ABSTRACT

This chapter describes phenomenology as a way of knowing, and discusses some of its major principles and concepts. The pivotal phenomenon is place, which incorporates place experiences, place actions, place meanings, and place events. Phenomenologist Max van Manen explains that the aim is to discern "the primordialities of meaning as people encounter and live with things and others in lived experiences and everyday existence". The everyday structure through which human-immersion-in-the-world unfolds is the lifeworld – a person or group's day-to-day world of taken-for-grantedness normally unnoticed and, therefore, concealed as a phenomenon. Essences are not some set of abstract, cerebrally derived universals that arbitrarily pin down and categorize lived experience. In studying place phenomenologically, one can examine the lived body's relationship to the physical environment and spaces in which experiencers find themselves. In doing phenomenological research, one faces the difficult conceptual and methodological question of interpretive accuracy and trustworthiness.