Abstract
The essay presents and develops the concept of “critical places” and how it can be used when studying the everyday experience of living with long-term sickness and/or disability. The concept analyses the duality of both physical risk and social benefit and how they can collide in one specific place and create a bodily situation where the individual needs to act. The concept of “critical places” explores the phenomenological thought about doing and happening in specific situations, and, as such, the concept can also be seen as an ethnographic method. As a more theoretical concept, “critical places” can be used for a hermeneutic analysis of risk-taking, hiding from stigma, identity formation, power relations in a specific place and so on. I have used the concept in a couple of Swedish text concerning disability, and in these texts the concept has been elaborated with theories from geographies (Alftberg et al. Inledning: ljudmiljöer, kulturella praktiker och hörselnedsättning. [Introduction: sound environments, cultural practise and hearing impairment]. In: Ljud tar plats: Funktionshinderperspektiv på ljudmiljöer [Sound takes place: disability perspective on audio environments] 11. Lund: Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University, 2016). The concept has also been used by Meghan Cridland (“May contain traces of”: an ethnographic study of eating communities and the gluten free diet. Lund: Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University, 2017) in her ethnographic study of eating communities and by Niclas Hagen (A molecular body in a digital society: from practical biosociality to online biosociality. In: The atomized body – the cultural life of stem cells, genes and neurons. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2012) in his study about people living with Huntington’s disease. In this article, I will also develop the concept with my new research project about disability and accessibility, a 3-year project that will start in 2018. The article will introduce the concept of “critical places” to an international arena.
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- 1.
I have used the concept in a couple of Swedish text concerning illness, disability and health, and in these texts the concept has been elaborated with theories from culture geography and ethnology (Hansson 2007a; Alftberg et al. 2016). The concept has also been used by my colleagues at Lund University, namely, Cridland (2017) in her ethnographic study of eating communities and Hagen (2012) in his study about people living with Huntington’s disease.
- 2.
In the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, ethnology, and more broadly research in the humanities and social sciences, became more and more aware of the researcher’s own position to the fieldwork and the analysis of the study object. It became central to scrutinise the researcher’s position and make this clear. In the 2000s, this changed to not only reflecting upon the researcher’s own position but to the researcher using their own feelings and bodily sensations to gather new empirical material as part of their fieldwork. This methodological standpoint is central in this chapter to develop a methodological and a theoretical perspective to understand health through medical and geo-humanities.
- 3.
In my academic career as a researcher meeting other people with asthma, allergy and diabetes or using wheelchairs, disadvantages have become experiences that I share with them.
- 4.
The interviews were part of my PhD project that resulted in the book In a breath: A cultural analysis of asthma as limitation and possibility (2007b).
- 5.
This method was inspired by Harrison’s article “Seeing health and illness worlds – using visual methodologies in a sociology of health and illness: a methodological review” (2002).
- 6.
Merleau-Ponty writes: “make the discovery that I am in love” (2002: 442), a good example of how our bodily feelings are in relation to the emotional categories that surround us.
- 7.
Some of the risk that an individual takes can be calculated and more or less easy to cope with. One knows the risk but the traction to the place is greater, so the individual make a rational consideration. Other times there are no rational considerations, and the individual just throws themselves into the situation.
- 8.
This discussion and example is further elaborated in Hansson (2005): “In this kind of passing a person can conceal a stigmatized identity (Goffman 1963). It is a kind of reflexive camouflage. At the same time this reflexive passing is not always done through individual choice. A person can be forced to act in accordance with a dominated discourse of what is accepted and what is not (Foucault 1987)” (ibid., p. 138).
- 9.
This perspective is not developed further in the chapter, but “knowing one’s place” shall be understood as the person sees himself with the eyes of the other – how to see oneself as object (cf. de Beauvoir 1997).
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Hansson, K. (2020). Critical Places and Emerging Health Matters: Body, Risk and Spatial Obstacles. In: Atkinson, S., Hunt, R. (eds) GeoHumanities and Health. Global Perspectives on Health Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21406-7_5
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