Diana Beljaars – författare

Compulsive Body Spaces presents a spatial understanding of compulsion. Providing a compelling account of the lives of 15 people with Tourette syndrome, it demystifies the seemingly irrational, purposeless and meaningless character of this behaviour.

It demonstrates how attending to the spatial circumstances under which compulsive acts, like touching, ordering, and aligning objects take place, can produce valuable novel insights that complement neuroscientific, psychiatric or psychological knowledge. By paying attention to the sensory, material, and social environment of the body during its performance of compulsive acts, the book establishes the ways in which configurations of bodies, objects, and spaces disrupt people’s lives or allow them to thrive. This collaborative, qualitative study that is based on in-depth interviews, observations, and mobile eye-tracking places the book at the forefront of a new wave of patient emancipation in medical research, and gives rise to a renewed consideration of what empathetic, context-sensitive care may look like in the 21st century. In turn, its insights give rise to a ground breaking spatial conceptualisation of wellbeing. Considering the compulsive capacities of a broader humanity, Compulsive Body Spaces highlights the compulsive dimension in bodily spatiality, which underpins the very core theories of human life as embodied and performed.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars in science and technology studies, human geography, sociology, health and social care, medical humanities, continental philosophy and disability studies.

Compulsive Body Spaces presents a spatial understanding of compulsion. Providing a compelling account of the lives of 15 people with Tourette syndrome, it demystifies the seemingly irrational, purposeless and meaningless character of this behaviour.

It demonstrates how attending to the spatial circumstances under which compulsive acts, like touching, ordering, and aligning objects take place, can produce valuable novel insights that complement neuroscientific, psychiatric or psychological knowledge. By paying attention to the sensory, material, and social environment of the body during its performance of compulsive acts, the book establishes the ways in which configurations of bodies, objects, and spaces disrupt people’s lives or allow them to thrive. This collaborative, qualitative study that is based on in-depth interviews, observations, and mobile eye-tracking places the book at the forefront of a new wave of patient emancipation in medical research, and gives rise to a renewed consideration of what empathetic, context-sensitive care may look like in the 21st century. In turn, its insights give rise to a ground breaking spatial conceptualisation of wellbeing. Considering the compulsive capacities of a broader humanity, Compulsive Body Spaces highlights the compulsive dimension in bodily spatiality, which underpins the very core theories of human life as embodied and performed.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars in science and technology studies, human geography, sociology, health and social care, medical humanities, continental philosophy and disability studies.

Civic Spaces and Desire presents an original and critical appraisal of civic spaces for a novel theoretical intersection of architecture and human geography. The authors address civic spaces that embody a strong moral code, such as a remembrance park or a casino, in various places in the United Kingdom, Europe, North America, Australia and Asia. The consecutive chapters of the book present these chosen spaces as the interconnection between the everyday and the ideological. By doing so the book reimagines the socio-political effects of the countercultural assemblages and ontologies of difference that these spaces produce, represent and foster, as presented through outcasts and nomads of various kinds and forms.

The book reflects on different interpretations of the key texts from primarily post-linguistic theoreticians, such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Jacques Derrida. It will benefit students and academics in architecture, geography, philosophy and urban studies and planning, who seek to understand the politics of space, place and civility. By deconstructing normative ideological constructs, the book uses the concept of desire to explore the tensions between expectations of civic spaces and the disappointment and wonder of their immanent existence.

Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.