(Re)Inhabiting awareness: geography and mindfulness

2016

Recent developments in theories of practice have seen place and space taken explicitly into account. In particular, THEODORE SCHATZKI's 'site ontology' offers distinctive but as yet under-explored means of engaging with human geographies. By giving ontological priority to practices as constitutive of the social, this kind of practice theory provides an integrative conceptual framework that enables the analysis of diverse phenomena in relation to each other, over space and time, as they are constituted through practices. This article develops an outline agenda for bringing theories of practice, and particularly SCHATZKI's 'site ontology', together with geographical inquiry. We elucidate this agenda through consideration of three contemporary preoccupations in human geography, comprising emotion, materiality and knowledge.

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2005

The current upsurge of interest in emotions within geography has the potential to contribute to critical perspectives that question conventional limits to scholarship. Three precursors of emotional geographies are discussed in this context (humanistic, feminist and non-representational geographies). Connections between emotional geographies and psychotherapy are explored with a view to resisting the equation of emotion with individualised subjective experience, and developing situated, relational perspectives.

Geographical Research, 2019

2000

The question of geography’s future has recurred throughout the history of geographical thought, and responses to it often presume a linear trajectory from the past and present to a possible future. Yet one of the major contributions that geographers have made to understanding spatio-temporality is reconceiving both space and time as plural, fluid, and co-constituted through multiple space-time trajectories simultaneously. Amidst the ongoing crises of the present, this article opens the current special issue with a call to pluralize geography’s futures by diversifying the voices speaking in the name of ‘geography’ and broadening the onto-epistemic horizon of possibilities for the futures of geographical thought and praxis. We have assembled the contributions in this collection with the aim of raising important theoretical, methodological, and empirical questions about how geography’s past and present shape the conditions of possibility for its potential futures. In doing so, we seek to demonstrate how the worlding of geography’s futures is fundamentally a matter of transforming its disciplinary reproduction in the here-and-now.

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2011

Canadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes, 2016

Key Messages There is a crisis of mental health in the academy. This special issue, the first to address this crisis, brings together three bodies of research: geographers' understanding of the relationship between mental health, social space, and material places; mental health initiatives in higher education; and the neoliberalization of the academy. In this introduction we discuss two particular foci: defining the crisis of mental health and wellbeing in neoliberalizing universities, and institutional and individual responses. Watch a video presentation of this Special Issue

2011

Abstract I discuss the presence of memory within geography, particularly in relation to the interweaving non-representational/peformative/affective 'turns'. Memory seems under-considered in these non-representational geographies (nrgs) which focus on the affective performativities of the present and the richness and creative potentials therein. As memory is a fundamental aspect of becoming, the roles it plays in the peformative moment need to be considered.

In May 2010 the proposed Bickham coal mine near the Pages River in the Upper Hunter region of Australia was formally rejected because of its potentially deleterious impacts on hydrology and the likely negative impacts on a valuable thoroughbred breeding region. In this paper we focus on the 'psychoterratic' mental states of topophilia and solastalgia and highlight how people's intimate personal relationships with the river and ''the environment'' were concealed through the formal assessment process. We argue that these relationships and the emotional states they sustain are critical, are at present little understood by geographers, that geography is well placed to develop and incorporate these understandings, and that the formal impact assessment system could be greatly improved by the incorporation of psychoterratic geographies.