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This paper uses one of Scotland's most controversial experiments in penal reform – the Barlinnie Special Unit – to examine the enfolding nature of care and control in carceral space. Connecting with recent arguments relating to “caring architecture” and using the framework of historical carceral geographies, it showcases the spatial complexities of implementing caring practices alongside reforming tactics. Beginning with a discussion of the care and control nexus within institutional spaces and its historical legacy, it considers the use of small units within the Scottish Prison System. Using the Barlinnie Special Unit as a pivot, the paper opens up the complex spatial arrangements and spatial tactics of experimental prison reform. It first examines the spatial and architectural dimensions of the Special Unit. Second, the paper focuses on issues of routine and inhabitation and the emotional uncertainty this generated for prisoners. Overall, this paper seeks to argue the importance of examining experimental spatial practices in prison reform history to highlight the interwoven spatialities of care and control in every‐day institutional life.

The final report in this series focuses on the emerging intersections between historical geography, archaeology and the law. Whilst staying attuned to the darkest of geographies emerging from the sub-field, this report turns its attention to the creative and critical ways in which the dead are being used to reveal past lives and worlds that have been destroyed and forgotten. Using soil and the archaeological imagination as a pivot, this report centres on the interweaving themes of fragile environments, resurfacing and legal worlds in order to suggest the emerging possibilities for a hopeful excavation of new historical geographies.

The second report in this series turns to focus on the trace in relation to life-writing and biography in historical geography and beyond. Through attention to tracing journeys, located moments and listening to the presence of ghosts (Ogborn, 2005), this report seeks to highlight the range of different ways in which historical geographers have explored lives, deaths, and their transient traces through varied biographical terrains. Continuing to draw attention in historical geography to the darkest of histories, this piece will pivot on moments of discovering the dead to showcase the nuanced ways in which historical geography is opening doors into uncharted lives and unspoken histories.

This paper uses the unique collection of Scottish outsider art, labelled Art Extraordinary, as a window into the often neglected small spaces of asylum care in the early twentieth century. By drawing upon materials from the Art Extraordinary collection and its associated archives, this paper demonstrates the importance of incorporating small and everyday spaces of care – such as gardens, paths, studios and boats – into the broader historical narratives of psychiatric care in Scotland. Examples of experiential memorialization and counterpoints to asylum surveillance culture will be illuminated. The significance of using ‘outsider’ art collections as a valuable source in tracing geographical histories will be highlighted.

This photo-collage essay seeks to highlight visually some of the stories of my fieldwork during the project. Although a significant proportion of the research was undertaken in Glasgow Museums Resource Centre and is not covered here, time was spent seeking out connections about place and being ‘in place’ to try and uncover new histories and generate stories that resonate from the collection. The pictures represented here are my own collages inspired by the work of artist extraordinary Marylene Walker. Marylene’s layering of sights, sounds,\ud lives and experiences deeply resonated with me and I used her techniques to help tell the tales of my fieldwork. Extracts from my fieldwork diary accompany the pictures to give some context. These are not detailed interpretations or explanations of the scenes but are, in many ways, simply reflections of being ‘in place’ during the fieldwork.

In conjunction with the recent critical assessments of the life and work of R.D. Laing, this paper seeks to demonstrate what is revealed when Laing’s work on families and created spaces of mental health care are examined through a geographical lens. The paper begins with an exploration of Laing’s time at the Tavistock Clinic in London during the 1960s, and of the co-authored text with Aaron Esterson entitled, Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964). The study then seeks to demonstrate the importance Laing and his colleague placed on the time-space situatedness of patients and their worlds. Finally, an account is provided of Laing’s and Esterson’s spatial thinking in relation to their creation of both real and imagined spaces of therapeutic care.

No abstract available.

Scottish born psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Ronald David Laing, was born in Glasgow in 1927 and died in 1989, aged only 61. Training in medicine at Glasgow University then moving to the discipline of psychiatry, and finally studying psychoanalysis at the famous Tavistock Clinic in London under the guidance of more recognisable analysts such as Charles Rycroft and Donald Winnicott, Laing became a globally renowned figure for his controversial and inspiring views on the subject of mental ill-health. Laing decided to step away from conventional psychiatry by condemning the use of electric shock treatment, lobotomies, and insulin treatment and instead focused on more experimental therapies such as meaningful communication and LSD treatment. Laing desired to investigate the intricate connections between mind and body interactions and through an existential phenomenological approach attempted to understand his patients within the context of their own local, social and familial worlds. Many critics condemned his vision as attempting to romanticise mental suffering but this did not halt Laing gaining a cult following and becoming one of Britain’s most influential, yet forgotten, intellectual figures. This thesis aims to introduce the life and work of Laing to a geographical audience by demonstrating both the geographies of Laing and Laing’s geographies. An increasingly substantial number of geographers working within the sub-fields of psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic geographies have endeavoured to cast a geographical eye over psychoanalytic concepts such as the ‘unconscious’ and key figures in the discipline such as Freud, Kristeva and Lacan, however, Laing remains a curious missing figure in this literature. Through archival research with the Laing collection held in the Special Collections at the University of Glasgow I explore Laing’s early life and work through a geographical lens. In doing so the fragmentary nature of archival work is revealed and its methodological repercussions investigated within the current geographical literature concerned with life writing and biography. Through the construction of a geographical biography of Laing’s early life, beginning with the reconstruction of his childhood city of Glasgow in the 1920s through to his creation of the ‘asylum’ of Kingsley Hall in 1965, I examine how certain spaces, sites and places became fundamental to the formation of Laing’s broader philosophy on mental ill-health and his exploration of different therapeutic practices with seriously disturbed, often schizophrenic, individuals. This geographical dimension is explored in further detail in the concluding section of this thesis as I attempt to unpick the geographies arguably present in Laing’s theoretical work.