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Research from the 1980s by Ronan Paddison, Allan Findlay and colleagues on ‘the post-colonial city' and ‘the Arab city' is examined. Distinguishing between ‘post-colonial' (as periodization) and ‘p...

This is an extended book review essay considering Christian Abrahamsson’s impressive 2018 monograph Topoi/Graphein: Mapping the Middle in Spatial Thought. It argues that, rather than addressing ‘a ...

The relationship between pandemic, or chronic infectious diseases, and the carceral, meaning set‐apart spaces of enforced confinement for “wrong‐doers,” has a long, tangled history. It features in Foucault's inquiries into disciplinary power and its associated spatial formations, not least in the shape of the modern prison. Drawing lightly from Foucault's claims about disciplinary and biopolitical power, as well as on his anti‐prison activism, this paper explores three possibilities for penal transformation arising during the early months of COVID‐19 in UK prisons (circa March to August 2020). Consulting primary source material, these possibilities are respectively identified as “retrenching,” “reworking” or “reducing” the carceral. A chief finding is that under the press of pandemic “emergency,” the tilt of emphasis has been towards a retrenched or reworked “carceral state,” disappointing any promise of abolition, let alone more humble reduction in carceral conditions. The “biological sub‐citizens” of prisons are hence being left especially vulnerable to the press of pandemic, in part precisely because of how carceral spatialities are being intensified.

As part of a wider ‘geographical’ reading of writings by Theodor W. Adorno, the\ud Frankfurt School critical theorist, energised by a wish to discern possible lineaments of an ‘anti-fascist geographical imagination’, this paper engages in detail with Adorno’s aphoristic ruminations gathered together as Minima Moralia (2005 [1951]). With its close-grained attention to\ud ‘minimal’ or ‘minor’ things – a bewildering diversity of objects, practices and events that might\ud normally be reckoned of little account – this text exemplifies what Adorno elsewhere frames as\ud a concern for the ‘micrological’, as well as signposting many dimensions of what he will later\ud present more systematically as ‘negative dialectics’ (Adorno 1973 [1966]). This paper reconstructs the multiple geographies integral to many passages in Minima Moralia, working towards\ud an exegesis of what is claimed there about ‘distant nearness’ and ‘space enough between them’,\ud at the same time inspecting Adorno’s austere opposition to ‘affirmationism’ but also readiness\ud to be a phenomenologist – even one with occasional leanings towards a more ‘romantic’ celebration of objects, however unpleasant – of the nothing-much.

This chapter considers what some have called the ‘inescapable anxieties’ (Rose et al. 2020) associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, and we make two specific interventions: the first addresses contagious disease and places of care for people with mental health problems in historical and contemporary times, and the second explores psychological boundaries for those people who already experience severe anxiety conditions. Historically, occupants of ‘asylums’ were particularly at physical risk from the likes of cholera epidemics, but nothing was recognized about any additional burden upon their ‘madness’. During the current crisis, the physical dangers posed to psychiatric patients in closed-institutional environments (hospital wards) because of spatial proximities to bodies are paramount, but so too is a concern for the mental health of inpatients. The psychological effects of COVID-19 on those with existing mental ill-health outside of inpatient settings are also considered, particularly for those who already practice socio-spatial distancing, micro-boundary maintenance, and constant vigilance against perceived biohazards. We critically consider public commentary on these anxious pandemic geographies by both those with lived experience and those who staff psychiatric and psychological services.

Our aim in presenting this Classic Text is to foster wider analytical attention to a fascinating commentary on insanity by a former inmate of Glasgow Royal Asylum, Gartnavel, James Frame. Despite limited coverage in existing literature, his text (and other writings) have been surprisingly neglected by modern scholars. Frame’s Philosophy presents a vivid, affecting, often destigmatizing account of the insane and their institutional provision in Scotland. Derived from extensive first-hand experience, Frame’s chronicle eloquently and graphically delineates his own illness and the roles and perspectives of many other actors, from clinicians and managers to patients and relations. It is also valuable as a subjective, but heavily mediated, kaleidoscopic view of old and new theories concerning mental afflictions, offering many insights about the medico-moral ethos and milieu of the mid-Victorian Scottish asylum. Alternating as consolatory and admonitory illness biography, insanity treatise, mental health self-help guide, and asylum reform and promotion manual, it demands scrutiny for both its more progressive views and its more compromised and prejudicial attitudes.

What and where is ‘the asylum’ today? To what extent do mental healthcare facilities stand out as clearly bounded entities in the modern urban landscape, perhaps reflecting their history as deliberately set-apart and then often stigmatised places? To what extent have they maybe become less obtrusive, more sunk into and interacting with their urban surroundings? What issues of urban ethics are at stake: concerning who/what is starkly demarcated in the city, perhaps subjected to exclusionary logics and pressures, or more sensitively integrated into the city, planned for inclusion and co-dwelling? These questions underscore our article, rooted in an in-depth case study of Gartnavel Royal Hospital, Glasgow, opened as a ‘lunatic asylum’ on its present, originally greenfield, site in the 1840s and remaining open today surrounded by dense urban expansion. Building from the ‘voices’ of patients, staff and others familiar with the site, we discuss the sense of this asylum as ‘other’ to, as ‘outside’ of, or merely ’beside’ the urban fabric. Drawing from concepts of ‘orientations’ (Ahmed, 2006), sites as spatial constructions (Burns & Kahn, 2005), the power of borders and boundaries (Haselsberger, 2014; Sennett, 2018), issues of site, stigma and related urban ethical matters will be foregrounded. Where are the boundaries that divide the hospital campus from the urban context? What are the material signifiers, the cultural associations or the emotional attachments that continue to set the boundaries? Or, in practice, do boundaries melt into messier, overlapping, intersecting border zones, textured by diverse, sometimes contradictory, bordering practices? And, if so, what are the implications? open access GART-PSYSPAC: discourse, dwelling, doing

This book is undoubtedly a milestone in the ongoing process of writing the histories of the great period that saw the rising of critical and radical approaches in geography from the 1960s and 1970s onward. Although these histories are characterized by a plurality of methodological approaches (biographical, transnational, place-based, and spatial-sensitive), there is increasing evidence that this rising was international, albeit one of its most famous manifestations took place in North America, as narrated by most of the invaluable chapters included in this book

This chapter discusses Michel Foucault, the celebrated French intellectual, as a spatial historian of social policy: as someone who, in critical and scholarly veins, consistently probed ideas and practices constitutive of an envisaged ‘right ordering of the social’, particularly but not exclusively in settings from the past of Western Europe. Taking his early-1970s lecture course on The Punitive Society as a pivot-point, the chapter explores a key transition in Foucault’s thinking about the role of space in such an ordering of the social: a shift from seeing space (distance, barrier, boundary) primarily as a tool for excluding troublesome populations (abandonment, banishment, segregation) to seeing space (arrangements, distributions, relations) as additionally a tool for including such populations (reforming, rehabilitation, reintegration). Identifying this transition helps to sharpen understanding of the different ways in which a spatialising of social policy research can proceed.

No abstract available.

This article opens a dialogue between geohumanities and poetry—or, more broadly, creative writing—around the subject matters of violence and wounding. It considers what kinds of “poetry” might be usefully enrolled by the geoliterary critic, or even authored by the geographer-poet, in response to such subject matters. Difficult questions abound about what it means to author, hear, and read poetry that is engaged and enraged by instances of violence, trauma, and victimhood. One horizon for these questions is Adorno’s ([1966] 1973) claim that “there can be no more poetry after Auschwitz,” and more particularly his elaboration and partial retreat from this claim in Negative Dialectics. Here, wary of attempts “at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate” (Adorno [1966] 1973, 361), he nonetheless concluded that “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man to scream; hence it may be wrong to say that after Auschwitz you can no longer write poems” (363). Th...

This paper introduces a special issue on ‘Histories of asylums, insanity and psychiatry in Scotland’, situating the papers that follow in an outline historiography of work in this field. Using Allan Beveridge’s claims in 1993 about the relative lack of research on the history of psychiatry in Scotland, the paper reviews a range of contributions that have emerged since then, loosely distinguishing between ‘overviews’ – work addressing longer-term trends and broader periods and systems – and more detailed studies of particular ‘individuals and institutions’. There remains much still to do, but the present special issue signals what is currently being achieved, not least by a new generation of scholars in and on Scotland.

This special issue is dedicated to the memory of Ronan Paddison (1945–2019), Founder and Editor in-Chief of Space & Polity. It derives from a Festschrift on Paddison Geographies convened on Novembe...

This chapter shows that geography as spatial science, emerging in the 1950s and 1960s, replicated the obsession with the material world, albeit translating the configurations of material phenomena into more abstract geometric representations supposedly disclosing the deeper truths of humanity's spatial organization. It suggests that there are surprisingly few works which explicitly set out to explore the possible overlaps between human geography and sociology. The chapter also suggests that the success of the cultural turn is actually posing a few problems for the study of social geography, the subdisciplinary realm which, in Britain at least, initially spawned the present cultural turn. It is concerned with the researcher's focus all too quickly becomes one hung up on identity politics and cultural representations, rather than patiently excavating the grain of component social lives, social worlds and social spaces.

This editorial introduces a four-paper thematic section on ‘Insecure environments’, growing out of a conference session held in 2012. Through an excursion into Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1979), themes are identified to do with the dialectic of security and insecurity, as played out in humanity's modern dealings with nature. The four papers are then formally outlined and situated in relation to these themes of (in)secure environments, the domination of nature and its many repercussions.

Background: Transition to adulthood may have negative consequences for health and wellbeing\ud in individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID), but this aspect of transition has received little\ud investigation. This qualitative study aimed to explore the transition experiences of individuals\ud with ID from their own perspectives, and from that of their parents, in order to identify health or\ud wellbeing implications of transition.\ud Method: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 17 young people with mild, moderate\ud and severe ID aged 16–27 years and with 23 parents of young people with mild, moderate, severe\ud and profound ID aged 16–26 years. Interviews were analysed using thematic analysis, deploying\ud both emic and etic coding categories.\ud Results: This study provides direct insights into the issues on health and wellbeing that young\ud people with ID and their parents find important during transition. The primary health implication\ud of transition centred on mental health and wellbeing; young people experienced heightened\ud anxiety during transition, and themes identified as contributing to anxiety included: a lack of\ud meaningful activity following school exit; inadequate support during transition; and difficulties\ud associated with ‘growing up’. Problem behaviours and obesity were also implicated.\ud Conclusion: The transition from school needs to be better supported in order to ease anxiety for\ud young people during this difficult period.

No abstract available.

Contents: Introduction Part I Spatial Science and Its Critics: A geographic methodology, William Bunge Sensations and spatial science: gratification and anxiety in the production of ordered landscapes, D. Sibley Retheorizing economic geography: from the quantitative revolution to the 'cultural turn', Trevor J. Barnes. Part II Marxist Geography and Its Early Reconstructions: Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary theory in geography and the problem of ghetto formation, David Harvey The socio-spatial dialectic, Edward W. Soja The matter of nature, Margaret Fitzsimmons. Part III Humanistic Geography and Its Early Reconstructions: Humanistic geography, Yi-Fu Tuan Practising humanistic geography, Susan J. Smith Prospect, perspective and the evolution of the landscape idea, Denis Cosgrove. Part IV Agency and Structure: Human agency and human geography, Derek Gregory Human agency and human geography revisited: a critique of 'new models' of the self, Steve Pile Space and causality, or whatever happened to the subject?, Benno Werlen. Part V Time, Space, Place and Space-Time: Social reproduction and the time-geography of everyday life, Allan Pred Geography and the realm of passages, Erik Wallin Politics and space/time, Doreen Massey. Part VI Scaling Human Geographies: Is there a place for the rational actor? A geographical critique of the rational choice paradigm, Trevor J. Barnes and Eric Sheppard Beyond state-centrism? Space, territoriality and geographical scale in globalization studies, Neil Brenner Human geography without scale, Sallie A. Marston, John Paul Jones III and Keith Woodward. Part VII Feminist and Other 'Positioned' Geographies: The geography of women: an historical introduction, Alison M. Hayford Changing ourselves: a geography of position, Peter Jackson Postcolonialising geography: tactics and pitfalls, Jenny Robinson I lost an arm on my last trip back home: black geographies, Katherine McKittrick. Part VIII Poststructuralist Geographies: Geography and power: the work of Michel Foucault, Felix Driver Understanding diversity: the problem of/for 'theory', Linda McDowell My dinner with Derrida, or spatial analysis and poststructuralism do lunch, D.P. Dixon and J.P. Jones III Poststructuralist geographies: the essential selection, Marcus A. Doel. Part IX Posthumanist Geographies: Inhuman/nonhuman/human: actor-network theory and the prospects for a nondualistic and symmetrical perspective on nature and society, Jonathan Murdoch The body as 'place': reflexivity and fieldwork in Kano, Nigeria, Heidi J. Nast Making connections and thinking through emotions: between geography and psychotherapy, Liz Bondi From born to made: technology, biology and space, Nigel Thrift. Part X Limits to Human Geography: Hemming the way, Gunnar Olsson Coming out of geography: towards a queer epistemology, Jon Binnie Neo-critical geography, or, the flat pluralist world of business class, Neil Smith Name index.

Mindfulness meditation (in the context of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy) is a reflexive practice that seeks to reduce suffering in the form of depression, anxiety and stress. Through a variety of techniques, mindfulness meditation aims to cultivate awareness of the participant’s current experience (notably their thoughts and feelings), as well as an attitude of non-judgement towards this experience. Via Crossley’s (2001) account of the relation between habits and the development of a self-reflexive stance, the paper develops an understanding of agency as distributed across body, mind and context, and which is not fixed in time or space. Drawing on in-depth interviews carried out with students and teachers of mindfulness meditation, the paper analyses the role of dialogue in the practice, and situates it within the wider routines of the participant’s everyday lives.

The author revisits his paper ‘ “Not at our seaside”: community opposition to a nineteenth-century branch asylum’, published in Area in 1987, beginning with a mini-biography of the paper that explains something of how it sought to work between past and present (between historical and social geography). Attention is given to the paper's highlighting of parallels between older and more recent expressions of NIMBYism in the landscape of mental health provisions, and also to the undercurrents of the paper that sought to position such disputes within a bigger picture historical geography of ‘the Same and the Other’.

The phrase ‘body-politic’ is often deployed to mean all of the people comprising a given ‘political’ unit, perhaps a country, nation or state, and sometimes conceived as the multitudes ruled over b...

This chapter highlights the significance of thinking geographically about mental health and aims to demonstrate what a geographically informed analysis of mental health can offer to future debates within global mental health. Beginning with an overview of mental health geography, the chapter focuses upon four interconnecting strands of the subfield, that of ‘spatial epidemiologies’ and the ‘psychiatric city’, provision and the complex spaces of care, and therapeutic landscapes, to highlight the significance of a geographical approach. A range of examples from the work in mental health geography and beyond are presented to illustrate the different geographical components revealed by these studies. Finally, future challenges in and agendas for further critical exploration into global mental health from this perspective are suggested, particularly with reference to the lack of attention currently given to those sites, spaces and voices in the Global South.

As a contribution to both rural theory and a geography of rural disability, this paper tackles the idea of the ‘rural panopticon’. Inspired by empirical research on mental ill-health in the Scottish Highlands, the authors specify certain workings of the rural panopticon, stressing interconnections between visibility, observation, surveillance, chatter and interiorised senses of self-disciplining (particularly for those with fragile mental health). There are suggestions that Bentham regarded his institutional brain-child, the Panopticon, as most logically and properly an urban phenomena, even calling it ‘Panopticon Town’, but there is a supplementary argument that identifies a rural vision – of a virtuous, self-regulating farming community – present in the margins of his Panopticon thinking. Through the figure of the ‘glass palace’ in the countryside, emphasising the pervasive watching, judging and censuring of conduct, a further link is made from Bentham's Panopticon to the rural panopticon. The paper explores this link both textually and though the Highlands case study, concluding by examining Foucault's dual attention to both Bentham's Panopticon and a rural colony for delinquent boys, Mettray, as twin exemplars of ‘panopticism’ in the disciplining of troublesome and troubled populations (those with disabilities included).

Background Transition to adulthood might be a risk period for poor health in people with intellectual disabilities. However, the present authors could find no synthesis of evidence on health and well-being outcomes during transition in this population. This review aimed to answer this question. Method PRISMA/MOOSE guidelines were followed. Search terms were defined, electronic searches of six databases were conducted, reference lists and key journals were reviewed, and grey literature was searched. Papers were selected based on clear inclusion criteria. Data were extracted from the selected papers, and their quality was systematically reviewed. The review was prospectively registered on PROSPERO: CRD42015016905. Results A total of 15 985 articles were extracted; of these, 17 met the inclusion criteria. The results of these articles were mixed but suggested the presence of some health and well-being issues in this population during transition to adulthood, including obesity and sexual health issues. Conclusion This review reveals a gap in the literature on transition and health and points to the need for future work in this area.

This Keynote essay argues for a supplement to existing studies in children’s geographies, one that explores the potential of a non-child-centric children’s geography alert to the work done by the figure of ‘the child’ in all manner of worldly situations. Taking a cue from the poetry of John Betjeman, notably his 1960 Summoned by Bells, the essay considers both the intimate spaces of childhood – ones gauged by the immediacies of ‘sounds and sights and smells’ – and the challenges posed by a wider world raddled by adult preoccupations and abuses, those characterised by Betjeman as stemming from ‘the dark of reason’. The essay builds from this foundation to address the ‘darkness’ in two sets of Nazi children’s wartime geographies, as well as engaging with the complexities of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s claims, in the horizon of WWII, about the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’. Within the latter – and also, notably, in Adorno’s later writing – the figure of ‘the child’ surfaces as one miniscule crumb of hope, of experiencing and knowing the world otherwise, set against the face of adult Enlightenment’s seemingly inevitable decay. At the close, Adorno’s own brief dalliance with imagining a small slice of children’s geographies allows the essay to arc back towards its original claims, and to a renewed sense of why childhood ‘sounds and sights and smells’ continue to matter far beyond just the domain of geographers researching children.

Prompted by the 50th anniversary of the first publication of Foucault’s famous book commonly known in English as Madness and Civilization, this essay explores how the book has changed between versions, in the process losing what can be cast as both its phenomenological undertones and a ‘romanticism’ about the truths supposedly revealed by madness. Reasons for Foucault’s own disavowal of these elements are considered, and taken together – conjoining a critical biography of the book with attention to Foucault’s reactions to it – this essay fashions a mirror to hold up to certain currents within contemporary human geography. It is argued that the ‘romantic fantasy’ which permeates the original book, if not overwhelming it, has significant echoes in the ‘romantic gesture’ displayed by some present-day geographers. The older Foucault’s distancing from his earlier romanticism is hence instructive for scholars critiquing the recent history of human geography, but there may also be grounds for claiming that it would be mistaken to lose this romanticism, together with its phenomenological correlates, entirely.