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Therapeutic Everyday Materialities in the Subjective Smoking Experience

  • Arena of Health
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Abstract

This study examines the smoking experience through the subjective meanings connected to the smoker’s everyday materialities and socio-spatial norms. The paper draws on landscape-oriented health methodologies and the concept of the therapeutic everyday landscape to contextualise smoking as a vitalist habitual behaviour. The study is based on semi-structured qualitative interviews with high cultural capital smokers in Tallinn, Estonia. The analysis pays attention to the spatial contextualisation of the intensities of smoking events reported by participants and their reported relationships between individual smoking habits and everyday landscapes. The study indicates how bringing different habitual materialities of smoking into a smoker’s awareness has the potential to transform habitual patterns regarding their psychological and behavioural health. The paper suggests that paying attention to the rewards of the therapeutic everyday environment and seeking them while smoking may help increase awareness in the smoking event that may influence individual choices for transforming health behaviour.

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Funding

This research has been financed by the Estonian Research Agency PRG 398 Landscape approach to rurbanity.

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  1. Centre for Landscape and Culture, School of Humanities, Tallinn University, Narva mnt 25, 10120, Tallinn, Estonia

    Kadri Kasemets

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  1. Kadri Kasemets
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Correspondence to Kadri Kasemets.

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Kasemets, K. Therapeutic Everyday Materialities in the Subjective Smoking Experience. Hu Arenas 5, 44–56 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-020-00131-9

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