How environments get to the skin: biosensory ethnography as a method for investigating the relation between psychosis and the city

Abstract

Epidemiological research in psychiatry has established robust evidence of the link between urban living and psychosis, but the situated experience of the city, as well as the precise ecology of psychosis remain largely unexplored. In this context, the aim of this paper is to discuss the productive potential of a 'revitalized' biosocial geographical thinking and researching on urban mental health. We do so through a methodological proposition. First, we discuss the need for a biosocial approach to the city/psychosis nexus and argue that a broader biological view, beyond epigenetics and neurosciences and a more precise investigation of 'the social' need to be developed. Second, a telling and recurring motto of recent reflections on biosocial processes is to understand how the environment or the social 'gets under the skin'. We suggest examining a specific place in this pathway, the skin itself. This leads us to expose a methodology using electrodermal activity (EDA), combined with ethnographic observations and interviews, as a strategy for analysing ecological processes in psychosis. In doing so, we discuss the potential of 'biosensory ethnographies' in studies of urban mental health and more broadly as a biosocial approach to the geography of health.

Understanding urbanicity: how interdisciplinary methods help to unravel the effects of the city on mental health

“…Instead, they may use these differences to co-create research designs. This may, for example, inspire human geographers to move beyond social constructivism and include biological dimensions of mental health (Winz & Söderström, 2020). It may help epidemiologists and neuroscientists to consider urban life as a series of situational phenomena that people encounter and actively construct, rather than something that can be reduced to the notion of ‘exposure’ to an invariable environment (Söderström, 2019).…”

Spatialising happiness economics: Global metrics, urban politics, and embodied technologies

“…Much of the research to date has been focused on urban areas, and several of the happy cities initiatives have experimented with these kinds of technologies (Happier by Design, 2017; Happy City, 2016). Geographers have also undertaken a number of experimental studies using wearable biosensing technologies, similarly recording Electrodermal Activity (EDA) as a psychophysiological measure of emotional arousal or momentary stress (Biremboin, 2018; Pykett et al, 2020a; Resch et al, 2014; Shoval et al, 2018; Winz & Söderström, 2021). The sensors are connected to smart phones to locate these measures geographically and in real‐time.…”

Situated Withnessing in/as Intervention

“…One crucial concept I was able to develop through my withnessing in the Inclusion Project was the above-mentioned concept of encounter(ing), which facilitates attendance to the specific relations between urban life (and particularly neighborhood cohabitation) and mental health, highlighting more-than-human socialities. With my conceptual discussion of encounter(ing) I relate to wider debates on the entanglement of mental health and urban environments -a research question that has only recently been rediscovered in psychiatric and ethnographic work (Manning 2019;Amin & Richaud 2020;Winz & Söderström 2020). Most researchers in both domains argue for the necessity of inter-and transdisciplinary modes of knowledge production.…”