroom conversation, I found myself returning to insights I had learned years earlier during my own phenomenological research journey.
It was an intellectual path toward finishing my dissertation of “what it feels like to be a communication scholar in knowledge production through journal output” by employing phenomenology of practice approach (2021-2025). There, during interviews, I viewed human experience not simply “collected” as objective datum (the singular mode of data). They are capta, captured, encountered, interpreted, and co-constituted through relational presence. This entails the logic of discovery (Lanigan, 1994) (*)
The use of capta allows for accuracy and abstraction in description. It focuses on the quality of a well-chosen example (an exemplar) to intuitively understand the essence of a phenomenon.], and not invention based on data, which relies heavily on proving things (quod erat demonstrandum) — the hallmark of positivism. Perhaps this is why phenomenology demands more than procedural competence. It requires patience, attentiveness, emotional restraint, and the willingness to remain with uncertainty.
I told my students that completeness is not the highest criterion in phenomenological work. Depth is. Listening does. Dwelling matters when the cycle of inquiries and responses stop.
A fragmented memory may reveal more than a perfectly structured answer sheet. Silence may carry sedimented grief. An awkward pause may contain an entire history of abandonment. In phenomenology, meaning does not sit statically waiting to be extracted like a black box recovered from a crash site. Meaning moves, shifts, expands, retracts and contracts through encounter, even missed encounters.
That evening, I sensed that my students had not failed at all. Their journey to Suai had already become phenomenological before they realized it. They had encountered not merely respondents, but the limits of language, memory, and expectation. When the role (of journalists) did not suffice to establish rapport with their sources.
Perhaps this is what I increasingly understand teaching to be: not the transfer of methodological procedures, but the slow cultivation of attentiveness toward the ways human experience discloses itself — partially, vulnerably, and sometimes only through what refuses to be fully said.
(*) Lanigan (1994) defines capta as evidence that is taken during the process of analysis (quod erat inveniendum; which was to be found out). It is central to the methodology of discovery, where the researcher seeks to understand the “lived” experience of consciousness. In this model, the researcher is an “observer in the system.” They do not pretend to be objective or “omnipotent” but rather use their own experience as a rule of judgment to record how a phenomenon appears.
References
Lanigan, R.L. (1994). Capta versus data: Method and evidence in communicology. Human Studies 17, 109-130. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01323607
Ricoeur, P. (1977). Phenomenology and the social sciences. The Annals of Phenomenological Sociology 2, 145-159.
van Manen, M. (2016). Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy, 2E. Routledge.
