Geographies of Comfort

Danny McNally, Laura Price, Philip Crang, Danny McNally, Laura Price, Philip Crang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317030607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Geography
• Index: History

Bringing together conceptual and empirical research from leading thinkers, this book critically examines 'comfort' in everyday life in an era of continually occurring social, political and environmental changes.

Comfort and discomfort have assumed a central position in a range of works examining the relations between place and emotion, the senses, affect and materiality. This book argues that the emergence of this theme reflects how questions of comfort intersect humanistic, cultural-political and materialist registers of understanding the world. It highlights how geographies of comfort becomes a timely concern for Human Geography after its cultural, emotional and affective aspects. More specifically, comfort has become a vital theme for work on mobilities, home, environment and environmentalism, sociability in public space and the body. 'Comfort' is recognized as more than just a sensory experience through which we understand the world; its presence, absence and pursuit actively make and un-make the world. In light of this recognition, this book engages deeply with 'comfort' as both an analytic approach and an object of analysis.

This book offers international and interdisciplinary perspectives that deploys the lens of comfort to make sense of the textures of everyday life in a variety of geographical contexts. It will appeal to those working in human geography, anthropology, feminist theory, cultural studies and sociology.

1 Towards geographies of comfort

Laura Price, Danny McNally and Philip Crang

Introduction

Historian John E. Crowley has documented that during the eighteenth century physical comfort was an innovative part of Anglo-American culture, defined as “self-conscious satisfaction with the relationship between one’s body and its immediate physical environment” (1999: 750). The word “comfort” in this era became used increasingly to express this “satisfied” relationship, and indicated, according to Crowley, “a disposition to criticize traditional material culture and to improve it” (1999: 750). Centuries previous to this cultural-linguistic development, comfort mainly implied a “moral, emotional, spiritual, and political support in difficult circumstances” (1999: 751). Discomfort, at the same time, referred to feeling “sorrow, melancholy, and gloom rather than physical irritability” (1999: 751). Crowley goes on to explain that the consumer revolution in Anglo-American society during the eighteenth century developed a culture of comfort that integrated this new physical emphasis of the notion with the traditional one of moral support. Indeed, Brighenti and Pavoni (2019: 143) argue that the development of comfort-oriented societies is “the kernel of a theoretical genealogy of global capitalism”. Fast forward to the consumer world of modern day, comfort is now also a quality attributed to material objects regarding whether they provide that sensory experience (Miller 2008, 2010; Vannini and Taggart 2014: 1078). For instance, scholars have explored the cultural economy of “the normalisation of comfort” in the home regarding heating practices (Shove 2003), and comfort as a negotiated sensibility through different types of clothing (Fuller and Bulkeley 2013; Johnson 2017).

The term “comfort” is omnipresent, both imbued with multiple and expansive meanings, whilst at the same time being everyday, ordinary and vernacular. This is not necessarily a book which seeks to define comfort – and its subsidiaries of discomfort, comfortable, comforting and so on. Rather, it is an exploration of the term as a geographical imperative. In this sense, while we do not present a concrete definition of comfort, we do wish to sketch out and illustrate the geographies of comfort. Cultural geographers have long attended the mundane, taken-for-granted aspects of society and life – seeking their ubiquity as worthy of study, investigation and engagement (Crouch 1989; Lorimer 2005; Laurier and Philo 2006; McNally 2015; Price 2015; Holmes and Hall 2020). Comfort, we argue, both develops and interrogates these agendas. As such, this volume compiles a selection of interventions that explore a range of geographies of comfort, bringing to the fore the textures and meanings behind them.

The Geographies of Comfort is the first volume to engage critically with “comfort” and “discomfort” as substantive concerns for Human Geography. It has gathered together conceptual and empirical research that deploys the lens of comfort to make sense of the textures of everyday life in a variety of geographical contexts. Comfort and discomfort have come to the fore in a range of works examining the relations between place and emotion, the senses, affect and materiality. We argue this emergence reflects how questions of comfort intersect humanistic, cultural-political and materialist registers of understanding the world. In this light, geographies of comfort are a timely concern for Human Geography after its cultural, emotional and affective “turns”. More specifically, comfort has become a vital, emergent concern in a number of substantive fields within Human Geography, including work on mobilities (Bissell 2008; Adey et al. 2012); home (Brickell 2012a, b; Gorman-Murray 2012; Racz 2015); environment and environmentalism (Spinney et al. 2012; Hitchings et al. 2014; Vannini and Taggart 2013, 2014); sociability in public space (Eldridge and Roberts 2008; Boyer 2012); and the body (Colls 2012; Fuller and Bulkeley 2013; Johnson 2017). Geographers, anthropologists, sociologists and historians have recognized “comfort” as more than just an emotion through which we understand the world; rather, through its presence, absence and pursuit worlds are actively made and unmade. Advancing this recognition, this volume engages seriously with “comfort” as both an analytic approach and object of analysis.

This introductory chapter, split into four parts, sets out an argument for investigating the geographies of comfort. Section One, through the use of a series of illustrative examples, suggests that comfort and discomfort are everyday, common and ordinary ways of thinking about shared geographical experiences of world-making and un-making, mobility and socio-environmental transformation. As such, we believe they deserve critical reflection. In part, this means interrogating problematic and easy equations of comfort and discomfort with good and bad experiences or with conservative and progressive politics.

Section Two of the chapter contextualizes the geographies of comfort within wider disciplinary and interdisciplinary agenda. We do this by drawing out the different registers implicated in questions of comfort and discomfort. This includes the bodily, sensory and phenomenological geographies; cultural politics and cultural and feminist geographies; and affective materialism and non-representational geographies. In doing so, we seek to map out coordinates for a fuller understanding of the nuances, contradictions, distinctions and politics of “comfort” and “discomfort”. In Section Three, we demonstrate how these different registers come together and are explored within the structure of the book across four substantive themes: bodies and environment; difference and encounters; materiality and textures; health and wellbeing. Finally, the chapter concludes drawing attention to the political importance and cultural geographies of comfort as world-making.

Negotiating slow (dis)comforting geographies of post-doctoral careers

The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neoliberal transformation of the university is well documented, the isolating effects and embodied work conditions of such increasing demands are too rarely discussed.

(Mountz et al. 2015: 1236)

The concept for this volume emerged out of a series of sessions on “Comforting Geographies” at the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers Annual Conference in 2013. There has been significant time between those conference sessions and the publishing of this volume, and we feel it important, particularly in the context of this topic, to highlight how our personal, everyday and on-going geographies of comfort have elongated the timeframe from conference to publication. In doing so, we seek not to be solipsistic but to make visible the difficulties, inequalities and systemic issues with the neoliberal university.

During the period of this book project two of the editorial team, Danny and Laura, went through the PhD process and into the post-PhD employment pool, moving between unemployment and temporary work for a number of years. Money was loaned, debt was accrued, and low-paid salaries were accepted out of necessity. Life was not comfortable in a material, social or emotional sense. As we sought to find time, energy and resources to complete the volume – we worried most about our responsibilities to co-authors, many were in a similar position. The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) recorded that in 2018/2019 34 per cent of academics were employed on fixed-term contracts (HESA 2020). Our experience is symptomatic of the entrenched reliance on precarious labour within UK Higher Education, perpetuated through the sector’s steady infiltration of neoliberal logics.

The Geographies of Comfort has been shaped and cultivated by the theories, thoughts and research of feminist cultural geographers, and we advocate here for “a feminist mode of slow scholarship works for deep reflexive thought, engaged research, joy in writing and working with concepts and ideas driven by our passions” (Mountz et al. 2015: 1253). Whilst getting “beyond your comfort zone” is critical and cerebrally integral to the generation of new ideas, thinking and doings (Eden 2014) – this, we argue, cannot be done sustainably without a degree of social, personal, emotional, material and personal comfort (security and familiarity) that can support the making of space in which research and career aspirations can flourish. It cannot be overlooked that systemically, the neoliberal university with its “regimes of harried time” does not facilitate for the feminist slow scholarship – indeed, it entrenches further the inequalities of geographies of comfort across race, gender, class, age.

Comfort is political, and we are grateful to have had, in the end, completed this volume. Our hope hereafter is twofold. First, that our co-authors’ ethnographically and theoretically rich work inspires and advances the geographies of comfort agenda. Second, in illustrating the on-going politics of comfort as negotiation of everyday, personal and careful geographies, it supports the slow scholarship challenge to

neoliberalism’s metrics and efficiencies, and instead recalibrates and changes academic culture. Our call is about more than simply making time for ourselves and our own scholarship; it is about collective action – big and small – in which we attend to the interpersonal and collective conditions that underpin knowledge production conducted with care.

(Mountz et al. 2015: 1254)

(Dis)comfort and everyday life

The longest bench in the UK measures 324 metres long and sits 300 people. It is in Littlehampton, West Sussex. It is made from reclaimed hardwood, salvaged from landfill and old seaside groynes, colourful stacks, linked together, that twist and curve around lamp posts and street furniture, down coastal paths and crossings. It is hoped the bench will continually extend – more stacks will be added. You can pay, of course, to have your name engraved on one of those stacks – a historically meaningful act that often celebrates the ordinary enjoyment of people who have visited, rested and enjoyed a local area from the viewpoint of a particular bench. Rishbeth and Rogaly (2018: 1) argue that park benches, and architectural design more broadly, are intrinsic to understanding the micro-geographies of conviviality and care. The details of such design, they suggest, affect both the social and physical comfort and discomfort of people in place.

In this vein then, and rather contra in anecdote, let’s picture another scene: spikes on a park bench. Bolts installed on shop doorsteps and windowsills. Even barbs on tree branches. These are examples of hostile architecture – urban design aimed at preventing people from accessing public space in ways deemed undesirable. So-called “anti-homeless spikes” intervene in the potential of public, civic space as a potential source of comfort for homeless people to linger, rest and sleep. It negates comfort through design in a way that is felt through the body in terms of aesthetic and tactility. These nefarious design decisions alter public spaces around the world, whilst symbolically and materially excluding vulnerable populations from particular places, often, based on ensuring the social comfort of others deemed undesirable. When we introduce or identify comfort there is always discomfort – it is a sensation that sits at a border, or boundary. It is not dichotomous – but rather fluid, negotiated, oscillated. For Djohari et al. (2018: 357) comfort is something arising from an ongoing relation with (in) the world. This is echoed by Pickerill (2015: 1065) who refers to comfort as a process, not an attribute. These world-making sensibilities have now long been attended by cultural geographers. It is precisely the politics and power which comfort makes and un-makes worlds that we humbly suggest this volume develops and contributes too.

In January 2017 Jennie Platt and her two sons decided to act on anti-homeless spikes in Manchester City Centre. They visited high-street retailer Primark to bulk buy cushions to furnish and alter these spaces. In doing so, they were attempting to make them more comfortable, enacting a quietly political act of care and compassion. It is unsurprising that attendance to comfort has thus far been largely advanced by feminist geographers interested in care, emotion, compassion and the everyday, folded into the now established debates around emotion and affect. Indeed, more recently, there has been geopolitical attention paid to the quiet, everyday, activist ways of making changes. Kye Askins (2015: 275) refers to the “quietly political” that is “performed through relationships that are enabled by and mutually co-productive of everyday geographies”. In this light, this intervention by Jennie Platt worked to tip the everyday geographies of discomforting anti-homeless spikes back to comfort through the addition of cushions.

I am Tower of Hamlets, as I am in Tower of Hamlets, just like a lot of other people are (2011–2012) was a year-long off-site artwork by artist Amalia Pica, commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery in Bow, East London. Starting in June 2011, I am Tower of Hamlets involved touring a sculpture mad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Towards geographies of comfort
• Section one Bodies and environments
• Section two Difference and encounter
• Section three Materiality and texture
• Section four Health and wellbeing
• Index