Living through, living with and living on from breast cancer in the UK: creative cathartic methodologies, cancerous spaces and a politics of compassion

Creative geographies and living on from breast cancer: The enlivening potential of autobiographical bricolage for an aesthetics of precarity

“…Consequently, geography only has a small, but growing, corpus of work that uses embodied, personal images combined with alternative, creative forms of geopoetic expression. So these bricolages do not simply “exist” in an intellectual vacuum: they have been produced through particular relations of social and political power and wider discourses and knowledge systems (Madge, , p. 213). In other words, autobiographical bricolage is also connected to dominant intellectual regimes (including normative tropes surrounding breast cancer) and these discursive spaces can influence creative expression and shape its production, reception and being in the world.…”

“…Indeed, employing autobiographical bricolage can be a tool to express such subjectivity, potentially enabling people passing through the trauma of living with or through life‐threatening illnesses to make an “imaginative cathartic move through the creative process, possibly stitching together some of the fragmented shards of the minded‐body” (Madge, , p. 222). This creative agency might be a way of “writing oneself (back) into being” (Philo, , p. 285), of bearing “witness to occurrences that cannot be understood or experienced in any other manner” (Tamas, , p. 91).…”

And now the end is near: enlivening and politizising the geographies of dying, death and mourning

“…One question is to ask, why has so much research occurred without reference to these multiple intersections, whilst so little has taken place on the basis of research that calls for their inclusion? Alongside end of life experiences, there is considerable scope to incorporate the voices of those who have survived a close-to-death experience and explore the specific circumstances and the post-living/s on, with and through (see Madge, 2016;Stevenson, 2016). The ways through which living has been naturalized needs to be problematized, whilst thinking about how 'taking life' 'rights to die' and 'planning for death' has been 'othered'.…”

Suicidal journeys: attempted suicide as geographies ofintendeddeath

“…Rather than resolving or subsuming these difficult geographies, in circulating disparate literatures and portraying what often remains invisible, I contribute to a developing movement that acknowledges a more contingent understanding of dying-living-surviving, and that proposes geographies of dying and death as active. For example, through an autobiographical narrative, Madge (2014) explores how emotional and visceral accounts of livingdying are written from and through the body, while Romanillos (2015, p. 569) notes the 'countless uses to which the dead have been put to work in cultivating state memory and identity' and where the materialities of death and loss are purposely erased to generate 'landscapes of negation '. In what follows, suicidal journeys are understood from the 'inside', and I access something of how it might feel to be suicidal as well as show how 'attempted suicide' is articulated through personal geographical journeys via survivor testimonies. Moving beyond a sole focus on why to understanding more about when, how and where people attempt suicide elucidates the spaces, places and geographies of suicide survivors, and reduces the invisible spatiality of suicide that haunts academic enquiry into the geography of dying and death.…”

“…I situate my contribution in relation to two, currently distinct, strands of thought in geography -geographies of dying and death and a geography of suicide, where other kinds of dying/living are encountered, especially in relation to the spatial complexities of living with dying and spatial mappings of suicide (see Brown, 2003;Madge, 2014). Recognising that a more interpretative geographical perspective of suicide is currently absent, I explore the implications such thinking has for understanding geographies of dying and death as vibrant and vital.…”