GeoHumanities and Health

This volume brings together research in the GeoHumanities from various intellectual perspectives to illustrate the benefits of humanities-inspired approaches in understanding and confronting historically entrenched and recently emergent health-related challenges. In three main sections, this volume seeks to foreground the richness of work entangling medicine and health with the concerns of geography and of the Humanities. This volume will be of interest to academics and researchers in the Geographies of health and medicine, social sciences in GeoHumanities, and health humanities, and students in programs focusing on the humanities and health. 

In the book's first section, Bodies, the authors explore the material, sensory and more than physical capacities of bodies in accounting for experiences of death, air raids, immigration, dance therapy, asthma and blindness. Section two, Voice, addresses the nature of evidence, HIV/AIDS policy, patient voices in animal research, homelessness, and constructions of truth. The final section, Practice, focuses on creative writing, as well as the pedagogic tools of teaching with the asylum, the creative practice of nuclear emergency planning zones, arts-based care for the elderly, and cartographic practices within health research. 

Dr. Sarah Atkinson is a Professor of Geography and Medical Humanities in the Department of Geography, and Deputy Head of Faculty in Social Science and Health Research Operations at Durham University. As professor of geography and medical humanities, her academic attention is primarily characterized by interdisciplinary encounters with contemporary issues of medicine and health informed by her background in anthropology, nutrition and public health policy. Dr. Atkinson’s experience prior to working at Durham University was in policy implementation both as practitioner, consultant and researcher in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and India. Her research seeks to understand and interrogate the assumptions underlying mainstream health-related policies and practices and particularly in relation to non-clinical settings. Topics addressed in this way include how the concept of well-being is interpreted, how care and responsibility for care are understood, constrained and located and how engagement with the creative arts offers a transformative potential for health and well-being, both as personally experienced and as politically conceptualized.

Dr. Rachel Hunt is a lecturer in GeoHumanities in the School of Geosciences at Edinburgh University, where she engages in both teaching and research in Human Geography related fields. She earned her Ph.D. in Human Geography from the University of Glasgow in 2016, and has previously been a researcher in Rural Affairs and Environment in the Strategic Research Department of the Scottish Government, and a Research Assistant in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow.