Karolina Doughty

Discourses of Mobility: Institutions, Everyday Lives and Embodiment

Abstract This article seeks to contribute to the growing body of literature on the politics of mobility, revealing the ways in which the governing of mobility intersects with everyday mobile lives. We suggest that dominant and enduring institutional discourses of mobility, which are pervaded by a privileging of individualised automobility, can be conceptualised around a framework of morality, modernity and freedom. By examining everyday discourses of mobility in this context we highlight the ways in which these discourses reflect and resist normative sets of knowledge and practices. It is argued that by emphasising the everyday and mundane in an analysis of discourses of mobility, and acknowledging their situatedness in prevailing normative discourses, we are then able to focus on how movement is a social and cultural practice in constant negotiation and (re)production.

Community treatment orders: learning from experiences of service users, practitioners and nearest relatives.

Abstract Background: The effectiveness of Community Treatment Orders (CTOs) has been examined previously. However, few studies have explored the significance of service user and practitioner understandings. Aims: The study explored the experiences of service users, practitioners and nearest relatives, to identify key factors and good practice in relation to CTOs. Method: A study of CTOs in a mental health NHS Trust in Southern England, including 72 semi-structured interviews, analysed thematically. Results: CTOs were perceived as helpful in certain circumstances for the “right” service user. Factors influencing effectiveness included recognition of the containing elements of the CTO, a respect for its legal authority and an acceptance of conditions. Conclusions: The perceptions of service users have an important role in determining the value and potential effectiveness of CTOs. A consideration of these issues should be integral to the process of assessing whether a CTO is appropriate in individual cases.

Community treatment orders: exploring the paradox of personalisation under compulsion

The introduction of supervised community treatment, delivered through community treatment orders (CTOs) in England and Wales, contrasts with the policy of personalisation, which aims to provide service users autonomy and choice over services. This article draws upon findings from a primarily qualitative study which included 72 semi-structured interviews (conducted between January and December 2012) with practitioners, service users and nearest relatives situated within a particular NHS Trust. The article also refers to a follow-on study in which 30 Approved Mental Health Practitioners were interviewed. The studies aimed to develop a better understanding of how compulsory powers are being used in the community, within a policy context that emphasises personalisation and person-centred care in service delivery. Findings from the interview data (which were analysed thematically) suggest that service users were often inadequately informed about the CTO and their legal rights. Furthermore, they tended to be offered little, or no, opportunity to make choices and have involvement in the making of the CTO and setting of conditions. Retrospectively, however, restrictions were often felt beneficial to recovery, and service users reported greater involvement in decisions at review stage. Areas of good practice are identified through which person-centred care can be better incorporated into the making of CTOs.

The pan flute musicians at Sergels torg: between global flows and specificities of place

Research on the relationship between music and place has highlighted the importance of music — in terms of both consumption and production — for how people experience, feel and perceive places as well as how they act in those places (e.g. Johansson and Bell, 2009). Connell and Gibson (2003: 192) state that ‘Music, through its actual sound, and through its ability to represent and inform the nature of space and place, is crucial to the ways in which humans occupy and engage with the material world.’ Simultaneously, scholars contributing to the so-called ‘mobilities turn’ in the social sciences since the 1990s have argued for the understanding of social and cultural life as inherently mobile. However, the relationship between music and mobility has remained underexplored in both literatures on sound/music and the wide-ranging literatures on the experiential dimensions of mobilities. In this chapter we address this gap by exploring how live musical performances in an urban public space come to matter in a number of ways for local mobilities (both physical and imaginary), and the tensions that arise between global flows and local place-making. Given the theme of this anthology, we also aim for this chapter to contribute to a wider theorisation of the relationship between representational and non-representational dimensions of urban place-making, through a lens of musical mobilities.

Healing Waters: Therapeutic Landscapes in Historic and Contemporary Ireland. Foley, Ronan

© The authors 2012 Geografiska Annaler: Series B