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- Högström, Ebba, et al.
(author)
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‘Let there be light’ or life in the dark? Vital geographies of mental healthcare
- 2023
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In: Social Science and Medicine. - : Elsevier. - 0277-9536 .- 1873-5347. ; 333
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper explores the relations between light and dark/white and black disclosed in a study of Gartnavel Royal Hospital in Glasgow, Scotland, where an old Victorian lunatic asylum remains, if becoming ruined, on the same site as a modern mental healthcare campus. In-depth interview work recovering the ‘spatial stories’ of patients and staff, past and present, reveals a complex mixture of positive and negative memories and interpretations prompted by both the ‘darkened spaces’ of Old Gartnavel and the liveliness associated with both sets of spaces. These findings are framed by (a) a reading of Badiou's short monograph on Black (Badiou, 2017) and (b) an engagement with light and dark studies, both of which suggest a rebalancing of the normal valuations whereby dark/black is cast as the realm of death, everything that deadens and threatens life, whereas light/white is cast as that of life, liveliness and vitality. The scholarship here speaks to work on vitalist health geographies, agreeing that vital health-worlds can surface almost anywhere, but reminding that the fragility of such worlds can always be threatened by too much over-ordering. © 2023 The Authors
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| 2. |
- Högström, Ebba, et al.
(author)
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Ontological Boundaries or Contextual Borders : The Urban Ethics of the Asylum
- 2020
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In: Urban Planning. - : Cogitatio Press. - 2183-7635. ; 5:4, s. 106-120
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- What and where is ‘the asylum’ today? To what extent do mental healthcare facilities stand out as clearly bounded entities in the modern urban landscape, perhaps reflecting their history as deliberately set-apart and then often stigmatised places? To what extent have they maybe become less obtrusive, more sunk into and interacting with their urban surroundings? What issues of urban ethics are at stake: concerning who/what is starkly demarcated in the city, perhaps subjected to exclusionary logics and pressures, or more sensitively integrated into the city, planned for inclusion and co-dwelling? These questions underscore our article, rooted in an in-depth case study of Gartnavel Royal Hospital, Glasgow, opened as a ‘lunatic asylum’ on its present, originally greenfield, site in the 1840s and remaining open today surrounded by dense urban expansion. Building from the ‘voices’ of patients, staff and others familiar with the site, we discuss the sense of this asylum as ‘other’ to, as ‘outside’ of, or merely ’beside’ the urban fabric. Drawing from concepts of ‘orientations’ (Ahmed, 2006), sites as spatial constructions (Burns & Kahn, 2005), the power of borders and boundaries (Haselsberger, 2014; Sennett, 2018), issues of site, stigma and related urban ethical matters will be foregrounded. Where are the boundaries that divide the hospital campus from the urban context? What are the material signifiers, the cultural associations or the emotional attachments that continue to set the boundaries? Or, in practice, do boundaries melt into messier, overlapping, intersecting border zones, textured by diverse, sometimes contradictory, bordering practices? And, if so, what are the implications?
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