Geographies of Comfort

Geographies of Comfort

Author: Danny McNally

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-29

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1317030605

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Bringing together conceptual and empirical research from leading thinkers, this book critically examines ‘comfort’ in everyday life in an era of continually occurring social, political and environmental changes. Comfort and discomfort have assumed a central position in a range of works examining the relations between place and emotion, the senses, affect and materiality. This book argues that the emergence of this theme reflects how questions of comfort intersect humanistic, cultural-political and materialist registers of understanding the world. It highlights how geographies of comfort becomes a timely concern for Human Geography after its cultural, emotional and affective aspects. More specifically, comfort has become a vital theme for work on mobilities, home, environment and environmentalism, sociability in public space and the body. ‘Comfort’ is recognized as more than just a sensory experience through which we understand the world; its presence, absence and pursuit actively make and un-make the world. In light of this recognition, this book engages deeply with ‘comfort’ as both an analytic approach and an object of analysis. This book offers international and interdisciplinary perspectives that deploys the lens of comfort to make sense of the textures of everyday life in a variety of geographical contexts. It will appeal to those working in human geography, anthropology, feminist theory, cultural studies and sociology.


The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence

The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence

Author: Rasul A Mowatt

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-30

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1000453294

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The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence exposes the spatial processes of racialising, gendering, and classifying populations through the encoded urban infrastructure – from highways cleaving neighbourhoods to laws and policies fortifying even more unbreachable boundaries. This synthesis of narrative and theory resurrects neglected episodes of state violence and reveals how the built environment continues to enable it today within a range of cities throughout the world. Examples and discussions pull from colonial pasts and presents, of old strategic settlements turned major modern cities in the United States and elsewhere that link to the physical and legal structures concentrating a populace into neighbourhoods that prep them for a lifetime of conscripted and carceral service to the State.


Romantic Geography

Romantic Geography

Author: Yi-Fu Tuan

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 0299296830

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Geography is useful, indeed necessary, to survival. Everyone must know where to find food, water, and a place of rest, and, in the modern world, all must make an effort to make the Earth -- our home -- habitable. But much present-day geography lacks drama, with its maps and statistics, descriptions and analysis, but no acts of chivalry, no sense of quest. Not long ago, however, geography was romantic. Heroic explorers ventured to forbidding environments -- oceans, mountains, forests, caves, deserts, polar ice caps -- to test their power of endurance for reasons they couldn't fully articulate. Why climb Everest? "Because it is there." In this book, the author considers the human tendency -- stronger in some cultures than in others -- to veer away from the middle ground of common sense to embrace the polarized values of light and darkness, high and low, chaos and form, mind and body. In so doing, venturesome humans can find salvation in geographies that cater not so much to survival needs (or even to good, comfortable living) as to the passionate and romantic aspirations of their nature


Geographies of Making, Craft and Creativity

Geographies of Making, Craft and Creativity

Author: Laura Price

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-03-22

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1315296918

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This book brings together cutting-edge research from leading international scholars to explore the geographies of making and craft. It traces the geographies of making practices from the body, to the workshop and studio, to the wider socio-cultural, economic, political, institutional and historical contexts. In doing so it considers how these geographies of making are in and of themselves part of the making of geographies. As such, contributions examine how making bodies and their intersections with matter come to shape subjects, create communities, evolve knowledge and make worlds. This book offers a forum to consider future directions for the field of geographies of making, craft and creativity. It will be of great interest to creative and cultural geographers, as well as those studying the arts, culture and sociology.


Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography

Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography

Author: Ben Anderson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 1317046951

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Emerging over the past ten years from a set of post-structuralist theoretical lineages, non-representational theories are having a major impact within Human Geography. Non-representational theorisation and research has opened up new sets of problematics around the body, practice and performativity and inspired new ways of doing and writing human geography that aim to engage with the taking-place of everyday life. Drawing together a range of innovative contributions from leading writers, this is the first book to provide an extensive and in-depth overview of non-representational theories and human geography. The work addresses the core themes of this still-developing field, demonstrates the implications of non-representational theories for many aspects of human geographic thought and practice, and highlights areas of emergent critical debate. The collection is structured around four thematic sections - Life, Representation, Ethics and Politics - which explore the varied relations between non-representational theories and contemporary human geography.


Carceral Geography

Carceral Geography

Author: Dominique Moran

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1317169786

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The ’punitive turn’ has brought about new ways of thinking about geography and the state, and has highlighted spaces of incarceration as a new terrain for exploration by geographers. Carceral geography offers a geographical perspective on incarceration, and this volume accordingly tracks the ideas, practices and engagements that have shaped the development of this new and vibrant subdiscipline, and scopes out future research directions. By conveying a sense of the debates, directions, and threads within the field of carceral geography, it traces the inner workings of this dynamic field, its synergies with criminology and prison sociology, and its likely future trajectories. Synthesizing existing work in carceral geography, and exploring the future directions it might take, the book develops a notion of the ’carceral’ as spatial, emplaced, mobile, embodied and affective.


Geographies of Writing

Geographies of Writing

Author: Nedra Reynolds

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2007-09-03

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0809387514

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Twenty-first-century technological innovations have revolutionized the way we experience space, causing an increased sense of fragmentation, danger, and placelessness. In Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference, Nedra Reynolds addresses these problems in the context of higher education, arguing that theories of writing and rhetoric must engage the metaphorical implications of place without ignoring materiality. Geographies of Writing makes three closely related contributions: one theoretical, to reimagine composing as spatial, material, and visual; one political, to understand the sociospatial construction of difference; and one pedagogical, to teach writing as a set of spatial practices. Aided by seven maps and illustrations that reinforce the book’s visual rhetoric, Geographies of Writing shows how composition tasks and electronic space function as conduits for navigating reality.


Geography of Loss

Geography of Loss

Author: Patti Digh

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2013-12-23

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1493004158

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This extraordinary book is borne of loss: the loss of love, of certainty and assuredness, of knowing where we are or who we are, of beauty and youth, of health, of life itself, of privacy, and of roles and of knowing. When someone or something we love leaves us, we suddenly walk alone into new territory without them. We become strangers in new lands, places where the landscape is unalterably changed, where the center of gravity has somehow faltered and become weak, making us feel as if we might fall off the surface of the earth. Sometimes, that moment of loss defines the rest of our lives, becoming a center to our compass forever. This unique book is a guidebook, an atlas of those experiences of loss and grief, a map for living through and into change and impermanence, to moving on anew. You are the navigator through the three main sections: Embrace what is: walk into your new landscape Honor what was: be grateful for your old landscape Love what will be: live into your future landscape Illustrated throughout with art submitted from around the world, this book is an atlas of experience, utilizing map imagery and the richly metaphoric, evocative, and functional language of geography to help you place yourself on your own journey, to find your way through helpful exercises and an empathetic, expert guide.


Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography

Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography

Author: Edward Relph

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-07-30

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1317373669

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This book, first published in 1981, explores why it is that the modern built environment, while successfully providing material comfort and technical efficiency, none the less breeds despair and depression rather than inspires hope and commitment. The source of this paradox, where material benefits appear to have been gained only at the expense of intangible values and qualities is found in humanism, the persistent and powerful belief that all problems can be solved through the use of human reason. But humanism has become increasingly confused, rationalistic, callously devoted to efficiency, and authoritarian. These confusions and contradictions, together with the anti-nature stance of humanism and its failure to teach humane behaviour, lead the author to conclude that humanism is best rejected. Such rejection does not advocate the inhuman and anti-human, but requires instead a return to the ‘humility’ that lies at the origin of humanism – a respect for objects, creatures, environments and people. This ‘environmental humility’ is explored in the context of individuality of settings, ways of seeing landscapes, appropriation and ways of building places. This title will be of interest to students of human geography.