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‘Let there be light...
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- 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
Subject headings
- SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP -- Social och ekonomisk geografi -- Kulturgeografi (hsv//swe)
- SOCIAL SCIENCES -- Social and Economic Geography -- Human Geography (hsv//eng)
Keyword
- Black and white
- Light and dark
- Liveliness and deathliness
- Mental health geographies
- Vital health geographies
- Glasgow [Scotland]
- Scotland
- United Kingdom
- health geography
- health services
- health worker
- mental health
- adult
- article
- drug mixture
- geography
- human
- interview
- medical geography
- memory
- mental hospital
Publication and Content Type
- ref (subject category)
- art (subject category)
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