Carsten Schjøtt Philipsen

My current research is on the themes: living alone, being alone and feeling alone in the modern society.

Abstract for PhD-project:

The PhD project is a study of ‘the sense of feeling at home' in the late modern society with focus on the subject of dwelling. The aim is to scrutinize this ‘feeling' and examine how it´s being established under different scenarios in an attempt to find an underlying common phenomenon and/or generative process.

Often heavy metaphors are being used in order to describe or encircle the phenomenon, however such metaphors are mostly more seductive than clarifying and they seem to obscure the examination of the phenomenon in vague and/or (semi)magical meaningfulness. A major challenge to the project is therefore to describe this fuzzy feeling without using such metaphors or at least to take this criticism into account.

The study will be carried out from a more or less phenomenological point of view but is also inspired by ethnography. The main empirical focus will be on people who are moving into houses and apartments. The theoretical framework will be a combination of John Searles philosophy of mind (1983, 1999, 2002) and theory of appropriation as found among  people like Tim Ingold (2000), Henri Lefebvre (1991) and Carl Friedrich Graumann (1976, 1996).