Diana N.M. Beljaars

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Research Associate at Swansea University

In recent years, both within and beyond academic and clinical spheres, medical and health humanities have become increasingly influential. Drawing from interdisciplinary fields in the humanities, social sciences, and the arts, medical and health humanities present unique lenses for considering nuanced spaces and lived experiences of health and heal...

Geographers have a long standing interest in how perception influences human spatial behaviour and experience of places, with special focus on the visual (Pink, 2009). This post-phenomenological study extends on this body of work by investigating how people with Tourette syndrome experience and interact with everyday objects and environments. These...

To date, post-phenomenological thought in human geography has mostly been conceptual and theoretical in nature. Underwriting post-phenomenological thought in empirical terms requires the development of a methodology that incites a new way of thinking human being through bodily experience. This paper proposes a renegotiation of embodiment through an...

In order to understand ‘human being’, human geographers have engaged with the spatialities and geographies of the human body in how it constitutes the ways humans engage with place. They have done so by situating the corporeal as affected by a multiplicity of extracorporealities producing a conceptualisation of engagements with place as intentional...

This paper proposes an ontological centring of compulsivity as emanating with the Tourette syndrome diagnosis to analyse human being-with-the-world on unchosen terms. In addition to motor and vocal tics, many people with Tourette’s experience urges to interact with the extracorporeal environment. In abolishing these urges, they need to compulsively...

Background Although access to free healthcare is universal in the United Kingdom, evidence suggests variations by ethnicity in terms of outcomes following injury. The BE SURE study offers insights into use and outcomes of emergency healthcare for injury by minority ethnic groups to inform theories on mechanisms of access to help reduce disparities...

The most common clinical research question regarding Tourette syndrome focuses on tic reduction, which follows from classical ‘lack of inhibition’ models. Rooted in views about brain deficits, this model suggests that with higher severity and frequency, tics are necessarily disruptive and should therefore be inhibited. However, emerging calls from...

Recent reports from Tourette syndrome clinical researchers in North America and Europe1,2 describe a recent increase in young patients presenting to Tourette syndrome clinics. Reported commonalities in clinical presentation include a female preponderance, older age of first detected symptoms, complex behaviours (e.g. phrases, coprolalia, long/seque...

"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 touc...

This chapter explores the bodily and sensory processes leading up to compulsions; particularly regarding the increasing urge to act compulsively. Developing how compulsivity could be regarded as emerging from, and responding to a ʻlandscape of tensionʼ, it illumines the manifold ways in ways people with Tourette's feel drawn into performing compuls...

Tourette Syndrome is almost exclusively seen through the lens of disruptive tics. The most relevant clinical question seems to be: how to combat tics? In line with emerging calls from those diagnosed, we argue for a more positive approach focused on the Tourettic person, rather than on disruptions flowing from tics. This change of focus is ethicall...

Recent reports from Tourette Syndrome (TS) multiple clinical researcher groups in North America and Europe describe a recent increase in young patients presenting to TS clinics. Reported commonalities include a female preponderance, older age of first detected symptoms, complex behaviors, significant functional impairment, and similarities to behav...

In this paper we problematize and challenge narrow clinical depictions of Tourette syndrome by denoting how dimensions of the condition are rendered invisible in biomedical and clinical sciences and practice. Tourette syndrome is associated with people having to do gestures and movements and make sounds that they experience as unwanted and unintent...

This paper presents a spatial imagining of compulsivity. Deconstructing its medicalised conceptualisation and its rendition through the diagnostic system, the paper offers a performative analysis of compulsive body–world formation. It does so by introducing compulsivity as urging the performance of acts that are unwanted, purposeless, and meaningle...

(Article in Dutch) This article explains the outcomes of my doctoral study for people with a Tourette syndrome diagnosis and their familiar others. It elaborates on how the performance of urge-driven compulsive interactions emerges from the bodily situation and the perception of the socio-material surroundings. This outcome resulted from the close...

[title translation: 'Compulsive Interactions: How your environment informs your tics'] This article published in the December issue of 'Tourette Magazine' of the Dutch Patient Organisation explains the outcomes of my doctoral thesis to people with Tourette syndrome and other interested members of the public. It is written in Dutch

This 10 minute provocation explores the idea of imagining compulsivity as both producer and product of an emergent relationship between the human body and its surroundings. Compulsivity can be understood as the performance of an act with an unknown origin: a response to an urge which is felt, and experienced as beyond rationality, purpose, meaning...

The human/nonhuman divide has been prolifically exercised in understanding the relationalities of our being-with-the-world. Posthumanist (Castree & Nash, 2004; Coyle, 2006), poststructuralist (Doel, 2000; Thrift, 2007) and post-phenomenological (e.g. Simonsen, 2012; Ash, 2014) theory in geography have explored the tension this divide creates. They...

The previous decade has witnessed the development of non-representational theorizations of the impingement of affective environments on the human body. This has been a reproach to the dogmatic situation of human behaviour as always driven by meaning and intent, always alluding to value and morality. Despite theorizations taking flight, empirical de...

With the medical humanities and narrative medicine gaining increased attention, the gap between the imagination of disorders in the medical sciences and their actual lived experience becomes more apparent. Demonstrative of this is the scientific inquiry into Tourette syndrome that locates these phenomena solely in the brain, thus producing a thorou...

In understanding human being, in the past decade human geographers, and in particular those concerned with deviations from the norms have sought to understand human conditions and their alternative ways of being with the world (see Hansen & Philo, 2007). In seeking to contribute to and expand on this work, this paper does two things. First, it prob...

Over recent years social scientists have acknowledged the agency and affect of non human entities and processes on human life. In a sense, this is an increasingly sophisticated and nuanced exploration of a process that human geographers have built their discipline upon: the influence of ‘place’ on the human condition. This paper seeks to frame thes...

Researcher positionality has been subject of concern in human geographical methodology, following a widespread rejection of the pursuit of scientific objectivism and neutrality in the social research encounters (Haraway, 1988; Rose, 1997). Subsequently, methodologies have increasingly been sensitive of social dimensions of researcher-researched rel...

De Stichting Actief Spijk staat voor een leefbaar Spijk. Een dorpshart moet hiervoor een belangrijke drager worden. Een plek waar ontmoeten centraal staat en waar ruimte is voor alle dorpsactiviteiten. Een plek die verbonden is met de geweldige natuurlijke omgeving en de rijke steenfabricagegeschiedenis. In het dorpsplan uit 2012 is aangegeven dat...