Compulsive Body Spaces

Compulsive Body Spaces provides a new perspective on the lives of 15 people with Tourette syndrome by exploring the spatial context of their compulsive behaviors. Through in-depth interviews, observations, and mobile eye-tracking, the book demonstrates how configurations of bodies, objects, and spaces disrupt or enable people's lives, leading to a groundbreaking spatial conceptualization of wellbeing. It will appeal to students and scholars in various fields, including science and technology studies, human geography, sociology, health and social care, medical humanities, continental philosophy, and disability studies.

Format: Hardback
Length: 188 pages
Publication date: 11 February 2022
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

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 behavior, demonstrating how attending to the spatial circumstances under which compulsive acts, such as 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, 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 groundbreaking spatial conceptualization 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.

Weight: 454g
Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367626082