Liz Bondi

The University of Edinburgh | UoE · School of Health in Social Science

Students and practitioners tend to assume that research requires them to set aside their embodied knowledge of practice and to produce radically different, objective and depersonalised forms of knowledge. Troubled by these assumptions, and coming from backgrounds within the humanities and social sciences shaped by critiques of this model of researc...

This special issue invited scholars from a range of disciplinary and professional backgrounds to engage with the question - writ broad - of what we do with, and how we understand, that which lingers in the shadows. In this introductory paper we begin with some background to this collection, we offer a few over-arching comments concerning the theore...

In this thought-provoking text, Liz Bondi and Judith Fewell invite practitioners to move away from an approach to research that depends upon distance and objectification, and towards a method centred on practical wisdom developed through intense exploration of the lived experience of therapeutic relationships.

Separately and together we offer our memories of how Gender, Place and Culture came into being. In so doing we seek to make available the kind of histories that often remain hidden from view. At the same time we illustrate the fallibility of memory and the conditions of possibility that frame what we can narrate.Recordando la creación de Gender, Pl...

This paper presents an abbreviated version of a verbatim script developed from oral history interviews with individuals key to the development of counselling and psychotherapy in Scotland from 1960 to 2000. Earlier versions were used in workshops with counsellors and pastoral care practitioners to share counter-narratives of counselling and to prov...

The concept of ontological security has been taken up in human geography primarily through Giddens' (199033. Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.View all references, 199134. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press.View all references) formulation, but the idea has its origins in...

The field of emotional geographies raises challenging methodological questions about how researchers produce knowledge about the feelings of others. Countering scepticism about the methodological possibilities of psychoanalysis, I argue for and illustrate its potential. Drawing on a single research interview, I show how psychoanalytic ideas about u...

Counselling and psychotherapy services have become increasingly prominent within modern urban welfare. Although often perceived to be intrinsically secular, since psychoanalytic thinking and practice arrived in Scotland it has been shaped by the Christian culture it encountered. Early Scottish-born contributors to psychoanalytic theory, including I...

The author argues that qualitative research and psychotherapy are both projects of making meaning. Qualitative research may provide therapeutic opportunities for participants that sometimes generate confusion about appropriate boundaries, but psychotherapy does not have a monopoly on the therapeutic. The meanings (or stories) that qualitative resea...

People professions - such as social work, teaching, nursing, ministry and counselling - are at heart ethical or moral enterprises. Much recent theorizing has been concerned to show that effective professional deliberation and judgement cannot be reduced either to technical rationality or to simple obedience to general occupational procedures or pre...

This collection offers a new way of looking at neoliberalisation and new understandings of contemporary processes of professionalisation. This collection offers a new way of looking at neoliberalisation. Presents new understandings of contemporary processes of professionalisation. Draws on new, original research. Features studies from the Global No...

people, how they “work” spaces of neoliberalism;professionalisation, globalised spaces of neoliberal governance;activism, professionalisation and neoliberalism, and tensions;neoliberalisation, how it co-opts, constrains, depletes activism;professional(ised) subjects, subversion of opportunities;neoliberalism, and programmes of Thatcherism and Reaga...

Recent years have witnessed a rapid rise in engagement with emotion and affect across a broad range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, with geographers among others making a significant contribution by examining the emotional intersections between people and places. Building on the achievements of Emotional Geographies (2005), th...

  Activists often strategically negotiate sectoral boundaries by switching between public, private and voluntary sectors over the life course in order to pursue their aims. This paper draws on a cross-national study that explored the extent of this inter-sectoral movement and the specific “career pathways” activists developed in relation to governm...

This paper outlines an approach used in a course designed to teach reflexivity as a research skill and explores what kind of gender intervention such teaching might constitute. Although inspired by feminist debates about the complex power dynamics of research relationships, the course in question does not focus specifically on gender issues. Instea...

People living in small rural communities tend to interact with each other in multiple aspects of their lives and are generally less anonymous to one another than those living in urban places. This density of social connectedness tends to militate against the boundaries normally associated with professionalised forms of care. This article explores h...

Care is double-edged and paradoxical, inspiring a vast range of strong feelings in both care-givers and care-recipients. This article draws on ideas about psychotherapeutic relationships to offer a theorisation of the complex emotional and power dynamics and imaginative geographies of care. Examining the humanistic approach developed by Carl Rogers...

Working out the Urban: An IntroductionGendering the Urban: A TheorizationDifferent Worlds of Work, Different Experiences of the CityWorking out the Urban: A Conclusion and ProspectusReferences

IntroductionSedimenting GenderReimagining Gendered SpaceConclusion

In 1989 the Scottish Health Education Group and the Scottish Association for Counselling compiled a directory of counselling services in Scotland. When asked if they offered counselling, the great majority of voluntary sector organisations in the welfare field said that they did, and they were therefore included in the directory, generating over 50...

Women’s efforts to influence policies have complex effects, which are often difficult to evaluate. This paper identifies four themes in feminist politics through which to analyse whether a particular intervention involving substantial numbers of women – that of counselling in the UK – can be understood as a feminist practice. These themes are conce...

The current upsurge of interest in emotions within geography has the potential to contribute to critical perspectives that question conventional limits to scholarship. Three precursors of emotional geographies are discussed in this context (humanistic, feminist and non-representational geographies). Connections between emotional geographies and psy...

An analysis is presented of how a particular psychotherapeutic practice, namely voluntary sector counselling, contributes to and resists neoliberal forms of governance. Neoliberal governmentality invokes a concept of the human subject as an autonomous, individualised, self-directing, decision-making agent, attributes fostered in different ways by p...

Academics are widely assumed to know things with high levels of certainty, and therefore to be capable of offering objective statements about the world. But feminists academics, myself included, generally eschew such assumptions. The feminist argument that knowledge claims are always situated (Haraway, 1988) implies that there is no neutral vantage...

Spatial terminology is used in many fields, including that of psychotherapies, in ways that often go unremarked. Human geographers have expressed ambivalence about an apparent proliferation of spatial thinking, challenging taken-for-granted meanings attributed to ‘space’. Drawing especially on feminist geography, this article outlines two of the mo...

This chapter discusses the evolution of voluntary sector counselling in Scotland that led up to the picture summarised in the 1989 directory in the framework of shifts that have characterized the voluntary sector. It explains how and why counselling was eagerly taken up by voluntary sector organisations in the 1980s and considers how and why counse...

Drawing on interviews with practitioners involved in voluntary-sector counselling in Scotland, this paper explores contradictions associated with the professionalisation of counselling in the UK. Five meanings of the term "professional" are identified. Those in support of professionalisation aim to bring these different meanings into close alignmen...

This article argues for and invokes an ambivalent feminist spatiality. Drawing on the idea that the position of feminist academic is a contradiction in terms, together with my ambivalence about presenting the Gender, Place and Culture 10th Anniversary Lecture, I illustrate ways in which feminists successfully inhabit unresolved tensions about acade...

This paper challenges two myths about voluntary sector counselling, namely (a) that volunteer counsellors and voluntary sector counselling are the same thing, and (b) that standards of practice in the voluntary sector are significantly different from those elsewhere. The paper also argues that voluntary sector counselling nurtures a deeply felt com...

This paper examines the spatiality of counselling, focusing on ideas about positions, boundaries and spaces emerging from practitioners' accounts. Counsellors describe counselling as a practice within which the relative positions of self and other are explored and negotiated. To that end, counsellors adopt a contradictory position in relation to ex...

This essay explores the changing shape of Anglo-American feminist urban geography, through a discussion of material published in Gender, Place and Culture and elsewhere over the past decade. We contextualize this discussion in relation to the development of feminist urban studies since the 1970s, showing its enduring commitment to work across tradi...

Geographies of care and welfare have neglected to consider a group of interrelated practices including counselling, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis, which are found in many different settings within modern welfare systems. In a number of influential studies, these psychological therapies have been described as self-oriented, narcissistic, and int...

This paper introduces psychoanalytic conceptualisations of identification and empathy as ways of thinking about fieldwork interactions. I argue that these ideas have considerable relevance for feminist geography as resources for reflecting on relationships between researchers and those they research, especially in relation to debates about power an...

Troubling the place of gender This chapter examines gender as an aspect of subjectivity that is both taken for granted and extraordinarily elusive. We illustrate the power of gender categories both experientially and theoretically, arguing that some kind of gender binary is very deeply woven into the fabric of cultural life. At the same time we ill...

This article explores the changing contours of the relationship between gender and the distinction between public and private spaces in western cities. Our account returns to the emergence of a modern understanding of public and private spaces to highlight its class and gender connotations. Then, focusing on middle-class women's experiences of publ...

This article contextualizes some of the more specifically focused articles in this Special Issue of 'Women and Mental Health' by reviewing general historical and political currents structuring contemporary discussions around questions of models, treatment and provision for women within British mental health services. Wehighlight some particularitie...

This paper explores the mutual constitution of gender and class in urban Britain in the light of economic trends of the last 10–15 years. We examine spatialities of gender and class relations, pointing to the centrality of inequalities in post-Fordist restructuring. In this context we draw on evidence from two intensive studies, one concerned with...

In this paper I take up the debate about gender, class, and gentrification. I accept the importance of class formation in understanding the relationship between gender and gentrification, and seek to supplement existing empirical studies by further exploring gender and class practices in a range of neighbourhoods. Through a combination of quantitat...

This article advances an interpretation of gender and fear of violence based on feminist post-structuralist theory. The authors explore the interweaving of 'embodied discourses', 'investments' in subject positions, and emotion. They illustrate their discussion through an exploratory analysis of the ways in which a sample of male and female universi...

This paper attempts to open up discussion about interconnectionsbetween psychotherapeutic practice and human geography. I offer brief “here and now” observations to introduce the importance of personal experience and interpersonal relationships. I then construct an autobiographical narrative to elaborate the themes of separation and connection. Thi...

Informed by feminist debates about the distinction between public and private in western urban societies, this article examines some urban landscapes created or transformed in recent decades with a view to assessing the extent to which emancipatory conceptions of gender are apparent. Evidence drawn from the city of Edinburgh shows how divisions bet...

In recent years, feminist theorists have begun to explore how sexual difference and patriarchal conceptions of gender permeate the epistemological structures as well as the substantive content of dominant forms of knowledge. This project discloses the fraudulence of universal truth claims and argues for situated knowledges. But developing situated...

Introduction 1. 'Class Struggle on Avenue A': The Lower East Side as Wild Wild West 2. Is Gentrification a Dirty Word?I: Toward a Theory of Gentrification 3. Local Arguments: From Consumer Sovereignty to the Rent Gap 4. Global Arguments: Uneven Development 5. Social Arguments: Of Yuppies and HousingII: The Global is the Local 6. Market, State and I...

In recent years, feminist theorists have begun to explore how sexual difference and patriarchal conceptions of gender permeate the epistemological structures as well as the substantive content of dominant forms of knowledge. This project discloses the fraudulence of universal truth claims and argues for situated knowledges. But developing situated...

A new debate has emerged in the literature on gentrification concerning the effects of the current economic recession. We criticize the terms of this debate for underplaying both the complexities and local specificities of gentrification. Exploring the course of gentrification in two localities in New York since the early 1970s, we show how the sam...