
Steven D. BrownNottingham Trent University | NTU · Nottingham Business School
Steven D. Brown
PhD
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Publications (169)
Public value and city governance are fundamental notions in contemporary settings, but, currently conceived, they are not fit for the challenges presented by the proposed new epoch of geological time—the Anthropocene. Walking through the locked-down streets or calle of Venice, we face the sudden emptiness that starkly reveals the impact of human ac...
One of the foremost intellectuals of his generation, French philosopher of science Michel Serres (1930–2019) broke free from disciplinary dogmas. His reflections on science, culture, technology, art, and religion have proved foundational to scholars across the humanities. The contributors to Porous Becomings bring the inspirational and enigmatic wo...
This paper takes a person-in-context approach to explore how the neoliberal university, embroiled in discourses of ‘progress’, influences academics’ narrativization and navigation of career. Whilst aware of the role ‘progress’ plays in framing a ‘traditional career’, academics find themselves having to navigate the contours of the university – wher...
Relational security in secure mental healthcare can be conceptualised as an outcome of social climate—the physical conditions of the wards and the social relationships that play out within them. Staff knowledge and understanding of patients is seen as key to maintaining relational security, by facilitating staff responsivity and personalised care....
Historically, nature has been considered central to healing and recovery in institutional mental health settings, with inpatient spaces designed to mirror the restorative forces nature may afford. Within contemporary healthcare architecture, the discourse surrounding nature’s role has once again become prominent, especially in the concept of ‘heali...
How do we engage with the threat of social and environmental degradation while creating and maintaining liveable and just worlds? Researchers from diverse backgrounds unpack this question through a series of original and committed contributions to this wide-ranging volume.
In this article, we propose that the perpetual difficulties in drug treatment can be understood as a consequence of how a binary opposition of order and disorder continues to structure drug discourses and treatment practices. When drug use is seen as a disorder of addiction, recovery becomes reduced to movements between fixed points benchmarked aga...
Henri Bergson (1859–1941) contributed major philosophical works on time, consciousness, evolution, and morality. His thinking remains central to debates on fundamental issues within philosophy and social science, particular around “process ontology.” Bergson’s work was of enormous influence to early-twentieth-century social science, and has seen a...
Medium secure forensic psychiatric units are unique environments within the broader “post asylum” landscape of mental health services. Length of stay is much greater and restrictions on behavior, including sexual behavior, are legally and institutionally legitimated, due to concerns regarding risk. As a result, sexuality is rarely explored with ser...
Medium secure forensic psychiatric units are unique environments within the broader “post asylum” landscape of mental health services. Length of stay is much greater and restrictions on behavior, including sexual behavior, are legally and institutionally legitimated, due to concerns regarding risk. As a result, sexuality is rarely explored with ser...
In this paper, we consider changes to memorial practices for mental health service users during the asylum period of the mid-nineteenth up to the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. The closing of large asylums in the UK has been largely welcomed by professionals and service-users alike, but their closure has led to a de...
In this paper, we consider the changes to memorial practice for mental health service users, during the asylum period of the mid-19th up to the end of the 20th century and into the 21st century. The closing of the large asylum in the UK has been largely welcomed by professionals and service-users alike, and yet, their closure has led to a decrease...
In this article we will contribute to the literature on carceral and institutional geographies through exploring the complexities of care, control, mobility and stasis thrown up by these tensions in a UK forensic psychiatric unit. We explore these complexities through empirical material gathered with staff and patients on a UK medium secure psychia...
Sitting between the psychiatric and criminal justice systems, and yet fully located in neither, forensic psychiatric units are complex spaces. Both a therapeutic landscape and a carceral space, forensic services must try to balance the demands of therapy and security, or recovery and risk, within the confines of a strictly controlled institutional...
Psychological wellbeing in relation to work is an idea which is easily understood but very di cult to de ne with precision. It concerns the range of changing positive and negative emotions that all employees may experience on a daily basis. Psychological wellbeing is heavily impacted by structural factors such as the ergonomics of the work environm...
Background: Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) has received substantial international attention since its founding in the late 1990s, with a growing evidence base relating to its nature and impact across a variety of settings.
Aims: To identify the effectiveness of MHFA upon a range of outcomes, recipients, its cost-effectiveness, and the mechanisms of...
Background:
Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) is a mental health intervention that teaches people how to identify, understand and help someone who may be experiencing a mental health issue. Reviews of the implementation of MHFA found between 68 and 88% of trained Mental Health First Aiders had used their skills when in contact with someone experienci...
We have entered the Anthropocene: a new geological epoch in which human activities, led by business interests, have inexorably compromised the Earth System. The current failure to provide a comprehensive and systematic response to this transition does not result from a lack of reason but is instead the manifestation of a generalized crisis in commu...
Sexuality in secure mental healthcare has been overlooked in both clinical praxis and academic research. In the UK, there exist no formal policies to inform staff approaches to managing inpatient sexuality. The limited research that has been undertaken in this field has found that often, prohibitive approaches are favoured, which may affect how inp...
This letter seeks to synthesise methodological challenges encountered in a cohort of Wellcome Trust-funded research projects focusing on sexualities and health. The ten Wellcome Trust projects span a diversity of gender and sexual orientations and identities, settings; institutional and non-institutional contexts, lifecourse stages, and explore a r...
How are relations of care and security between hospital staff and patients organized through sound? This article argues that the shifting distinction between meaningful sound and noise is fundamental to the lived experience of immersion in organizational acoustic environment. Based around a qualitative study of listening practices and ‘ear work’ at...
Psychosocial assistance is a crucial aspect of recent state reparation and human rights restitution policies in post-conflict Colombia. Drawing on the methodological tools offered by Science and Technology Studies (STS), we follow the trajectories of a psychosocial protocol for emotional recovery as a technology of reparation deployed in rural comm...
The impact of social and material conditions on mental health is well established but lacking in a coherent approach. We offer the concept of ‘vitality’ as means of describing how environments facilitate ‘feelings of being alive’ that cut across existing diagnostic categories. Drawing on the work of Stern, Fuchs, Worms and Duff, we argue that vital...
The climate or atmosphere of a ward in secure psychiatric care is typically studied by examining the relationship between social and environmental factors. However the experiences of patients are irreducible to a set of discrete dimensions or factors. Drawing on recent work in affect theory and architectural studies, we argue for an approach to atm...
The concept of atmosphere is a way of emplacing affect and affect theory. Work in contemporary social geography has done much to demonstrate how elemental forces become enveloped in atmospheres. However it tends to under-theorise the role of historically structured socio-cultural forces and the modes of engagement of persons with the atmospheric. I...
This paper presents analysis from a study of staff and patient experiences of the restrictive environments of a forensic psychiatric unit. The paper conceptualises the forensic unit as an impermanent assemblage, enacted in and through practices that hold a future life outside the unit simultaneously near, yet far. We show how the near-far relations...
Medium secure forensic psychiatric units are unique environments within the broader ‘post asylum’ landscape of mental health services. Length of stay is much greater, a recovery-focused care system is much more difficult to implement, and there is a paucity of suitable “step-down” services. The aim of this study was to examine how forensic psychiat...
This paper presents analysis from a study of staff and patient experiences of the restrictive environments of a forensic psychiatric unit. The paper conceptualises the forensic unit as an impermanent assemblage, enacted in and through practices that hold a future life outside the unit simultaneously near, yet far. We show how the near-far relations...
This chapter explores how newly homeless people negotiate the hostile climate of public space, to seek out protective immunological bubbles in which they can exist in relative safety. Sloterdijk argues that all bubbles that they create as spaces of intimacy and interiority 'work towards bursting'. The bubbles of safety are created through drawing o...
Peer-reviewed online open-access journal, published on http://www.discourseunit.com/annual-review/
This issue of ARCP introduces Deleuze’s project on a philosophy of difference in its critical intersection with psychology. After a general introduction, this special issue employs the distinctions Philosophy/Science/Art articulated in his later work...
The relationship between place and remembering has been a longstanding matter of phenomenological concern. The role of the ‘lived body’ in mediating acts of remembering in context is clearly crucial. In this paper we contribute to an ‘expanded view of memory’ by describing how remembering difficult or problematic events ― ‘vital memories’ ― draws u...
Much information in our lives is remembered in a social context, as we often reminisce about shared experiences with others, and more generally remember in the social context of our communities and our cultures. Memory researchers across disciplines and subdisciplines are actively exploring collaborative remembering. However, despite this common in...
Much information in our lives is remembered in a social context, as we often reminisce about shared experiences with others, and more generally remember in the social context of our communities and our cultures. Memory researchers across disciplines and subdisciplines are actively exploring collaborative remembering. However, despite this common in...
The dichotomy between 'truth' and 'falsity' in relation to memory is difficult to clearly sustain. The veridicality of memory is typically established by drawing on the local, normative procedures that operate in a given setting (e.g. legal, clinical, social). Since all procedures are strictly relative, all memories are technically either 'relative...
Institutions and organizations are defined by competing sociomaterial logics. Divergence between the ‘visible’ and the ‘hidden’ side of organization invites a critical work of ‘unveiling’. But such critique does not enable understanding of how coherency is accomplished between different modes of reason. This is performed in emergent third spaces, w...
Elaine Scarry's book The Body in Pain justly deserves its place as one the pivotal works that opened up the field of 'body studies'. The text needs to be evaluated in the retrospective terms of the field it established, and also with respect to the changing status of both 'torture' and 'war' in contemporary state politics. Scarry's analysis of the...
Individuals with mental health problems are considered to be part of a group labeled ‘vulnerable’ in forensic psychology literature and the legal system more generally. In producing witness statements, there are numerous guidelines in the UK, designed to facilitate the production of reliable and valid accounts by those deemed to be vulnerable witne...
In this article we examine the relationship between standards and subjectivity in the context of compensating the victims of terrorism. We do so by drawing on a corpus of data that features survivor and bereaved accounts of two 21st-century terrorist attacks. We investigate the distressing period in which compensation claims remained undecided, in...
A consensus has developed among social and biological scientists around the problematic nature of genetic ancestry testing, specifically that its popularity will lead to greater genetic essentialism in social identities. Many of these arguments assume a relatively uncritical engagement with DNA, under ‘high-stakes’ conditions. We suggest that in a...
How do memorials act to transmit memory through the organization of space? In this article, we contrast a preservation' model of the endurance of encoded memory with a meshwork' model which treats memory as emergent on the perdurance of the memorial site. Developing a theoretical framework from Tim Ingold's work, we describe how memorialization rec...
This book is concerned with particular kinds of autobiographical memories, amongst so-called ‘vulnerable’ groups, including survivors of child sexual abuse, adopted children and their families, forensic mental health service users and elderly persons in care home settings. With each group, we have learned of the importance of a particular class of...
Recent online marketing innovations such as ad-servers, ad-networks and ad-exchanges allow marketers to extract value from consumer data in new ways. But these new market devices do not just exploit technological innovations. They are constructed around a revolutionary new mask of the consumer. They treat consumers not as fixed individuals but as d...
In this article, we argue that emergent interests in social interaction, wider context and culture with regards to memory have united formerly disparate approaches within the discipline of psychology, namely, that from the discursive and experimental cognitive paradigms. Here, we develop the argument on the centrality of interaction and continuity...
When visual approaches are used in the social sciences, the distinction between researcher and researched becomes destabilised, due to a greater transference of autonomy and narrative authority over to the participant who creates, organises and analyses data in partnership with the researcher. ‘Showing a world’ is more agentic, perhaps, than the tr...
This article introduces some early data from the Leverhulme Trust-funded research programme, 'The Impact of the Diasporas on the Making of Britain: evidence, memories, inventions'. One of the interdisciplinary foci of the programme, which incorporates insights from genetics, history, archaeology, linguistics and social psychology, is to investigate...
Forensic mental health inpatients in medium-secure settings have a limited capacity for sexual expression during their stay in hospital. This is due to a number of factors, including a lack of willingness on behalf of staff to engage with sexual issues, as a result of safety fears and ambiguity regarding the ability of the patient to consent. Furth...
Michel Serres’ concept of ‘the parasite’ provides for a sustained rethinking of basic categories in human social science. As an example of post-Kantian philosophy, Serres critiques the classical logic of identity as based on a ‘third man’ argument. This third space – personified as the parasite – is essential to thinking communication and transform...
Organisational memory studies (OMS) has begun to consider the ways in which organisations construct versions of their own history. These histories have a broader significance through the ways they resource and are contested within cultural memory. In this paper we discuss the way that the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) consti...
The ‘mathematical imaginary’ at work in psychology is central to the contingent history of the discipline, but is also responsible for considerable confusion and ambiguity around the ontological assumptions of psychological theories and models. Rather than reject the mathematical altogether, this article argues for an alternative form of mathematic...
A diverse range of commemorative practices developed in the wake of the First World War as collective means for performing private trauma and loss. Public commemorative silence became adopted as a key feature of Armistice Day from 1919 onwards. This practice can be treated as a “social technology,” which is here defined as the mediational means for...
In this paper, we explore some of the tensions involved in the process of engaging with embodiment research. Although a significant volume of discursive work on “the body” and its role in social relations now exists, there is little in the way of empirical research that moves the focus away from discourse alone to concentrate on other modalities, s...
Audio recordings of meetings of two community groups in a deprived inner-city area were analysed, using discursive psychological and conversation analytic techniques to explore situated enactments of ‘community’. Participants situated themselves as members of a geographical community, of an ‘imagined’ community and of other constitutive communities...
The 2005 London bombings have been the subject of numerous commemorative practices, ranging from public silence to the Hyde Park memorial. In this article we discuss a less well-studied commemorative practice that we term, following Esther Hyman, a ‘living memorial’. This type of commemoration differs from other memorials in that it functions by ma...
This commentary on Isabelle Stengers’s article, “Comparison as a Matter of Concern” is an assessment of her stance toward experimental psychology. At the various points in her work where she considers that discipline, she tends to accuse it of failing to embrace the “risk” that she sees as defining the “collective games” of science. Brown invokes t...
This chapter examines the intellectual legacy of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945) in order to address three
research questions. First, how are individual and collective memories formed, retained, and manipulated? Second, what accounts
for the persistence and changes of cultural memories? Third, how do spatial and cultural contexts i...
This paper was published as Marketing Theory, 2010, 10 (3), pp. 299-312. It is available from http://mtq.sagepub.com/content/10/3/299. Doi: 10.1177/1470593110373182 Metadata only entry Embargoed until September 2011. Full text of this item does not appear in the LRA. Following Knorr Cetina and Bruegger (2002), an understanding of financial markets...
Research into emotion, crime and anti-social behaviour has lacked psychological input and rarely considered the multi-directional
associations between emotion, crime and morality. We present a study analysing audio recordings of two community groups meeting
in a deprived inner-city area with high rates of crime, using conversation analytic and disc...
In an era marked by the apparent saturation of terror and the ubiquitous mediation of all‐things‐past, the value of and the prospects for the remembering of terrorist attacks appear caught up in the velocity of the immediate circulation of media data and in the cyclical iterations of news images. Rather than these processes affecting a reduction or...
Embargoed by the publisher until December 2010. Full text of this item is not currently available on the LRA. The final published version is available at http://cap.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/15/4/463. DOI: 10.1177/1354067X09344890 Metadata only Recollection of child sexual abuse involves complex issues of agency—both in the past and in the p...
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to describe the problem of achieving “organizational justice” for children within integrated children's services. Justice is understood, following Byers and Rhodes discussion of Levinas as respecting the “unique and indivisible” character of a given child.
Design/methodology/approach
– The empirical material...
Psychological treatments of mental health issues have acquired a justifiable notoriety for their tendency to engage in generalisation and reductionism. By contrast, the emergent geographies of exclusion make visible the fine-grain material and spatial contours of the lives of individuals who experience mental health difficulties and distress. Howev...
In this paper, we explore how adoptive parents manage and order visual information relating to their adoptive child's birth or foster family. More specifically, our task is to make sense of the ways in which the memories that children have of their past families are (re)constructed and managed within the context of present adoptive parental concern...
There are parallels between the emergence of 'memory studies' as a domain of enquiry and the development of 'sexuality studies'. Both confront the difficulty of engaging with a central referent whose historical, cultural and ontological status is indeterminate. Reviewing a selection of articles from the first issue of Memory Studies, three sets of...