Exploring Vital Geographies
What role do social and spatial relations play in enlarging our sense of what is ‘the human’, in concert with heterogeneous non-human beings and objects, both material and virtual? What role do social and spatial relations play in fixing or reducing our sense of what is ‘the human’, maybe resulting in the banishment, entrapment, re)socialisation or (non-) benign neglect of ‘othered’ humans among us?
Vital geographies: Anchored in foundational statements made by HGRG staff from the early-2000s about ‘more-than-human geographies’/‘new animal geographies’, now enhanced by new conceptualisations from HGRG staff of ‘monstrous geographies’ and ‘evental geographies’, we are asking about the many ways whereby ‘the human’ is either augmented or diminished. Our concern is with: the role of spatial relations in enlarging our sense of what is ‘the human’, distributing its capacities and attributes alongside heterogeneous non-human beings and objects, both material and virtual; but also their role in fixing or reducing our sense of what is ‘the human’, maybe resulting in the abandonment or re-subjectification of ‘othered’ humans among us. Operating in-between vitalism and biopolitics, we conduct studies of: ‘madness’, asylums and the ‘psy-‘ disciplines; missing people and loss; animal co-habitation and co-mingling; virtual and mythological life-worlds; and technologies of both domestic intimacy and military destruction.
Selected publications (please go to staff pages for links to copies of publications or journal sites):
Davidson, J. and Parr, H. (2010). Enabling cultures of dis/order online. In Chouinard, Hall and Wilton (eds) Towards enabling geographies: ‘disabled’ bodies and minds in society and space. Ashgate Geographies of Health Series.
Dixon, D., Hawkins, H., and Straughan, L. (2012) Of human birds and living rocks: remaking aesthetics for post-human worlds. Dialogues in Human Geography, 2: 249-270.
Dixon, D.P. (2009) Creating the semi-living: on politics, aesthetics and the more-than-human. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers34 (4). pp. 411-425.
Lorimer, H. (2013) Scaring crows. Geographical Review, 103 (2). pp. 177-189.
Lorimer, H. (2010). Forces of nature, forms of life: calibrating ethology and phenomenology. In: Anderson, B. and Harrison, P. (eds) Taking-place: non-Representational theories and geography.: Farnham: Ashgate.
Meehan, K., Shaw, I., and Marston, S. (2013) Political geographies of the object. Political Geography 33: 1-10.
McGeachan, C. (2013). Needles, picks and an intern named Laing: exploring the psychiatric spaces of Army life. Journal of Historical Geography. (forthcoming)
McGeachan, C. (2013). (Re)remembering and narrating the childhood city of R.D. Laing. Cultural Geographies. (forthcoming)
Parr, H. (2008). Mental Health and Social Space: Towards Inclusionary Geographies? Blackwell.
Parr, H., and Fyfe, N. (2013) Missing geographies. Progress in Human Geography. (forthcoming).
Parr, H. (2011). Psychic life. In: Del Casino, V., Thomas, M., Panelli, R. and Cloke, P. (eds) A Companion to Social Geography. Blackwell: Chichester.
Philo, C. (2004). A Geographical History of Institutional Provision for the Insane from Medieval Times to the 1860s in England and Wales: The Space Reserved for Insanity. Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston and Queenston, USA, and Lampeter, Wales, UK
Philo, C. (2012). A ‘new Foucault’ with lively implications – or ‘the crawfish advances sideways’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37(4): 496–514.
Shaw, I.G.R. (2012). Towards an evental geography. Progress in Human Geography, 36 (5): 613-627.
Stevenson, O. (2011). From public policy to family practices: researching the everyday realities of families' technology use at home. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 27: 336-346.
Stevenson, O and Prout, A. (2013) Space for play? Families’ strategies for organizing domestic space in homes with young children, Home Cultures 10 (2). pp. 135-158.
Straughan, E. R. (2010). The salon as clinic: problematising, treating, and caring for skin. Social & Cultural Geography, 11(7), 647-661.
Straughan, E. R. (2012). Touched by water: The body in scuba diving. Emotion, Space and Society, 5(1), 19-26.
Return to HGRG main page.