Paul Kingsbury’s research while affiliated with Simon Fraser University and other places

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Publications (53)


Promoting medical tourism to India: Messages, images, and the marketing of international patient travel
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March 2011

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955 Reads

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294 Citations

Social Science & Medicine

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Leigh Turner

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[...]

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Paul Kingsbury

Geographies of food: ‘Afters’
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  • Full-text available

February 2011

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1,337 Reads

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54 Citations

Progress in Human Geography

This third and final ‘Geographies of food’ review is based on an online blog conversation provoked by the first and second reviews in the series (Cook et al., 2006; 2008a). Authors of the work featured in these reviews — plus others whose work was not but should have been featured — were invited to respond to them, to talk about their own and other people’s work, and to enter into conversations about — and in the process review — other/new work within and beyond what could be called ‘food geographies’. These conversations were coded, edited, arranged, discussed and rearranged to produce a fragmentary, multi-authored text aiming to convey the rich and multi-stranded content, breadth and character of ongoing food studies research within and beyond geography.

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Locating the Melody of the Drives

November 2010

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25 Reads

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26 Citations

The Professional Geographer

Psychoanalysis has profoundly influenced those social theories that inform qualitative methodology in human geography. Yet many geographers are skeptical about the value and viability of psychoanalytic methodology because of its alleged reductionist causal explanations and relativistic interpretations of data. Drawing on the work of Slavoj Zizek, which affirms Jacques Lacan's undermining of the dualism of causality versus sense, this article illustrates the potential value of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a qualitative methodology in geography. Using a methodological case study from my research on Jamaican tourism, I illustrate how we can locate a Lacanian understanding of the drives in the interactions between tourists and hotel workers. In so doing, the article provides new insights into the enduring allures of tourism's commodity-form by focusing on how the object petit aa chimerical object that incites desire and an unattainable object that the drives encircletakes place in customer service and entertainment activities.


Figure 1: The tourist element of medical tourism. Photo credit: authors. This photo shows the beachside view from a high-end resort in Mahabalipuram, India that is affiliated with a hospital treating international patients in a nearby city. Patients can choose to go to this resort during their recovery stay. The photo depicts the popularized image of medical tourism, whereby patients recover in desirable tourist locations after obtaining surgery in LMICs.
Table 1 Scoping Review Keyword Search Strategy
Figure 2: Scoping Review Search Strategy and Results.
Table 2 Databases Searched for Scoping Review
What is know about the effects of medical tourism in destination and departure countries? A scoping review

November 2010

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3,395 Reads

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328 Citations

International Journal for Equity in Health

Medical tourism involves patients intentionally leaving their home country to access non-emergency health care services abroad. Growth in the popularity of this practice has resulted in a significant amount of attention being given to it from researchers, policy-makers, and the media. Yet, there has been little effort to systematically synthesize what is known about the effects of this phenomenon. This article presents the findings of a scoping review examining what is known about the effects of medical tourism in destination and departure countries. Drawing on academic articles, grey literature, and media sources extracted from18 databases, we follow a widely used scoping review protocol to synthesize what is known about the effects of medical tourism in destination and departure countries. The review design has three main stages: (1) identifying the question and relevant literature; (2) selecting the literature; and (3) charting, collating, and summarizing the data. The large majority of the 203 sources accepted into the review offer a perspective of medical tourism from the Global North, focusing on the flow of patients from high income nations to lower and middle income countries. This greatly shapes any discussion of the effects of medical tourism on destination and departure countries. Five interrelated themes that characterize existing discussion of the effects of this practice were extracted from the reviewed sources. These themes frame medical tourism as a: (1) user of public resources; (2) solution to health system problems; (3) revenue generating industry; (4) standard of care; and (5) source of inequity. It is observed that what is currently known about the effects of medical tourism is minimal, unreliable, geographically restricted and mostly based on speculation. Given its positive and negative effects on the health care systems of departure and destination countries, medical tourism is a highly significant and contested phenomenon. This is especially true given its potential to serve as a powerful force for the inequitable delivery of health care services globally. It is recommended that empirical evidence and other data associated with medical tourism be subjected to clear and coherent definitions, including reports focused on the flows of medical tourists and surgery success rates. Additional primary research on the effects of medical tourism is needed if the industry is to develop in a manner that is beneficial to citizens of both departure and destination countries.


Figure 1: Search strategy and results.
Table 1 Scoping review keyword search strategy
Table 2 Databases searched for scoping review
Table 3 Summary of extracted informational points
What is known about the patient's experience of medical tourism? A scoping review

September 2010

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2,144 Reads

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382 Citations

BMC Health Services Research

Medical tourism is understood as travel abroad with the intention of obtaining non-emergency medical services. This practice is the subject of increasing interest, but little is known about its scope. A comprehensive scoping review of published academic articles, media sources, and grey literature reports was performed to answer the question: what is known about the patient's experience of medical tourism? The review was accomplished in three steps: (1) identifying the question and relevant literature; (2) selecting the literature; (3) charting, collating, and summarizing the information. Overall themes were identified from this process. 291 sources were identified for review from the databases searched, the majority of which were media pieces (n = 176). A further 57 sources were included for review after hand searching reference lists. Of the 348 sources that were gathered, 216 were ultimately included in this scoping review. Only a small minority of sources reported on empirical studies that involved the collection of primary data (n = 5). The four themes identified via the review were: (1) decision-making (e.g., push and pull factors that operate to shape patients' decisions); (2) motivations (e.g., procedure-, cost-, and travel-based factors motivating patients to seek care abroad); (3) risks (e.g., health and travel risks); and (4) first-hand accounts (e.g., patients' experiential accounts of having gone abroad for medical care). These themes represent the most discussed issues about the patient's experience of medical tourism in the English-language academic, media, and grey literatures. This review demonstrates the need for additional research on numerous issues, including: (1) understanding how multiple information sources are consulted and evaluated by patients before deciding upon medical tourism; (2) examining how patients understand the risks of care abroad; (3) gathering patients' prospective and retrospective accounts; and (4) the push and pull factors, as well as the motives of patients to participate in medical tourism. The findings from this scoping review and the knowledge gaps it uncovered also demonstrate that there is great potential for new contributions to our understanding of the patient's experience of medical tourism.


Repetita juvant! A reply to Gwilym Eades

September 2010

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61 Reads

Geoforum

We reply to Gwilym Eades's (2010) criticisms by emphasizing the dangers of predestined readings and restating three key points that we made in our previous article (Kingsbury and Jones, 2009): first, that Apollo and Dionysus are mutually affirming rather than oppositional: second, that Walter Benjamin provides valuable theoretical resources to consider the uncertainties and possibilities of technology; and third, that one cannot simply read politics off technology. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd.


Unearthing Nietzsche's Bomb: Nuance, Explosiveness, Aesthetics

January 2010

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46 Reads

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14 Citations

ACME

Friedrich Nietzsche's revolutionary philosophy is renowned for its shocking style, bombastic assertions, and apocalyptic visions. Whether lauded or spurned, Nietzsche is usually read in geography as the anti-foundationalist philosopher who self-identified with dynamite in order to detonate the "grand narratives" of Truth. Taking bearings from the work of Alenka Zupančič, this essay argues that an even more explosive Nietzschean bomb is possible. Zupančič rewires Nietzsche as follows: first, instead of simply reading Nietzsche as the postmodern big bang igniter of systematizing discourses, Nietzsche is also the "philosopher of the event" whose explosiveness is charged by the intense nuances of stillness, silence, and subtlety. Second, while Nietzsche is frequently praised for pitting multiplicity against the totality of the One, Nietzsche also affirms moments when "One turns to Two", that is, when totalizing discourses of representation, truth, and subjectivity become internally fractured. The essay explores these themes and their relevance to geography by telling the story of a Nietzschean "event" - the taking place of a positive correlation between nuance and explosiveness - that took place during the 2006 AAG Meetings in Chicago. The essay concludes by considering how Nietzsche can re-sensitize us to the aesthetics of everyday geographies.


Theoretical injections: On the therapeutic aesthetics of medical spaces

August 2009

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138 Reads

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54 Citations

Social Science & Medicine

In this paper we present a dialogue about the seemingly innocuous presence of environmental art in hospital settings as a way of furthering critical perspectives on the therapeutic landscapes concept and its application to medical spaces. We explicitly consider the potential utility of two perspectives, Foucaultian and Lacanian readings, for understanding the relationship between environmental art and the hospital waiting room. We use this paper as a vehicle to demonstrate how such theoretical perspectives can enhance critical scholarship on the therapeutic landscape concept, particularly as it is applied to settings such as health clinics and hospitals. A brief agenda for further critical engagements with the therapeutic nature of health care spaces is put forth in the conclusion.


Fig. 4. Google Earth illuminated profanities. (Sources: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/10/giant-profanity/; http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/08/giant_poo/; http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/31/huge_word/.) (Lines of Flight: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/09/profanity.kmz; http://regmedia.co.uk/2007/01/08/scots_say_poo.kmz; http://regmedia.co.uk/2006/05/31/huge_arse.kmz). 
Fig. 5. Google Earth shot of Geneina Airport, Darfur. The damaged planes are circled. (Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/30/darfur_gunrunner_on_ google_earth/). (Line of Flight: http://regmedia.co.uk/2007/05/30/geneina_airport. kmz). 
Fig. 6. ''Unsurprisingly, special care is required when negotiating the city's roads, since driving conditions can change dramatically in seconds " . (Source: http:// www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/25/google_earth_two_seasons/).  
Fig. 7. Google Earth art by Dr. Glass. Reproduced with kind permission of Drew Hornbein. (Source: http://drglass.deviantart.com/art/Google-earth-art-32453380).  
Walter Benjamin’s Dionysian Adventures on Google Earth

July 2009

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1,473 Reads

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138 Citations

Geoforum

This paper argues, following Friedrich Nietzsche, that recent evaluations of Google Earth uncritically privilege the product’s Apollonian determinations at the expense of its Dionysian uncertainties. Specifically, when we understand Google Earth as a virtual globe composed of surveyed panoramas, sober rationalization, dystopic control, and transparent order – or, even, as a tool for participation and empowerment – we undersell its capacities as an alluring digital peep-box, an uncertain orb spangled with vertiginous paranoia, frenzied navigation, jubilatory dissolution, and intoxicating giddiness. We argue that the former interpretations not only risk foreclosing our theorizations about how Google Earth is actually used in various ways and different contexts, they also reproduce a one-dimensional and conservative reading of technology that can be traced back (at least) to the writings of Theodor Adorno. By drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin (Adorno’s critic and pen pal for more than a decade) we aim to ‘go beyond Apollo and Adorno’ by illustrating the extent to which Apollonian order and Dionysian love makes Google Earth go round. To do this, we examine Google Earth as a “digital peep-box” with an online collective that revels in its “Spot the Black Helicopter” competitions; illuminated profanities; alien and giant insect invaders; naked sunbathers; and crashed transport planes in Darfur.


Citations (39)


... This paper also calls for more geographers to study crime fiction. So, while there has been some engagement with crime fiction by geographers and in geography journals (see, for instance, Howell, 1998;Schmid, 1995;Brosseau and Le Bel, 2016;McLaughlin, 2016;Kingsbury, 2023), the genre has largely been overlooked by the discipline. Yet, crime fiction has much more to offer geography. ...

Reference:

The subterranean in crime fiction: examining Edinburgh’s underground in Ian Rankin’s John Rebus novels
A literary geography of the sinthome: the case of Sherlock Holmes and The Stormy Petrels of British Columbia
  • Citing Article
  • August 2021

... The notion of total 'otherness' achieves its maximum when family members allow themselves to disconnect from any moral responsibility for what happens to 'it.' In and of itself, this moral chasm is humiliating (Burnham, 2021). To put it another way, the parent says it again and again: "if he could only comprehend us" (Kafka, 1915:76), and Grete begins to wonder, "How can that be Gregor?" ...

Lacan and the Environment
  • Citing Book
  • January 2021

... Additionally, scholars such as Fredric Jameson, Alain Badiou, Mari Ruti, and Todd McGowan offer significant interpretations of Lacan-Marx-Hegel that also inform my analysis. This radical, transdisciplinary scholarship has much to offer the domain of critical political theory and geography (see Pohl and Kingsbury, 2021;Pohl and Swyngedouw, 2023). Their perspectives share a common interest in understanding our individual and collective relationships toward antagonism and emancipation and will be useful for understanding the events that take place in Hot Skull. ...

The Most Sublime Geographer: Žižek with Place, Distance, and Scale

... Second, the cave's unending mystery "captures" them and drives them forward; we might consider this a kind of constitutive non-knowledge. Perhaps akin to the psychoanalytic concept of "The Thing" which can never be attained (Keane and Kingsbury, 2021), this mystery is manifest in an imagination and experience of the cave as inexhaustible--and thus manifests as an insatiable desire to continue onward. If "to think with caves or within caves is to be required to play with questions of knowing" (Parrott and Hawkins, 2021: 97) for no other reason than the weight of Platonic allegory, Bachelard suggests that "In poetry, non-knowing is a primal condition" (2014: 17). ...

Raising Sasquatch to the Place of the Cryptozoological Thing
  • Citing Chapter
  • February 2021

... Both have occurred. Recently, scholars across disciplines have taken anomalies more seriously, from cooperation within academia to conferences and written collaboration with public partners (Agrama, 2021;Graves, 2023;Kingsbury, 2019;Kripal, 2011;Limina, 2023;Masters, 2021;Wendt and Duvall, 2008). During the weekend of February 10, 2023, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) made international headlines when it shot down three UAP: one over the Alaskan coast on Friday, one over central Yukon on Saturday, and one over Lake Huron on Sunday. ...

Go figural: crop circle research and the extraordinary rifts of landscape
  • Citing Article
  • November 2018

Cultural Geographies

... Secor captures this 'lack in nature' when she highlights that even water is not 'supposed to know', and thus lacks a firm and stable instinctual foundation, or that lightning knows 'nothing of the ground' before it hits the earth. In Lacanian terms, I read this part of Secor's argument as a powerful statement that 'the big Other does not exist'neither in culture (Kingsbury, 2017) nor in nature (Pohl, 2020). The big Other would indicate that there is an indissoluble and consistent 'ground' that constitutes a firm ontological basis for both knowledge and action. ...

Uneasiness in culture, or negotiating the sublime distances towards the big Other
  • Citing Article
  • June 2017

Geography Compass

... Links between social integration and social enterprise workspaces are poorly understood, and lack empirical assessment (Keane et al., 2017). We applied mixed methods to explore how relations within a social enterprise contribute to social integration. ...

Linking online social proximity and workplace location: social enterprise employees in British Columbia

Area

... 6 Even if no one pictures enjoyment as a question raised by Lefebvre and Lacan, this is by far the first geographic contribution to Lacanian enjoyment. Paul Kingsbury (2005) pictures the "politics of enjoyment" regarding Jamaican tourism, Jesse Proudfoot (2010) gives an example of enjoyment as "extradiscursive" by reflecting on interviews during an international soccer competition in Vancouver, and Proudfoot and Kingsbury (2014) have published a work on "phallic jouissance" by focusing on masculine sexuation in submarine films, to mention just a few essential works. ...

Periscope down! charting masculine sexuation in submarine films
  • Citing Article
  • June 2014

... Focussing on the work accomplished in the Claude Glass, positioned between a looking subject and an emergent landscape, affords us with the opportunity metaphorically to understand that concepts, too, are never more than the work they accomplish. 27 In other words, the Claude Glass invites us to shift our attention from the constructedness of landscapes towards the conditions of their construction. Such a broadly structural understanding of the process of landscape generation allows for analyses of landscapes that no longer require the postulation of highly questionable subject-positions. ...

Introduction: The unconscious, transference, drives, repetition and other things tied to geography
  • Citing Article
  • June 2014

... Further, the importance of involving ethnic minorities in the planning and programming of such festivals is evident. The NBF enabled migrant communities to control the inclusion of experiences within the event, reducing hegemonic power often evident in liberal state-sponsored multicultural policies and practices (Kingsbury, 2016). Further, by acknowledging that ethnic minorities are internally different and providing a platform for these variations to be represented, the NBF moves away from depicting a 'united front' to its audience (Fincher et al., 2014, p. 44), thus increasing the authenticity of the event. ...

Rethinking the Aesthetic Geographies of Multicultural Festivals: A Nietzschean Perspective
  • Citing Article
  • January 2016