Digital Commons@RISD Home > Division of Liberal Arts > Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive) > Vol. 22 (2024)
Abstract
Places are at once inhabited by various individuals who are themselves members of diverse communities and whose experiences of the same everyday living environment can vastly differ. Everyone lives in some place, but not everyone is fortunate enough to feel as if they belong to that place, as if that place is their home. According to José Medina (2017), those who inhabit a place they are unable to make their home experience a unique form of displacement, that of being displaced within a place. This, he claims, is a problem for everyone—not just for those experiencing displacement within a place but also for those who are able to feel at home in that same place and inhabit it comfortably. So, minimizing this displacement is a key challenge facing pluralistic societies. In this paper, I show why adequately responding to this challenge requires taking the role of (everyday) aesthetics seriously, both when framing the problem and proposing solutions. In doing so, this paper bridges important discussions in everyday aesthetics and social epistemology and establishes a basis for the fruitful exchange of ideas between the two philosophical subdisciplines. It also provides an entry point for critically engaging with the social mission of everyday aesthetics put forward by Yuriko Saito (2017).