Therapeutic mobilities

Abstract

This Special Issue expands mobilities research through the idea of therapeutic mobilities, which consist of multiple movements of health-related things and beings, including, though not limited to, nurses, doctors, patients, narratives, information, gifts and pharmaceuticals. The therapeutic emerges from the encounters of mobile human and non-human, animate and inanimate subjects with places and environments and the individual components they are made of. We argue that an interaction of mobilities and health research offers essential benefits: First, it contributes to knowledge production in a field of tremendous social relevance, i.e. transnational health care. Second, it encourages researchers to think about and through functionally limited, ill, injured, mentally disturbed, unwell and hurting bodies. Third, it engages with the transformative character of mobilities at various scales. And fourth, it brings together different kinds of mobilities. The papers in this Special Issue contribute to three themes key for the therapeutic in mobilities: a) transformations (and stabilizations) of selves, bodies and positionalities, b) uneven im/mobilities and therapeutic inequalities and c) multiple and contingent im/ mobilities. Therapeutic mobilities comprise practices and processes that are multi-layered and mutable; sometimes bizarre, sometimes ironic, often drastically uneven; sometimes brutal, sometimes beautifuland sometimes all of this at the same time.

Health, Wellness, and Place Attachment During and Post Health Pandemics

“…Individuals perceive that traveling to destinations with abundant therapeutic landscapes, such as health resorts, gardens, meadows, lakes, and wellness retreat centers, improves their health and wellbeing. Scholars note the increasing trends in health (medical) and wellness tourism that allow tourists to rest and relax or spend time at therapeutic landscapes after surgery for recuperation (Ramkissoon et al, 2013a;Majeed et al, 2018;Kaspar et al, 2019). People in the Baltic States report they search to improve their health and well-being by enjoying the spa, being at the beach, and exploring forests (Smith, 2015).…”

Going for brokerage: strategies and strains in commercial healthcare facilitation

“…The growing body of social science research on crossborder travel for healthcare is providing valuable insights into the social relations and circulations that characterise one form of commercial healthcare facilitation [3][4][5], however the findings from this study point to several new directions for research: the role of diplomatic and business networks in facilitating access to care across borders, the new activities being mediated by facilitation companies in other countries, and the extent to which new technologies such as telemedicine are affecting facilitation work. Further research is needed to better understand the work of interpreters in commercial healthcare facilitation, and their exposure to exploitative employment relations.…”

“…Restructuring within healthcare systems in recent decades has seen the expansion of market-based provisioning in many settings [1,2]. It is a trend that has been accompanied by growth in cross-border travel for healthcare, as people seek care in global healthcare markets for services unavailable to them in their country of origin [3][4][5][6]. The expansion of these domestic and global markets for healthcare pose new sets of choices, and with them new bureaucratic and informational barriers and needs for accessing care [7], and this has opened up commercial opportunities for third-parties to operate as intermediaries in healthcare markets.…”

Anxious immobilities: an ethnography of coping with contagion (Covid-19) in Macau

“…Thus, it is surprising that there has been so far relatively little sociological investigation of socio-technical system resilience to disasters (see Guiver and Jain 2011;Woolley-Meza et al 2013). At the same time, mobility scholars have dedicated relatively little to conceptualizing the experiential immobility during ill-health (Kaspar, Walton-Roberts, and Bochaton 2019).…”

“…Instead, we aim to map out the complexity of immobilities that constitute the condition of contagion and thus contribute to the nascent research area of mobilities and health. Following the call to expand the field on transnational health, well-being, and mobility (Kaspar, Walton-Roberts, and Bochaton 2019) we take this agenda a one step further by showing the interrelationships of health and immobility through dialectic between the highly mobile effect of the spread of a contagious virus and the resulting health and safety-related deep stasis, stillness, and anxious immobilities. In terms of its effect on the everyday rhythms of life, it is highly relevant to conceptualize such anxious immobilities as a complex condition of static and dynamic elements resulting in practices of slowing down and coping with accidental immobility and related emotions.…”