Avril Maddrell

Living with the deceased: absence, presence and absence-presence

In this paper I build on my previous case-study focused research on memorialization to develop a thesis for absence-presence evidenced in vernacular memorial artefacts, spaces and performances at a variety of scales and locations across the British Isles. I make three key arguments: i) for bringing the universally significant experience of absence through bereavement to the fore in cultural geographies of absence; ii) for moving beyond representational and phenomenological analysis of memorial artefacts and spaces to focus critical attention on the contextualized interface between the representational and more-than-representational, embodied and affective practices that surround them, for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between the living and the absent deceased; and iii) that this interface of form and practice at a variety of vernacular memorials and locations evidences dynamic negotiations of absence-presence. I explore the ways in which the emotions, memory and materiality of absence through death is expressed and negotiated in different memorial forms and landscape settings in the British Isles. Analysis is based on a range of empirical examples drawn from contemporary practices of memorialization and remembrance, and explores how living with absence as a result of bereavement is mediated through different material forms and practices including expressions of ‘continuing bonds’. The discussion is contextualized in relation to wider dialogue on absent presence, but argues that expressions of continuing bonds with the deceased evidence a relational and dynamic absence-presence. Practices associated with absence-presence intersect with growing trends to mark private grief and remembrance of individuals in public space, through the creation of a range of informal memorials that frame a ‘Third Emotional Space’ for the bereaved. The material memorialscape is indicative of the interwoven narrative journeys in and through particular place-temporalities for the living, for whom bereavement is a confluence of emotional-spiritual-practical way-finding.

A place for grief and belief: the Witness Cairn, Isle of Whithorn, Galloway, Scotland

This paper draws on a case study of the Witness Cairn, at the Isle of Whithorn, Galloway, Scotland, to explore the relationship between bereavement practices and expressions of belief manifest in this particular place. The cairn is embedded in historic and contemporary Christian faith practices in the locality, and has combined with its form, naming and process of construction, to create a space of remembrance and, potentially, of transformation. Using the concept of liminality, it is argued that the individualised micro-memorials found at the Witness Cairn offer insight to a continuum of belief–unbelief and the blurring of the divide between practising faith-adherents and non-adherents in British society.

Mapping grief. A conceptual framework for understanding the spatial dimensions of bereavement, mourning and remembrance

Abstract This paper highlights the significance of the spatial dimensions of the universal human phenomena of bereavement. Grief, mourning and remembrance are experienced in and mapped upon (i) physical spaces, including the public and private arenas of everyday life; (ii) the embodied-psychological spaces of the interdependent and co-producing body-mind and (iii) the virtual spaces of digital technology, religious-spiritual beliefs and non-place-based community. Culturally inflected, dynamic emotional-affective maps of grief can be identified, as a form of deep-mapping, which reflect the ways in which relationality to particular spaces and places is inflected by bereavement, mourning and remembrance. Individual’s emotional-affective cartographies can intersect, overlap, or conflict with, others’ maps, with social and political consequences. The conceptual framework outlined here is illustrated by a schematic representation of grief maps. This framework provides geographical scholars with a lens on the dynamic assemblage of self-body-place-society that constitutes culturally inflected individual and shared everyday grief maps, providing insight to relational spaces, emotional-affective geographies and therapeutic environments. The reflexive identification of such maps represents a potential resource for the bereaved and their therapeutic counsellors, facilitating the identification of places which evoke anguish or comfort etc. and which might be deemed emotionally ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’ at particular junctures.

Crossing Surfaces in Search of the Holy: Landscape and Liminality in Contemporary Christian Pilgrimage

This paper examines the role of surfaces in pilgrimage practices and experiences in two denominational and cultural contexts and landscape settings for Christian pilgrimage: a week of Ecumenical pilgrimage walks in the Isle of Man and Orthodox pilgrimage to the monasteries of Meteora in Greece. Surfaces are examined as dynamic textured platforms for journeying and stages for the performance of ritual; as part of visual aesthetic and multisensory embodied experiences; as hermeneutical texts; as perceived liminal thresholds through which the divine might be experienced; and as tangible material fragments encapsulating and facilitating the ‘taking home’ of the pilgrim experience. Surfaces are found to be significant for pilgrims in a variety of shared ways, but also ways which are inflected by different theological and cultural contexts. Through its analysis of faith adherents and practices, this study offers (i) a spiritually informed perspective on both perceptions and experiences of surfaces, and (ii) understanding of faith-inflected mobilities and ‘more-than-representational’ meanings and practices.

Moving and being moved: More-than-walking and talking on pilgrimage walks in the Manx landscape

Religious pilgrimage has long been seen as an opportunity for, and means of, personal and collective renewal, with that renewal traditionally pivoting on penitence leading to a fresh start born out of forgiveness, or the healing of a physical or mental ailment. This paper explores a new annual event of a week of pilgrimage walks in the Isle of Man, within the broader context of recent work on ‘therapeutic’ landscapes or environments, addressing a call for better understanding of the role of the spiritual in therapeutic landscapes. Drawing on participant accounts, the paper demonstrates the commonalities between pilgrimage and other forms of guided walking and retreats, as well as the similar factors identified as ‘renewing’ by both faith adherents and non-adherents (e.g. good company, ‘silence’, physical exercise and the landscape). It also illustrates how many believers experience a sense of proximity to the Divine, and it is this experience that makes pilgrimage ‘more-than-walking’ and is at the heart of their sense of renewal.

Editorial: Spaces of Renewal

Change can be sudden or gradual; it can happen in a specific moment in one’s life, or take an entire life time – consider, for example, the physical and emotional effect of a car accident as compared to that of natural ageing. The experience and impact of the outbreak of a war, a new job, parenthood, being in love, moving home, religious conversion, serious illness, infidelity, redundancy; each holds the potential to cause shifts in the sense of self and world view, with positive or negative effects. Renewal is a particular form and expression of change, one whichmay occur by serendipity, such as the renewal of an old friendship through a chance encounter, but which tends to be the product of conscious intentionality and choice. Renewal is, as the word implies, re-newal, making new again. It is a concept at the heart of many religious and spiritual beliefs and rites, as well as secular customs, and can be applied to individuals, communities, places and practices. Renewal can be physical and spiritual; it can be deeply personal, yet socially-driven. It can mesh emotional, psychological and physiological processes, and in contemporary western society whole industries have grown up around these intersecting phenomena, including urban regeneration, diets, exercise and skin regimes, cosmetic surgery, self-help programmes, revivals, retreats and holidays. A ‘new’ more authentic self, team, or community is promised through attaining a particular size, shape, reputation, fervour, or order. Renewal is often used as a synonym for restoration, sometimes reviving and enlivening, as in the case of romance, sometimes calming and diffusing, as in the case of psychophysiological stress recovery, which can result in ‘positive shifts in mood, decline in arousal, improved performance on tasks that require directed attention’ (Hartig 2003, 103). More broadly, however, re-newal as a form of restoration implies a simultaneous return to the past and a continuity of core identity or form into a transformed present, which is also taken forward into the future. This re-newal can be seen as a unique event or part of a continuous ongoing process or cycle, such as cell renewal or the annual arrival of Spring. While renewal might be the result of a dramatic intervention or event (a Damascene conversion, a surprise reunion), quotidian acts of maintenance are frequently core

Emergent and divergent spaces in the Women’s March: the challenges of intersectionality and inclusion

Abstract This piece introduces the set of articles assembled from our call for Rapid Responses to the Women’s March on Washington circulated in February 2017. Each addresses issues arising through collective expressions of protest. The Women’s March on Washington, organized on the twin principles of intersectionality and inclusion, acted as a flashpoint for the generation of emergent spaces to do politics differently. In the search for solidarity, tensions within groups and among individuals shaped the way in which resistance and protests were responded to and organized. The authors in this collection take up themes of intersectionality and inclusion/exclusion via politicizing the personal, contesting the state, and challenging simplistic notions of unity in solidarity.

And now the end is near: enlivening and politizising the geographies of dying, death and mourning

A new body of scholarship on death and loss has emerged as a sub-field within social and cultural geography. This work has done much to draw geographers’ attention to questions of death, dying and remembrance and likewise to bring a spatial perspective to interdisciplinary death studies. Whilst deathscapes have been framed within geographical work as incorporating material, embodied and virtual spaces, to date Anglo-American and European studies have tended to focus on the literal and representational spaces of the end of life, sites of bodily remains and memorialization. With a number of important exceptions, embodied and dynamic experiences of dying, death and survival have been absent within the geographies of death. This special section aims to broaden the scope, and to resist simple dichotomies of life and death, and to be especially attentive to the embodied and visceral experiences, practices and processes of dying, death and survival. In this introduction, we explore themes of dying/s, death/s and survival/s across varied international, national and cultural contexts, as discussed in the contributing papers and raised by the politics of recent events. This collection offers an expanded and enlivened approach to research, documenting facing death/s, journeys at the end of life, living through, on and with life-limiting illnesses, living with loss and the interconnected spatialities that these experiences and practices evoke for individuals and wider social groups. They open up new spaces of P/politics and emotions, challenging limited political and medicalized frames. The papers also raise methodological questions and present a challenging agenda for future research. This special section grew out of sessions we organized for the 2012 RGS-IBG Annual International Conference at the University of Edinburgh.

Celtic pilgrimage, past and present: from historical geography to contemporary embodied practices

Perigrinatio, the Latin term for pilgrimage was at the heart of the medieval Celtic church, but was this was understood and practised not only as a journey to a shrine, but more broadly as a spiritual journey, which could lead to an isolated hermitage or peripatetic evangelistic mission. In this paper, we outline the beliefs and practices of the broad assemblage known as the Celtic church, particularly the interleaving of pilgrimage, asceticism and landscape poetics, and how these have informed continued and renewed pilgrimage practices to sites of the early Celtic church by particular denominations, ecumenical groups and those interested in broader spiritualities. These sacred mobilities are explored through vignettes of embodied-emotional-spiritual practices situated in the landscapes and faith communities of Lough Derg, Ireland and the Isle of Man. They share geographical marginality, a focus on multiple Celtic saints and an enduring belief in the immanence of God, expressed through embodied spiritual practice in the landscape. However, they differ widely in matters of institutionalised structure, regulation, discursive scripting and gendered hierarchy, reflecting situated and denominational preferences for the ascetic and aesthetic spiritual legacies of the medieval Celtic church.

Geographical frontiers of gendered violence

This article acts as an introduction to the suite of interventions which aim to generate belated conversation across geography on gendered violences. As such, it brings together and formalizes dialogue convened at the Royal Geographical Society with Institute of British Geographers(IBG) (RGS-IBG) Annual Conference 2013 on the theme of ‘new geographical frontiers’. Organized by the Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group as part of the ‘100+’ series of events marking the centenary of women’s admission to the RGS-IBG, a plenary panel on gendered violences provided case study insights from the Global North and South on this pressing issue. While far from exhaustive, we explain how the collective of interventions on rape, domestic violence, state-sponsored violence and religious and racial hate crime highlight a multiple set of gendered violences that affect the lives of women and men in different settings.