Geographical Imagination: Interpretations of Nature, Art and Politics
6th Nordic Geographers’ Meeting (NGM) Tallinn & Tartu, Estonia
15-19 June 2015
Conference website: http://www.tlu.ee/en/NGM2015/Conference-information
Session: “Exploring therapeutic spaces: Methodological contributions”
Organisers: Karolina Doughty, Lesley Murray and Carl Walker, University of Brighton
Session abstract:
In the current era of deinstitutionalisation of mental health, there is a growing acknowledgement that we need to provide supportive environments for people with mental health difficulties in the community. In this context, it is crucial to develop a broader understanding of what constitutes a ‘therapeutic’ intervention and cultivate better knowledge of the many informal spaces and practices that may have a positive impact on recovery and wellbeing. There is a need to address the symbolic and material realities of people’s lived experiences rather than reify recovery simply as a journey through the institutions of medicine and psy professions. An attention to the varied social and material spaces within which recovery can take place provides a fertile context for reimagining the ways in which we think about the ownership, constitution and reproduction of mental distress.
The concept of ‘therapeutic landscape’ has informed significant developments in the geographies of mental as well as physical health (Curtis 2010), by showing how wellbeing and mental health is associated with the complex interactions between people and their material, social and symbolic environments. Here the ‘therapeutic’ is invoked in its broadest sense to refer to embodied engagements with places and landscapes of (self) care (Gesler 2003). The recovery process is viewed as relationally anchored not only in the social but also in the material, bodily and sensorial.
There is a need for investigations of engagements with therapeutic spaces to develop research methods that are sensitive to a range of lived and mundane experiences of either formal or informal therapeutic interventions. In this session, we invite papers that consider the methodological opportunities and challenges that arise in the exploration of the production and cultivation of diverse therapeutic geographies. These may include, but are not limited to:
• Visual methods such as photography and video
• Mobile methods, go-alongs
• Creative and arts-based methods
• Sound/voice diaries
• Narrative methods
• Autoethnographies and observational studies
• Reflections on fieldwork experiences
If interested, please submit a max. 200 word abstract by 15 November via the online submission form, soon to be available on the conference website: http://www.tlu.ee/en/NGM2015/Conference-information. For more information or questions about the session, please don't hesitate to get in touch.
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