• Teaching Assistant (School of Geographical and Earth Sciences)

email: Cheryl.McGeachan@glasgow.ac.uk

Research Interests 

● Historical and cultural geographies

● R.D. Laing

● History of psychiatry

● Psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic geographies

● Experiences of mental ill-health

● Medical humanities

● Marion Milner and art therapy

● Biography

● Scottish literature

ESRC Funded PhD Research

Enticing Ghosts to Life: Exploring the Historical and Cultural Geographies of R.D. Laing (2010)

The neck of the woods in which I had ended up for a mere two years was a place of misery, absurdity and humiliation. In my room in the officers’ quarters, in the middle of the night, I would picture those other places, those barracks, those prisons, those other lunatic wards, those extermination wards, all those places of groans and tears that each night covers (Laing, Wisdom, Madness and Folly, 1985, 110: author’s emphasis).

This thesis introduces the life and work of psychiatrist, psychotherapist and psychoanalyst R.D. Laing (1927-1989), to a geographical audience for the first time in order to highlight both the geographies of Laing and Laing’s geographies. Through creating a geographical biography of Laing’s early life, starting in his childhood world of Glasgow in the late 1920s and working through to his creation of the ‘asylum’ of Kingsley Hall in 1965, I demonstrate how certain spaces, sites and places became integral to the formation of Laing’s practices and broader philosophy on mental health issues, particularly schizophrenia. In uncovering Laing’s geography in this way it becomes possible to understand how Laing’s ideas are gradually reshaped through his different encounters with these spaces, sites and places. This research delves further into the geographical dimension of Laing’s work by also unpicking the geographies arguably present in his theoretical work. Laing insisted in embedding his ‘psychoanalytic’ and ‘psychotherapeutic’ ideas directly with the study of, and interaction with, his ‘disturbed’ patients, and through the numerous case studies he portrays in his published and unpublished work, it becomes possible to tease out the different facets of Laing’s inherently spatial approach.

Current Research Project

“Looming over the landscape”: filming memories of the Laing family

Collaboration with Dr. Anthony Lewis and filmmaker James Gibson from Glasgow Museums, Sarah Hepworth from Special Collections University of Glasgow, and Adrian, Karen and Fiona Laing. This ongoing project is an attempt to allow certain members of Laing’s family, Adrian, Karen and Fiona, to tell their stories and recount on film the memories they wish to share. Filmed around Glasgow in March 2011, this footage displays the intricacies of personal memory and highlights the importance of thinking about, and working with, notions of place. 

Collaborator AHRC funded Transcultural Psychiatry project (grant holder Dr. Gavin Miller) http://transculturalpsychiatry.gla.ac.uk/

Collaborator Medical Humanities Research Network Scotland

http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/critical/research/fundedresearchprojects/mhrns/

Member of the Historical Geographies Reading Group

Lecturing

● Geography 1: Gender and development; Geographies of consumption.

● Geographical Thought (Geography 3): Feminist geographies; Agency/structure; Environmental determinism; Regional geography.

● Geographical Techniques (Geography 3): Introduction to qualitative research; Interviewing; Questionnaires; Documentary Analysis.

● MRes in Human Geography: ‘Other geographies’: feminism/identity politics; Self/other; Knowledge/discourse; Archival methods.

Field Classes

● Geography 2: Historical geographies option (Swansea)

● Geography 3: (Glasgow)

Honours Option

● ‘Historical Geographies of Care, Conflict and Confinement’ (2012-2013)

Other Duties

● Geographical Thought Tutor (Geography 3)

● Undergraduate and postgraduate dissertation supervision

Conference Papers 

● Inspiring Critical and Imaginative Learners: An Interactive Workshop on Creative Geographic Writing, co-authored session with Dr. Geraldine Perriam (University of Glasgow), to the 5^th Annual Learning and Teaching Conference, Empowering Student Learners in Higher Education, University of Glasgow. (2012).

● Staff and GTA Collaboration in Tutorial Design: Responding to Student Feedback, co-authored paper with Dr. Joanne Sharp, Geraldine Perriam and David Beel (University of Glasgow), to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Symposium. (2008).