Gavin J. Andrews’s research while affiliated with McMaster University and other places

In recent years, following new materialist, posthumanist and non-representational turns, human geography has increasingly understood the worlds it studies as vital, immediate and emergent. As part of this vision, studies have empirically animated and theoretically articulated various expressions/textures in the movement of space, including its rhythms, shapes, timings, repetitions, sensuousness and infections. Speed is one such expression/texture that has received some empirical attention but, in comparison to most others, it has not been so thoroughly theorized. In response, this article conducts a reconnaissance into speed, its intentions being to convey some foundational theoretical understandings of speed and, through empirical research, show these at play in social contexts. Specifically, naturalistic participant observations of forms of the movement activity of cycling are used to animate how (1) speed can be represented and affective as a scalar quantity, (2) all objects possess speeds and affect other speeds, (3) speeds and objects are known through relative positions and speeds, (4) speeds create rates of happening, (5) speeds occur in all expressions/textures of space and (6) the accelerating world is engaged at relational speeds. From this reconnaissance, to assist future research on speed, the article closes with some suggested avenues for further inquiry.

In this commentary, I describe music as a ‘hyperobject’ – an object so massive, multi‐dimensional and vastly distributed in space and time, that it exceeds full apprehension and quantification and ultimately traditional understandings of what a thing is. I draw examples from my own experiences and from the special issue articles to convey how music possesses the five core properties of a hyperobject; being viscous, molten, non‐local, phased and interobjective. I argue that, in contrast to many other hyperobjects, music is one that generally exerts a positive force in the world.

Many social interventions have been developed with the hopes of reducing and preventing social isolation among older people (e.g., recreation, arts-based programs and social prescription). Friendly visiting programs, also known as befriending schemes, have been a mainstay in this area for decades and are largely thought to be effective at reconnecting older people (≥ 60 years of age) experiencing isolation. Research and evaluations have yet to determine, however, how and why these programs may be most successful, and under what conditions. This article presents the findings of a realist synthesis aimed at identifying the critical mechanisms and contextual factors that lead to successful outcomes in friendly visiting programs. Seven studies are synthesized to inform a friendly visiting program theory accounting for key mechanisms (e.g., provision of informal support) and underlying contexts (e.g., training of volunteers) that can be used to inform future programs. Recommendations for future research are also presented.

The posthumanist turn in health and wellbeing research has paid attention to the qualities of space, particularly through the work of geographers. Although a range of these qualities have been explicitly articulated and well explored, a clear omission in the literature has been ‘speed’ - an important quality in its own right, and an element of all other qualities. This review paper takes a good look at speed. First it considers what speed is and the myriad ways in which it arises and is registered according to science and other intellectual paradigms. Second it considers speed as a distinctive feature of twenty-first century life and the health and wellbeing involvements and implications of this life. Third it considers some hidden partial precedent for a focus on speed and space in health and wellbeing research, by drawing speed out of current studies where it is implicit or a minor consideration. To conclude, the paper thinks about issues, challenges and possibilities for researching speed more fully, and the opportunities this might open up.

Across the social sciences the predominant engagement with ageing is through the study of human ageing, this also the exclusive concern of the ‘geography of ageing’. With the aim of advancing scholarship substantially, in this paper we (re)turn to science and consider how a broader, more fundamental understanding of ageing is found in the process of increasing entropy that all entities/systems are eventually subject to and contributors towards. Based on this theoretical foundation ‐ but cognizant of the need for a contemporary posthumanist sensibility ‐ we challenge geographers and others to extend the study of ageing to encompass all entities/systems at all possible levels of scale and complexity, highlighting pockets of partial precedent for this extension in different literatures. We argue that, through accepting this ‘all‐world ageing’ challenge, a more fulsome appreciation of the ageing macrocosm might be arrived at.

This article explores the concept of ‘world’ as it frequently appears across health studies; specifically largely humanistic and phenomenological variations in use of ‘the world’ and ‘lifeworld’ are considered as they have helped cast knowledge on health and care. Looking forward, it is argued that world might be reimagined post-humanistically and post-phenomenologically as a vital emergent material entity and property. This is a reimagination that pays dividends by drawing attention to all-world processes and productions, hence to ‘all-world health’. On one level, all-world health involves consideration of the healths of all the world's material and biological entities (all parts of the world). On another level, all-world health involves understanding what an entity gains from its total surround as it moves through life (all parts of its world). Together these levels provide a more processual, relational and holistic understanding of health than that provided by traditional notions of human health states, determinants or meanings, and even by some environmental (ist) ideas on health. All-world health arguably provides a vision of interrelatedness on which greater unity, cooperation and care might be built.

en This viewpoint considers extending aging studies beyond their current exclusive interest in human beings, conveying recent calls for this in more accessible terms. Specifically noted is that all entities/systems age relationally via the same universal entropic process and hence, based on this understanding, an “all-world aging” perspective might be developed. A particular consideration is what such a broadening of horizons might offer for advancing our understandings of time—specifically with regard to the material press in time—and the issues it raises in terms of subjectivities. Le vieillissement universel : une géo de toutes les choses sous la presse matérielle dans le temps fr Ce point de vue propose d'étendre les études sur le vieillissement au-delà de leur intérêt exclusif actuel pour les êtres humains, en exprimant les récents appels en ce sens en termes plus accessibles. On note en particulier que toutes les entités/systèmes vieillissent de manière relationnelle par le biais du même processus entropique universel et donc, sur la base de cette compréhension, une perspective de « vieillissement universel » pourrait être développée. Une considération particulière est de saisir ce qu'un tel élargissement des horizons pourrait offrir pour faire progresser notre compréhension du temps, en particulier en ce qui concerne la presse matérielle dans le temps, et les questions que cette compréhension soulève sur le plan des subjectivités.