This pitch proposes reframing consciousness studies through a critical-phenomenological lens, grounded in my research on the lived experience of intersex migrants in the United States. A recent symposium on consciousness studies (Frontiers Forum, 2025) highlighted an ongoing absence of theories that meaningfully connect consciousness with moral experience, suffering, social context, and the embodied conditions of life. Parallel debates (Houdart, 2025) suggest that consciousness theory may offer an alternative way of understanding political experience, particularly within LGBTQI contexts.

Drawing on findings from my PhD research, I conceptualize consciousness as an ongoing, affective, embodied, and situational activity of sense-making, processual, relational, and contextual (Thompson, 2007; Zahavi, 2005/2014). Within this view, identity is not an ontological starting point, but a flexible, contingent “sedimentation” of experience shaped by institutional encounters and normative expectations. Identity emerges from conscious life and, throughout life, constantly influences perceptual orientation, yet remains an outcome of relational and affective processes rather than a fixed structure (Saketopoulou, 2023).

Intersex migrants’ narratives demonstrate how consciousness operates through bodily attunement, temporal orientation, and meaning making, even when identity categories are undergoing internal and/or external transformation. Consciousness and lived experience remain present, while political and institutional systems may constrain subjectivity by suppressing or misrecognizing identity.

I invite discussion on how centering consciousness offers an account of human experience and how theoretical psychology might better understand embodiment, vulnerability, and lived meaning in “dark times.”