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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: This contribution responds to three articles (we refer to all three as 'editorials') concerning something called 'geopsychiatry'. Aims: To evaluate claims made in these editorials for 'geopsychiatry' as a new field of inquiry at the interface between geography and psychiatry. Method: Close critical reading of two editorials in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry – entitled 'Geographical determinants of mental health' and 'Political determinants of mental health' – and one in the International Review of Psychiatry – entitled 'What is geopsychiatry?' Results: While this geopsychiatry initiative is to be applauded, disquiet can be expressed about the almost complete neglect of a pre-existing domain of inquiry – 'mental health geography' or 'the geography of mental health' – that has long been researched by academic geographers and cognate scholars. Key trajectories in this field can be identified and related to the proposed foci for geopsychiatry. Conclusions: The hope is voiced that future developments in geopsychiatry will proceed in dialogue with the literature and practitioners of mental health geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report uses the First World War as a way to open up current debates into issues of bodies, selves, battlefields, memory and death in historical geography and beyond. Sweeping through a range of scales, from the global nature of imperialist practices to the intimate spaces of the psyche, this report highlights the contributions that historical geographers are making to these studies and the creative approaches taken. The aim is to expose the need for historical geography to engage with the darkest corners of human experience, in relation to conflict, so as to learn from the past in present insecure times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years, geographical engagements with issues surrounding different forms of memory have become increasingly diverse. Responding to Owain Jones’s recent call for more attention to be paid in geography to the individual and private memories that are crucial components in the makings of our lives, this paper seeks to investigate the processes of (re)remembering childhood worlds and the importance of thinking in more depth about the presentness of the past. Utilizing R.D. Laing’s ‘archive’, his autobiography Wisdom, Madness and Folly (1985), and a documentary film that appeared as part of John McGreevy’s Cities project in the late 1970s, this paper seeks to explore Laing’s (re)remembered childhood worlds in order to think more explicitly about the significance of these different sites and spaces – and their memories – on his ways of interpreting and making sense of the world in the present. Storying (past) lives and (past) places in such a way brings to the fore the narrative quality of memory, opening up alternative ways of thinking about how memories are produced and (re)told. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]