Home - Lived Experiences

This book explores the lived experience of being at home as well as being homeless. Being at home or not is typically a matter of being at a place or not, where such a place is carved out of space and designated as such. It is a place that is both empirical and trans-empirical. When one is at home or not at home, one typically has in mind an inhabited place. To inhabit or not to inhabit it is to find oneself in a place that has an affective presence or absence. In either case, affectivity points to a lived place where lived experience is constituted and displayed. Thus, in this context, affectivity becomes more than the subject of empirical psychology. If psychology were to have access, it would be in the context of phenomenological or existential psychology - a psychology that has its roots in the sensible world and, hence, a psychology that expresses an aesthetic dimension. 

John Murungi, PhD, JD, is Professor of Philosophy at Towson University, USA.  His research focuses on twentieth-century continental European philosophy, philosophy of law, and African and African American philosophy.  He is the author of An Introduction to African Legal Philosophy, African Musical Aesthetics, African Philosophical Illuminations, and African Philosophical Currents.  He has also co-edited and authored chapters in Sensorial Trajectories; Elemental Sensuous:  Phenomenology and Aesthetics; Rendezvous with the Sensuous:  Readings on Aesthetics; Symbolic Landscapes: Transformations of Urban and Suburban Landscapes; and Lived Topographies and their Mediational Forces, among others.  He is the co-founder of the International Association for the Study of Environment, Space, and Place, and the founder of the Geo-Aesthetics Conference Series.