Social and Cultural Geography Research Group

‘Gonna Live Forever’: places of health and wellbeing in popular music

Gavin Andrews, Robin Kearns, Paul Kingsbury & Neil Forrester would like to hear from academics interested in contributing to an edited book, potentially to be published in the Ashgate Health Geographies Series.

The book will be focused on the dynamics between music, health/wellbeing and place. It will engage critical with how the production and consumption of popular music are associated both positively and negatively with health and wellbeing. At one level it will consider charity causes, political involvement, forms of activism and celebrity. In other words, how music can be a powerful force to promote the health of individuals, populations and places. At another level it will engage with the subtle ways in which music works emotionally for individuals and groups.

Chapters might be based on a particular musician or band, a particular musical genre or style, a musical technique or practice, instrument or technology, format, place, time period, disease health or social context. Possible topics might include, for example, reggie, psychedelia, hip hop, indie, punk, two-tone, famine, AIDS, urban violence, the live album, the reverb pedal, busking, dancing, music therapy, the daily commute, TV talent shows, breaking up or leaving home. To maximize the book’s coverage in this broad and under-researched field, chapters will be relatively short at 3500 words each. They might be critical reviews/discussions or include empirical research and the analysis of data.

The book will be aimed at senior undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty working across sub-disciplines of human geography (including, in particular, health geography, social geography, cultural geography and urban geography). It should also be of interest across other social sciences and humanities (including sociology, cultural studies, media and communication studies and musicology) and certain health sciences (including music therapy, holistic health and health care, and critical public health).

If you would like to be involved, please send a 200 word abstract to Gavin Andrews (andrews@mcmaster.ca) by the end of February 2011. Once the abstracts are collected and considered, those selected will be included in a full proposal which will be submitted to the book series editors.

Flirting with Space: Journeys and Creativity, David Crouch, University of Derby, UK

‘A phenomenal and sensational work, Flirting with Space speaks of David Crouch’s intense and passionate interest in how it feels to feel. His spatial theories on life as it’s lived are spry and vital, asserting the generative and creative power held by people, trusting in the ordinariness of emotion and common experience, and seeking out practices of humane value.’ – Hayden Lorimer, University of Glasgow, UK

‘Crouch invites his readers on a journey that meanders through the workings of myriad artists, sojourners, and theorists, evoking resonances between seemingly unrelated pathways of intellectual and emotional discovery. Flirting with Space is a work of enchanting potential, written from the unique perspective of a mature artist and distinguished scholar.’ – Sally Ness, University of California Riverside, USA

The idea of ‘flirting’ with space is central to this book. Space is conceptualized as being in constant flux as we make our way through contexts in our daily lives, considered in relation to encounters with complexities and flows of materiality. Through considerations of dynamic processes of contemporary life-spaces, the book engages the inter-relations of space and journeys, and how creativity happens in those inter-relations. Unravelled through wide-ranging investigations, this book builds new critical syntheses of the intertwining of space and life: the mundane and exotic, ‘lay’ and ‘artistic’. The book creates a fascinating and original view of our interaction with space.

Contents: Prologue; Flirting with space; Everyday abstraction: geographical knowledge in the art of Peter Lanyon; Spacing, performing and becoming: tangles in the mundane; The play of spacetime; Expressive encounters; Landscape and the poetics of flirting (with) space; Some conclusions; Bibliography; Index.  20% reduction available from AShgate if you quote refce: C1DSN20 when ordering.  Sample pages for published titles are available to view online at: www.ashgate.com

Smith S., Pain R., Marston S. Jones JP. eds (2010) The SAGE Handbook of Social Geographies

This is the latest book in Sage’s growing series of Handbooks, and an excellent addition. Rather than hold a fair stasis in claiming the ground of the field, the chapters of the book make critical engagement across the striations of the subject, from gender to social justice; the relationalities of social and economic geography to performativities; health, politics and affect; emotion and ethics; race and ethnicity. After all, the title presents us the plural. In these ways the book is more than a hand book, a provocation from which many threads of the SCGRG run and will be enriched.

The books has a refreshing range of contributors to these considerations of social geography; of what it is, might be, and lucid discussion of the character of diversities in its coherence. The chapters are not written by ring-fenced social geographers, but usefully lean across the wider areas of human geography and outside the particular discipline too, each focusing the relevance of social geography now.

In the introduction, the book wisely sets up timely issues and debates that work their way persistently through the chapters. There is an astute and reflexive discussion on social inequality and welfare that reaches over the polarisation of its being underplayed and otherwise being the overriding fracture around which to assemble our concepts. There are equally fine considerations of social and nature, social and economy, social and ethics. Doing Social geography, a verbalisation of the subject, raises welcome current debates and makes a fine final section to the whole volume.

The contributors include too many familiar and newer contributors to list; a very welcome mix. I guess as an increasingly ‘cultural’ more or rather than ‘social’ geographer for some time, I yearned for more direct engagement, even in the Introduction, with  the energetic debates on the social-cultural ‘nexus’. Much of what addresses this significant concern, especially for social/cultural geographies is rather limited, and somewhat dated, and pursued in the chapters mainly in terms of fear. Yet ‘cultural matters’ do find their way into many sites of the book.

David Crouch, May 2010