Anxious Geographies
Anxious Geographies

Author: Louise E. Boyle

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-06-03

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1040032990

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Anxious Geographies offers a unique perspective on social anxiety, framing it as both a social and spatial phenomenon. Through a meticulous exploration using online questionnaires and interviews, the book provides a crucial examination of the intricacies of anxious lives. This book presents a critical intervention in the experience of mental health in 21st-century society and provides a compelling geographical account of the underpinnings of the anxious experience. The book pivots on the in-depth perspectives of people with social anxiety, diagnosed or “sub-clinical”, but with an academic commentary that relates their experience to the medicalisation of a disrupted relational life, offering lessons for all of us in modern societies. Each chapter considers a unique aspect of social anxiety accounting for the social, spatial, temporal, relational and embodied dynamics, a geographical approach that enriches our understanding of the contexts and conditions that exacerbate and sustain anxious distress. The phenomenological descriptions herein, capture how social anxiety can profoundly alter a person’s coherent, habitual and embodied sense of being in and navigating through their social and spatial worlds. Through the experiential accounts of anxious distress and by considering the social contexts in which they emerge, this book provides readers with crucial insights into the hidden lives of those living with social anxiety. This book will be of appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of human geography and across the social sciences and humanities. It will also provide useful insights for academics and health professionals in social psychiatry, social psychology, counselling studies and therapeutic practice.

Space, Place and Mental Health
Space, Place and Mental Health

Author: Professor Sarah Curtis

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2012-11-28

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1409488640

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There is a strong case today for a specific focus on mental public health and its relation to social and physical environments. From a public health perspective, we now appreciate the enormous significance of mental distress and illness as causes of disability and impairment. Stress and anxiety, and other mental illnesses are linked to risks in the environment. This book questions how and why the social and physical environment matters for mental health and psychological wellbeing in human populations. While putting forward a number of different points of view, there is a particular emphasis on ideas and research from health geography, which conceptualises space and place in ways that provide a distinctive focus on the interactions between people and their social and physical environment. The book begins with an overview of a rich body of theory and research from sociology, psychology, social epidemiology, social psychiatry and neuroscience, considering arguments concerning 'mind-body dualism', and presenting a conceptual framework for studying how attributes of 'space' and 'place' are associated with human mental wellbeing. It goes on to look in detail at how our mental health is associated with material, or physical, aspects of our environment (such as 'natural' and built landscapes), with social environments (involving social relationships in communities), and with symbolic and imagined spaces (representing the personal, cultural and spiritual meanings of places). These relationships are shown to be complex, with potential to be beneficial or hazardous for mental health. The final chapters of the book consider spaces of care and the implications of space and place for public mental health policy, offering a broader view of how mental health might be improved at the population level. With boxed case studies of specific research ideas and methods, chapter summaries and suggestions for introductory reading, this book offers a comprehensive introduction which will be valuable for students of health geography, public health, sociology and anthropology of health and illness. It also provides an interdisciplinary review of the literature, by the author and by other writers, to frame a discussion of issues that challenge more advanced researchers in these fields.

COVID-19 and Similar Futures
COVID-19 and Similar Futures

Author: Gavin J. Andrews

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-06-19

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 3030701794

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This volume provides a critical response to the COVID-19 pandemic showcasing the full range of issues and perspectives that the discipline of geography can expose and bring to the table, not only to this specific event, but to others like it that might occur in future. Comprised of almost 60 short (2500 word) easy to read chapters, the collection provides numerous theoretical, empirical and methodological entry points to understanding the ways in which space, place and other geographical phenomenon are implicated in the crisis. Although falling under a health geography book series, the book explores the centrality and importance of a full range of biological, material, social, cultural, economic, urban, rural and other geographies. Hence the book bridges fields of study and sub-disciplines that are often regarded as separate worlds, demonstrating the potential for future collaboration and cross-disciplinary inquiry. Indeed book articulates a diverse but ultimately fulsome and multiscalar geographical approach to the major health challenge of our time, bringing different types of scholarship together with common purpose. The intended audience ranges from senior undergraduate students and graduate students to professional academics in geography and a host of related disciplines. These scholars might be interested in COVID-19 specifically or in the book’s broad disciplinary approach to infectious disease more generally. The book will also be helpful to policy-makers at various levels in formulating responses, and to general readers interested in learning about the COVID-19 crisis.

Anxious Joburg
Anxious Joburg

Author: Nicky Falkof

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2020-10-01

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1776146301

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An interdisciplinary account of the life of Johannesburg, South Africa's "global south city" Anxious Joburg focuses on Johannesburg, the largest and wealthiest city in South Africa, as a case study for the contemporary global South city. Global South cities are often characterised as sites of contradiction and difference that produce a range of feelings around anxiety. This is often imagined in terms of the global North’s anxieties about the South: migration, crime, terrorism, disease and environmental crisis. Anxious Joburg invites readers to consider an intimate perspective of living inside such a city. How does it feel to live in the metropolis of Johannesburg: what are the conditions, intersections, affects and experiences that mark the contemporary urban? Scholars, visual artists and storytellers, all look at unexamined aspects of Johannesburg life. From peripheral settlements to the inner city to the affluent northern suburbs, from precarious migrants and domestic workers to upwardly mobile young women and fearful elites, Anxious Joburg presents an absorbing engagement with this frustrating, dangerous, seductive city. It offers a rigorous, critical approach to Johannesburg revealing the way in which anxiety is a vital structuring principle of contemporary life. The approach is strongly interdisciplinary, with contributions from media studies, anthropology, religious studies, urban geography, migration studies and psychology. It will appeal to students and teachers, as well as to academic researchers concerned with Johannesburg, South Africa, cities and the global South. The mix of approaches will also draw a non-academic audience.

Handbook of Cultural Geography
Handbook of Cultural Geography

Author: Kay Anderson

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 612

ISBN-13: 9780761969259

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Presenting a state-of-the-art assessment of the key questions informing cultural geography in the 21st century, this handbook emphasises the intellectual diversity of the discipline and is cross-referenced throughout.

Violent Geographies
Violent Geographies

Author: Derek Gregory

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-18

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 1135929068

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"Violent Geographies is essential to understanding how the politics of fear, terror, and violence in being largely hidden geographically can only be exposed in like manner. The 'War on Terror' finally receives the coolly critical analysis its ritual invocation has long required." —John Agnew, Professor of Geography, UCLA "Urgent, passionate and deeply humane, Violent Geographies is uncomfortable but utterly compelling reading. An essential guide to a world splintered and wounded by fear and aggression—this is geography at its most politically engaged, historically sensitive, and intellectually brave." —Ben Highmore, University of Sussex "This is what a ‘public geography’ should be all about: acute analysis of momentous issues of our time in an accessible language. Gregory and Pred have assembled a peerless group of critical geographers whose essays alter conventional understandings of terror, violence, and fear. No mere gazetteer, Violent Geographies shows how place, space and landscape are central components of the real and imagined practices that constitute organised violence past and present. If you thought terror, violence, and fear were the professional preserve of security analysts and foreign affairs experts this book will force you to think again." —Noel Castree, School of Environment and Development, Manchester University "A studied, passionate and moving examination of the way in which the violent logics of the ‘War on Terror’ have so quickly shuttered and reorganized the spaces of this planet on its different scales. From the book emerges a critical new cartography that clearly charts an archipelago of a large multiplicity of ‘wild’ and ‘tamed’ places as well as ‘black holes’ within and between which we all struggle to live." —Eyal Weizman, Director, Goldsmiths College Centre for Research Architecture

Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Mental Health and Wellbeing
Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Mental Health and Wellbeing

Author: Candice P. Boyd

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-11-15

Total Pages: 683

ISBN-13: 1040147917

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This handbook critically examines spaces of mental health and wellbeing across multiple, often intersecting, domains from green and blue spaces to lived and embodied spaces, creative spaces, work and home spaces, and institutional and post-institutional spaces. The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Mental Health and Wellbeing features 45 chapters from leading international scholars who collectively interrogate the spatial dimensions of mental health and wellbeing from conceptual and experiential viewpoints. The ways in which these theoretical developments prompt a re-thinking of mental health and wellbeing as concepts is also discussed before presenting some highlights from the handbook’s five main sections – (1) green and blue spaces, (2) lived and embodied spaces, (3) creative spaces, (4) work and home spaces, and (5) institutional and post-institutional spaces. The key benefits of this book include a great appreciation of the complex networks and assemblages of mental health and wellbeing, the value of a geographical/spatial approach to thinking about mental health, and the vast array of spaces and places that are implicated in human and posthuman notions of wellbeing. This book will be of interest to students and scholars across the social sciences and the humanities as well as researchers and practitioners in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, social work, nursing, health geography, social and cultural geography, anthropology, mental health social studies, cultural theory, and architecture.

Emotional Geographies
Emotional Geographies

Author: Liz Bondi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-13

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1317144600

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Bringing together well-established interdisciplinary scholars - including geographers Phil Hubbard, Chris Philo and Hester Parr, and sociologists Jenny Hockey, Mike Hepworth and John Urry - and a new generation of researchers, this volume presents a wide range of innovative studies of fundamentally important questions of emotion. Following an overarching introduction, three interlinked sections elaborate key intersections between emotions and spatial concepts, on which each chapter offers a particular take informed by substantive research. At the heart of the collection lies a commitment to convey how emotions always spill over from one domain to another, as well as to illuminate the multiplicity of spaces that produce and are produced by emotional life. The book demonstrates the richness that an interdisciplinary engagement with the emotionality of socio-spatial life generates.

A Companion to Health and Medical Geography
A Companion to Health and Medical Geography

Author: Tim Brown

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2009-12-21

Total Pages: 646

ISBN-13: 1405170034

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A COMPANION TO HEALTH AND MEDICAL GEOGRAPHY A Companion to Health and Medical Geography provides an essential starting point for anyone interested in studying the role of geography and of geographers, both past and present, in promoting an understanding of issues relating to health and illness. Whilst thoroughly mapping out the territory covered by the sub-discipline and examining changes in focus and terminology, this book offers a discussion of the major themes from differing methodological and theoretical perspectives. Questions of class, ethnicity, gender, age, and sexuality are covered throughout the text and case studies within chapters draw upon scholarship from around the globe in order to illuminate key points. Organized to promote dialogue and encourage health and medical geographers to rethink sub-disciplinary boundaries, this Companion provides a unique account of the history of the field and its future potential and possibilities.

Phobic Geographies
Phobic Geographies

Author: Joyce Davidson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-10-24

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1351911325

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Despite recent estimates that there are currently 10 million people in the UK suffering from phobias, there is a substantial and conspicuous gap in existing academic literature and research on this topic. This book addresses this gap in relation to geography literature, but also extending beyond this field to connect with a wide range of academics, health professionals and phobic 'others' whose ideas are (re)formed by fear. In doing so, it provides non-clinical, specifically geographical insights into phobia, of relevance for its sufferers and expands human geographical understandings of the relations between gender, embodiment, space and mental health, via a study of agoraphobia. This book argues that a critical geographic perspective is better placed to take account of the importance of wider social contexts and relations, and can give a fully spatialised account of the disorder more faithful to the way sufferers actually describe their experiences. By drawing attention to some of the more unusual ways that people relate to each other, and to their environments, we can illuminate some ordinarily taken for granted aspects of personal geographies.