Geographies of Comfort

ISBN-13: 9780367682613 / Angielski

Danny McNally; Laura Price; Philip Crang

Opis

Bringing together conceptual and empirical research from leading thinkers, this book critically examines ‘comfort’ in everyday life in an era of continually occurring social, political and environmental changes.

Comfort and discomfort have assumed a central position in a range of works examining the relations between place and emotion, the senses, affect and materiality. This book argues that the emergence of this theme reflects how questions of comfort intersect humanistic, cultural-political and materialist registers of understanding the world. It highlights how geographies of comfort becomes a timely concern for Human Geography after its cultural, emotional and affective aspects. More specifically, comfort has become a vital theme for work on mobilities, home, environment and environmentalism, sociability in public space and the body. ‘Comfort’ is recognized as more than just a sensory experience through which we understand the world; its presence, absence and pursuit actively make and un-make the world. In light of this recognition, this book engages deeply with ‘comfort’ as both an analytic approach and an object of analysis.

This book offers international and interdisciplinary perspectives that deploys the lens of comfort to make sense of the textures of everyday life in a variety of geographical contexts. It will appeal to those working in human geography, anthropology, feminist theory, cultural studies and sociology.

Spis treści

1 Towards geographies of comfort 1

LAURA PRICE, DANNY McNALLY, AND PHILIP CRANG

SECTION ONE

Bodies and environments 23

2 Transitioning comforts: bodily evaluations of urban mobilities 25

DAVID BISSELL

3 Beyond the ‘comfort zone’: experiencing and responding to everyday weather 43

ELIZA DE VET

4 (Re)creating a sense of comfort: post-disaster homemaking 65

STEPHANIE HAREL

5 ‘Goodnight, sleep tight’: bedtime stories, picture-book bedrooms and tales of comfort 82

JAMIE ADCOCK

Contents

vi Contents

SECTION TWO

Difference and encounter 99

6 The geopolitics of (dis)comfort and indifference in Israel-Palestine 101

DANIEL WEBB

7 Homely comforts abroad: navigating the comfort zone(s) within international student mobility 121

LAURA PRAZERES

8 ‘Economia da Saudade’: comfort food for London’s Brazilian diaspora 137

MARIA DAS GRACAS BRIGHTWELL

9 Assembling a great way to fly: performances of comfort in the air 151

WEIQIANG LIN

SECTION THREE

Materiality and texture 171

10 Comfort, identity and fashion in the post-socialist city 173

MARK JAYNE

11 Cosy, comforting, disruptive? knitting and knitters in/out of place 194

LAURA PRICE

12 A correspondence with water: on the (dis)comforts of the swimming pool 206

MIRANDA WARD

SECTION FOUR

Health and wellbeing 217

13 Picturing dis/comforting geographies: place, punctum and photography 219

ANDREW GORMAN-MURRAY

14 Between bodies and buildings: the place of comfort within therapeutic spaces 238

DARYL MARTIN

15 Feeling good, looking good: comfort and the technologies of beauty in the spa 258

JO LITTLE AND KATHERINE MORTON

O autorze

Danny McNally is Lecturer in Geography at Teesside University. His research draws from cultural and social geography, and art theory and practice to explore pressing social and environmental issues. He has a PhD in Cultural Geography from Royal Holloway, University of London.

Laura Price is Research and Project Manager at PositiveNegatives based in SOAS, University of London. She is also co-editor of Geographies of Making, Craft and Creativity published by Routledge in 2018. Her research explores feminist geography, education, craft and creativity.

Philip Crang is Professor of Cultural Geography at Royal Holloway University of London. He was editor of the journal Cultural Geographies from 1999 to 2008. His research is concerned with the material textures of places and the mobilities of people, things and ideas that constitute them.