Landscapes of Trauma and Mental Health

Proudfoot, Jesse

Abstract

In recent years, human geographers have turned their attention to trauma as a way of re-examining long-standing concerns in the discipline, including transnational migration, natural and human-made disasters, and urban displacement. Drawing on work from literary studies, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, geographers have engaged with trauma as a way to shed light on the affective and emotional valences of these phenomena and have used geographical thinking to critique theorisations of trauma. In this chapter, I review recent work on trauma by geographers and distill some key themes in this emergent scholarship. I argue that the principle critiques advanced by geographers can be grouped around two poles: one critiquing the framing of trauma as an individual experience and a second critiquing the supposed exceptionality of trauma. Drawing on critical, feminist, and queer theory, geographers have argued for more social and systemic accounts of trauma that transcend its origins in the psy-disciplines. Having parsed the field in this way, I conclude by offering provocations to further critique, drawn from my own and others’ work.

Citation

Proudfoot, J. (2024). Landscapes of Trauma and Mental Health. In C. P. Boyd, L. E. Boyle, S. L. Bell, E. Högström, J. Evans, A. Paul, & R. Foley (Eds.), Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Mental Health and Wellbeing. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003345725-41

• Online Publication Date: Nov 20, 2024
• Publication Date: Nov 5, 2024
• Deposit Date: Nov 29, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: May 6, 2026
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Book Title: Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Mental Health and Wellbeing
• Chapter Number: 37
• ISBN: 9781003345725
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003345725-41
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/3110571