"In actual experience, there is never any such isolated singular object or event; an object or event is always a special part, phase, or aspect, of an environing experienced world—a situation."

— John Dewey

Alan W. Jurgens

PhD Philosophy – University of Wollongong
M.A. Philosophy – University of Copenhagen

I work as a Lecturer and program co-convenor of the Masters of Autism and Neurodivergent Studies in the School of Education at the University of Wollongong. I work on developing communities of practice and am a teacher educator. My work focuses on affirming practices and enhancing the autonomy and decision making of autistic and neurodivergent individuals in workplace and education settings. I am a philosopher by trade and my research interests are in Enactive Social Cognition, Ecological Psychology, Feminist Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Psychology, Philosophy of Disability, and Narrative Theory.  
 
Outside of work my wonderful partner Natasa and I enjoy the outdoors and traveling from our home on the South Coast of Australia back to our respective homelands of Wisconsin and Bosnia and Herzegovina. I am a sandan in kendo and also enjoy practicing yoga as a way to ground myself. I studied Buddhist Philosophy and Meditation while living in Nepal in 2010 and 2011 and completed my yoga instructor training in Berlin in 2013.
 

I completed my M.A. in philosophy with a specialisation in phenomenology at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark under the supervision of Prof. Dan Zahavi.

My doctoral thesis, New Developments in Enactive Social Cognition, was conducted under the supervision of Dr. Glenda Satne, Dr. Michael Kirchhoff, and Prof. Shaun Gallagher. The thesis provides new developments for the enactive project of investigating and explaining social cognition. The thesis utilises two approaches to achieve this goal. First, it dialectally defends enactivism vis-a-vis the mindreading framework. It does this by both securing established enactive claims from criticism, and by developing new objections against mindreading. Second, the thesis offers new enactive interpretations of empirical developmental data and presents new ways of investigating three central areas of debate within the field of social cognition: the metaphysical basis of social cognitive processes, the false-belief test literature, and the concept of empathy in relation to therapeutic practices and autism.

I presented a commentary on Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna’s (2019) book The Mind-Body Politic at the American Philosophical Association central meeting in Chicago 2022. My commentary ‘Master Narratives: Embodying Ideology’ was published in the Journal of the Philosophy of Emotion in 2024 and there is now a podcast out on this.

In an article published in Frontiers in Psychology, I advocate for a relational model of disability that adopts both a neurodiversity paradigm approach and Chapman’s ecological functional model. Recent developments in this area of research are working more towards utilising enactive and neurodiversity frameworks. This is a follow-up on work that I began in my PhD thesis.

I am also reviewer for the following journals: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Constructivist Foundations, Adaptive Behavior, Cogent Psychology, Philosophical Psychology, Imaging Science Journal, Autism Research, Critical Education, Current Psychiatry Research and Reviews and Diametros.

To stay up to date check out: Academia, Google Scholar, PhilPeople, and ResearchGate.

I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which the University of Wollongong is built and where I am able to do my research. I pay my respects to Elders past and present and acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the first people of Australia. They have never ceded sovereignty, and remain strong in their enduring connection to land and culture.

Contact

Office Contact:
School of Education, Building 23.112
Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences, and the Humanities,
University of Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia

Preferred Email:
jurgens.alan [at] gmail.com

Bluesky:
@alanjurgens.bsky.social