Gary Backhaus

John Murungi

This collection explores the various forms of narrative, semiotic, and technological mediation that shape the experience of place. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi have assembled a wide array of scholars who give a unique perspective on the phenomenology of place.

Lived Topographies and Their Mediational Forces

"This collection explores the various forms of narrative, semiotic, and technological mediation that shape the experience of place. From the East End of London to Navajo lands to Ground Zero, Lived Topographies examines the great effect of language, mass media, surveillance, and other incursions of the contemporary world on topographical experience and description. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi have assembled a wide array of scholars to provide an interdisciplinary approach to this subject, giving this collection a unique perspective on the phenomenology of place."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This volume presents the concept of Ecoscape as spatial interrelations, or spatially patterned processes, that are constitutive of an environment_an ecosystem. Contributors investigate environmental issues concerning the human impact on geohistory, food distribution, genetically modified biota, waste management, scientific mapping, and the rethinking of human identity.

Geographical Patternings of Relations

Ecoscapes

Linda Ardito

The world of aesthetics is, itself, inextricable from the world as a whole. Indeed, as this book argues, it is among its essential features, and an invaluable key to its appreciation. Thus, to venture into the uncharted world of aesthetics is also to venture into this larger world, a world that might be called the “cosmos” or the “universe”. At the same time, to venture into this uncharted realm is to also blaze a trail to the self. This trail would, itself, be paradoxical, as it would end where it begins and begin where it ends. In this light, it may also be said that the uncharted world of aesthetics is the uncharted world of the self. This book provides insights into how works about aesthetics are also works reflective of the self, as well as works with endless possibilities of being.

Venturing into the Uncharted World of Aesthetics

The illumination of African philosophy offered in this volume leads to the illumination of philosophy in general. Illuminating arises as an essential task of philosophy, whether African or not. What is illuminated is not already there, but is constituted at the moment of illumination. This book invites the reader to participate in the illuminating work of philosophy and necessarily, thereby, to contribute to his or her own self-constituting self-illumination. Although the focus is on African philosophy, the book also bridges the gap between African philosophy and other branches. Today more than ever, a bridging philosophy is called for, and this book helps to meet that need. This book poses philosophical questions such as who is an African and what Africa is, and seeks philosophical answers. In doing so, it contributes to the ongoing discourse on African philosophy. It addresses such issues as the African grounding of philosophy, the difference between African and Black philosophy, the African body, African art as expressed in and by Chiwara, the plight of African trees as the plight of Africans, and the symbolic meaning of Robben Island.

African Philosophical Illuminations

The contributors to this volume address global, regional, and local landscapes, cosmopolitan and indigenous cultures, and human and more-than-human ecology as they work to reveal place-specific tensional dynamics. This unusual book, which covers a wide-ranging array of topics, coheres into a work that will be a valuable reference for scholars of geography and the philosophy of place.

The Dynamics of Boundaries and Placements

Tensional Landscapes

In Rendezvous with the Sensuous readers are drawn to, and become situated within, the dynamic place of the aesthetic experience. While there, human sensuousness comes into relief as it combines with the sensuousness that derives from nature. In this complex place where artistic expression coalesces with the natural world, readers are extended an invitation to share in the journey of a richly diverse synesthetic experience and to gain a greater appreciation of the important place of the sensuous in illuminating the role of aesthetics in the world of ideas.

Readings on Aesthetics

Rendezvous with the Sensuous

Symbolic Landscapes presents a definitive collection of landscape/place studies that explores symbolic, cultural levels of geographical meanings. Essays written by philosophers, geographers, architects, social scientists, art historians, and literati, bring specific modes of expertise and perspectives to this transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary study of the symbolic level human existential spatiality. Placing emphasis on the pre-cognitive genesis of symbolic meaning, as well as embodied, experiential (lived) geography, the volume offers a fresh, quasi-phenomenological approach. The editors articulate the epistemological doctrine that perception and imagination form a continuum in which both are always implicated as complements. This approach makes a case for the interrelation of the geography of perception and the geography of imagination, which means that human/cultural geography offers only an abstraction if indeed an aesthetic geography is constituted merely as a sub-field. Human/cultural geography can only approach spatial reality through recognizing the intimate interrelative dialectic between the imaginative and perceptual meanings of our landscapes/place-worlds. This volume reinvigorates the importance of the topic of symbolism in human/cultural geography, landscape studies, philosophy of place, architecture and planning, and will stand among the classics in the field.

Symbolic Landscapes

This is an introductory book on African legal philosophy. The book claims that African legal philosophy exists and is intelligible in the context of African culture, just as every other legal philosophy has its cultural foundation. What law is, how it is thought, how it is interpreted, and how it is applied takes place with thing the parameters of African culture. At a time when the imposition of Western culture on Africans has to be reckoned with, African legal philosophy is, in part, a response to this imposition. It ought to have a liberating effect.

John Murungi

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