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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.