Ian Tucker
Biographic Data
| ID | 307333 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ian Tucker |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ian |
| FAMILY NAME | Tucker |
| SIGNATURE | TUCKER I |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of East London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1314-2222 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 184 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Developing a digital ecological momentary assessment tool for ‘real time’ evaluation in implementation science
Introduction: Social prescribing is increasingly adopted as a strategy to address psychosocial determinants of health, yet evaluating complex community-based interventions remains methodologically challenging. Digital ecological momentary assessment (EMA) offers potential for capturing real-time, multi-modal data in naturalistic settings. This study aimed to develop and assess the feasibility of a novel digital EMA approach integrating wearable-d…
Temporalities of peer support
This paper considers matters of time in online mental health peer support. Significant evidence of the value of peer support exists, with new digital platforms emerging as part of the digitisation of mental health support. This paper draws from a project exploring the impact of digital platforms on peer support through interviews with users of a major UK-based online peer support platform. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's concept of the 'living presen…
Experiences of Using Mental Health Apps to Support Psychological Health and Wellbeing
Mental health apps (MHApps) present a significant change to the field of mental health and represent a major shift in the way people manage and understand their mental health. MHApps are a new strand of apps available on a smartphone or tablet to support people with their psychological health and wellbeing. In these apps, users can record their mood, self-esteem, or other psychological factors via the app and then take part in psychological exerc…
The emotional in-formation of digital life
The current paper argues for an onto-genetic account of our relationships with digital technologies, that captures the excessive operation of data and the meta-stabilizing role of emotion in the operation of individuation. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s (2020a. Individuation in light of notions of form and information. Trans. T. Adkins. London: University of Minnesota Press; 2020b. Individuation in light of notions of form and information: Volume …
Digital community assets
The digitisation of mental health support has accelerated since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study investigated the impact of digital engagement with community assets on mental health during COVID-19. Digital engagement is typically not location-bound, but the restricted movement enforced during 'lockdowns' meant that people were primarily accessing digital community assets from their home environments. We report findings from a st…
Simondon, emotion, and individuation
This article develops new theoretical connections that offer insight regarding the status and operation of emotion in digitally mediated environments. I draw on Gilbert Simondon’s concepts of emotion and affectivity—as key dimensions of his philosophy of individuation—to articulate an account that situates emotion at the heart of psychological life, while accounting for its role in the continuous practices of (re)solving psychic and collective te…
(Re)thinking Body-Technology Relations with Michel Serres
This paper highlights several key principles of the work of Michel Serres and considers them in relation to life in contemporary socio-technical worlds, e.g. notions of relationality, noise, bodies, sense and data. A journey with Serres involves seeking novelty in spaces ‘outside’ of existing knowledge producing practices. This paper highlights how, for Serres, mediation as noise does not operate via a singular universal interface, but is multipl…
Peripheral recovery
Sitting between the psychiatric and criminal justice systems, and yet fully located in neither, forensic psychiatric units are complex spaces. Both a therapeutic landscape and a carceral space, forensic services must try to balance the demands of therapy and security, or recovery and risk, within the confines of a strictly controlled institutional space. This article draws on qualitative material collected in a large forensic psychiatric unit in …
Organizing the sensory
How are relations of care and security between hospital staff and patients organized through sound? This article argues that a shifting distinction between meaningful sound and noise is fundamental to the lived experience of immersion in an organizational acoustic environment. Based around a qualitative study of listening practices and ‘ear-work’ at a medium-secure forensic psychiatric hospital, using interview and photo-production methods, the a…
Affect theory and the concept of atmosphere
The concept of atmosphere is a way of emplacing affect and affect theory. Work in contemporary social geography has done much to demonstrate how elemental forces become enveloped in atmospheres. However, it tends to under-theorise the role of historically structured socio-cultural forces and the modes of engagement of persons with the atmospheric. In this paper we identify core themes in the literature – the inbetweeness of atmospheres, tuning sp…
Agents and spectres
The atmosphere of the ward
The climate or atmosphere of a ward in secure psychiatric care is typically studied by examining the relationship between social and environmental factors. However the experiences of patients are irreducible to a set of discrete dimensions or factors. Drawing on recent work in affect theory and architectural studies, we argue for an approach to atmosphere that places it 'in-between' persons and space, as a 'spatially extended quality of feeling' …
Temporalities of mental distress
The Internet is increasingly used to seek support by those suffering with mental distress (Bauman, S. and Rivers, I. Mental Health and the Digital Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; 2015). Drawing on research on a major online peer support forum, we analyse discussions around acute distress, self-harm and suicide. The paper argues that new temporalities of mental health 'crisis' are emerging through the intersection of the immediacy of online …
Living ‘in between’ outside and inside
Digital atmospheres
This article develops the concept of digital atmosphere to analyse the affective power of social media to shape practices of care and support for people living with mental distress. Using contemporary accounts of affective atmospheres, the article focuses on feelings of distress, support and care that unfold through digital atmospheres. The power of social media intersects with people's support and care-seeking practices in multiple ways and not …
Medicated bodies
Social media are increasingly being recruited into care practices in mental health. This article analyses how a major new mental health social media site ( www.elefriends.org.uk ) is used when trying to manage the impact of psychiatric medication on the body. Drawing on Henri Bergson’s concept of affection, analysis shows that Elefriends is used at particular moments of reconfiguration (e.g. change in dosage and/or medication), periods of self-ex…
Social Psychology of Emotion
Introduction
Social media and the co-production of bodies online
Social media’s networked form of communication provides people with bodies that are combinations of embodied and technologically mediated action. This creates multiple forms of visibility within the infospheres (Terranova) of social media, which require simultaneous production of bodies in and through offline and online spaces. Bergson’s non-dualistic model of bodies as images addresses the challenges of experiencing ‘bodies online’; understood a…
Sensing Bodies and Digitally Mediated Distress
In The Five Senses (2008) Michel Serres shows how the body is not an abstracted, dislocated surface that allows for the objectification of the senses and instead illustrates how it is a process: one of continually infolding sensitivities that translate our bodily feelings into a fluid sense of the world. In this article we explore what it means to be a body in the mediated environments of everyday lives of those who visit social media sites that …
Topology and mental distress
This article develops a topological approach derived from Kurt Lewin to analyse the psychological life space/s produced in a mental health service user's home. Drawing on arguments that space plays an important part in the organisation and management of mental distress, photographs of a service user's home are analysed as topological spaces. The article argues that topological theory can contribute to community health psychology through framing p…
Mediation and digital intensities
Social media are said to offer seemingly endless ways of connecting with people in a variety of online spaces. The mediated form that such communication takes has re-opened many theoretical debates regarding the status of relationships that are organized and managed online. In this article we seek to explore these issues through the lens of topological thinking, and particularly through the work of Kurt Lewin (1890-1947). Lewin's topological psyc…
Bodies and surveillance
Increases in the use of information media mark them out as significant forces on social and individual living. Information is continually being shared and harvested through the growing presence of information technologies across society. The technological aspects of these processes have led to questions regarding the extent to which technologies, and latterly information, are coming to define individuals, beyond the biological boundaries of bodie…
The affective atmospheres of surveillance
The spaces that surveillance produces can be thought of as ambiguous, entailing elements that are ethereal yet material, geographical yet trans-geographical. Contemporary surveillance systems form numerous connections that involve multiple times, spaces, and bodies. Owing to their ubiquity, normalization, and yet clandestine characteristics, they seem to produce an almost unnoticed aspect of everyday life. The impacts, then, of contemporary surve…
The Dynamics of Impersonal Trust and Distrust in Surveillance Systems
Empirical research concerned with the trust that individuals may or may not have in surveillance systems has largely been gauged through opinion poll and survey type research. Although these may be useful in augmenting broad patterns of trust based attitudes, this article argues that they tend to harbour theoretically weak conceptualisations of trust which may produce misleading results. We draw on relevant concepts related to notions of 'imperso…
The affective atmospheres of surveillance
The spaces that surveillance produces can be thought of as ambiguous, entailing elements that are ethereal yet material, geographical yet trans-geographical. Contemporary surveillance systems form numerous connections that involve multiple times, spaces, and bodies. Owing to their ubiquity, normalization, and yet clandestine characteristics, they seem to produce an almost unnoticed aspect of everyday life. The impacts, then, of contemporary surve…
Everyday Spaces of Mental Distress
Theorising psychological activity as a spatial product appears a logical extension of moves in social theory to emphasise the role of space and place in the consideration of experience. Catalysed by turns in social and human geographies to highlight the role of space and location in constituting psychological activity, various forms of the 'spatialisation of experience' have emerged. In this paper I will follow this theoretical direction in relat…
Affect theory and the concept of atmosphere
The concept of atmosphere is a way of emplacing affect and affect theory. Work in contemporary social geography has done much to demonstrate how elemental forces become enveloped in atmospheres. However, it tends to under-theorise the role of historically structured socio-cultural forces and the modes of engagement of persons with the atmospheric. In this paper we identify core themes in the literature – the inbetweeness of atmospheres, tuning sp…
Digital atmospheres
This article develops the concept of digital atmosphere to analyse the affective power of social media to shape practices of care and support for people living with mental distress. Using contemporary accounts of affective atmospheres, the article focuses on feelings of distress, support and care that unfold through digital atmospheres. The power of social media intersects with people's support and care-seeking practices in multiple ways and not …
Stories’ of chronic fatigue syndrome
This study sought to analyse how knowledge of the controversial illness, known among other names as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) or Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), is rhetorically constructed in the accounts of four sufferers. A discursive psychological approach was adopted, to analyse how sufferers of CFS use their discourse to actively represent notions of blame and accountability and their stake and interest, in situated illness narratives. …
Agents and spectres
Medicated bodies
Social media are increasingly being recruited into care practices in mental health. This article analyses how a major new mental health social media site ( www.elefriends.org.uk ) is used when trying to manage the impact of psychiatric medication on the body. Drawing on Henri Bergson’s concept of affection, analysis shows that Elefriends is used at particular moments of reconfiguration (e.g. change in dosage and/or medication), periods of self-ex…
Sensing Bodies and Digitally Mediated Distress
In The Five Senses (2008) Michel Serres shows how the body is not an abstracted, dislocated surface that allows for the objectification of the senses and instead illustrates how it is a process: one of continually infolding sensitivities that translate our bodily feelings into a fluid sense of the world. In this article we explore what it means to be a body in the mediated environments of everyday lives of those who visit social media sites that …
Mental health service user territories
This article develops a conceptualization of 'space' that enables in-depth analysis of mental health service user 'territories'. Driven by the aim to understand how spaces within the framework of 'community care' are produced, an approach that draws upon Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'territoriality' is developed. Through this we see how important it can be for service users to produce 'safe spaces' that enable forms of 'normalized' activities…
Topology and mental distress
This article develops a topological approach derived from Kurt Lewin to analyse the psychological life space/s produced in a mental health service user's home. Drawing on arguments that space plays an important part in the organisation and management of mental distress, photographs of a service user's home are analysed as topological spaces. The article argues that topological theory can contribute to community health psychology through framing p…
The Potentiality of Bodies
Theorizing embodiment has proved a major stumbling block in social psychology in recent times. Attempts have been made, such as the “discursive body” or the “regulated body,” but less attention has been placed upon incorporating a sense of movement and change within theories of the body. This paper seeks to conceptualize a potentialized body, utilizing Deleuzian theory, along with Massumi’s focus on potentiality. This is empirically driven throug…
The atmosphere of the ward
The climate or atmosphere of a ward in secure psychiatric care is typically studied by examining the relationship between social and environmental factors. However the experiences of patients are irreducible to a set of discrete dimensions or factors. Drawing on recent work in affect theory and architectural studies, we argue for an approach to atmosphere that places it 'in-between' persons and space, as a 'spatially extended quality of feeling' …
Temporalities of mental distress
The Internet is increasingly used to seek support by those suffering with mental distress (Bauman, S. and Rivers, I. Mental Health and the Digital Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; 2015). Drawing on research on a major online peer support forum, we analyse discussions around acute distress, self-harm and suicide. The paper argues that new temporalities of mental health 'crisis' are emerging through the intersection of the immediacy of online …
Living ‘in between’ outside and inside
Social media and the co-production of bodies online
Social media’s networked form of communication provides people with bodies that are combinations of embodied and technologically mediated action. This creates multiple forms of visibility within the infospheres (Terranova) of social media, which require simultaneous production of bodies in and through offline and online spaces. Bergson’s non-dualistic model of bodies as images addresses the challenges of experiencing ‘bodies online’; understood a…
Bodies and surveillance
Increases in the use of information media mark them out as significant forces on social and individual living. Information is continually being shared and harvested through the growing presence of information technologies across society. The technological aspects of these processes have led to questions regarding the extent to which technologies, and latterly information, are coming to define individuals, beyond the biological boundaries of bodie…
Sense and the Limits of Knowledge
The work of Michel Serres has been of significant value, yet remains under-utilized across the social sciences. In this review article the long-awaited translation of his The Five Senses (1985) is explored, with particular interest in its offerings for contemporary theories of the materiality of the human condition. Serres invites the reader into a diverse and rich world of sense, from localized sites of individual bodies to global landscapes of …
The Dynamics of Impersonal Trust and Distrust in Surveillance Systems
Empirical research concerned with the trust that individuals may or may not have in surveillance systems has largely been gauged through opinion poll and survey type research. Although these may be useful in augmenting broad patterns of trust based attitudes, this article argues that they tend to harbour theoretically weak conceptualisations of trust which may produce misleading results. We draw on relevant concepts related to notions of 'imperso…
Temporalities of peer support
This paper considers matters of time in online mental health peer support. Significant evidence of the value of peer support exists, with new digital platforms emerging as part of the digitisation of mental health support. This paper draws from a project exploring the impact of digital platforms on peer support through interviews with users of a major UK-based online peer support platform. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's concept of the 'living presen…
Digital community assets
The digitisation of mental health support has accelerated since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study investigated the impact of digital engagement with community assets on mental health during COVID-19. Digital engagement is typically not location-bound, but the restricted movement enforced during 'lockdowns' meant that people were primarily accessing digital community assets from their home environments. We report findings from a st…
Deleuze, sense, and life
This paper offers a psychology of individuation, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of series, event, sense, and individuation to develop a way of thinking human experience that is non-reductionist and processual. Deleuze’s writing produces a conceptualization of life as multiple, novel, and yet inherently linked to the past. The desire for such an undertaking comes from the need to avoid capturing experience according to theories that prioriti…
The emotional in-formation of digital life
The current paper argues for an onto-genetic account of our relationships with digital technologies, that captures the excessive operation of data and the meta-stabilizing role of emotion in the operation of individuation. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s (2020a. Individuation in light of notions of form and information. Trans. T. Adkins. London: University of Minnesota Press; 2020b. Individuation in light of notions of form and information: Volume …
Organizing the sensory
How are relations of care and security between hospital staff and patients organized through sound? This article argues that a shifting distinction between meaningful sound and noise is fundamental to the lived experience of immersion in an organizational acoustic environment. Based around a qualitative study of listening practices and ‘ear-work’ at a medium-secure forensic psychiatric hospital, using interview and photo-production methods, the a…
Mediation and digital intensities
Social media are said to offer seemingly endless ways of connecting with people in a variety of online spaces. The mediated form that such communication takes has re-opened many theoretical debates regarding the status of relationships that are organized and managed online. In this article we seek to explore these issues through the lens of topological thinking, and particularly through the work of Kurt Lewin (1890-1947). Lewin's topological psyc…
Somatic concerns of mental health service users
Theories of affect have been offered in abundance in recent times as potential remedies for the many theoretical ailments that face the social sciences. Post cognitive theories continue to grapple with new ways of thinking the unrepentantly tricky relation between the psychological and socio-material. This paper will explore some of these avenues, before arguing that theories of affect are required that can speak to specificity in terms of the ch…
Stories’ of chronic fatigue syndrome
This study sought to analyse how knowledge of the controversial illness, known among other names as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) or Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), is rhetorically constructed in the accounts of four sufferers. A discursive psychological approach was adopted, to analyse how sufferers of CFS use their discourse to actively represent notions of blame and accountability and their stake and interest, in situated illness narratives. …
Towards the Multiple Body
These texts each approach embodiment theory from a different angle. Shilling attempts to address the multi-dimensionality of embodiment theory, Crossley attempts to overcome mind–body dualism, whilst Coupland and Gwyn's review places empirical data at the forefront of its endeavours. Whilst each provides valuable insight into ways of thinking about the body, they tend towards emphasizing either bodies as ‘acted upon’ or bodies as ‘actors’. The ar…
Eff the Ineffable
not for sale References“ADM (Aéroports de Montréal) soutient que la sécurité des passagers a été amélioriée.” 2005. La Presse (Montreal). May10: A7.Agamben
The Potentiality of Bodies
Theorizing embodiment has proved a major stumbling block in social psychology in recent times. Attempts have been made, such as the “discursive body” or the “regulated body,” but less attention has been placed upon incorporating a sense of movement and change within theories of the body. This paper seeks to conceptualize a potentialized body, utilizing Deleuzian theory, along with Massumi’s focus on potentiality. This is empirically driven throug…
Mental health service user territories
This article develops a conceptualization of 'space' that enables in-depth analysis of mental health service user 'territories'. Driven by the aim to understand how spaces within the framework of 'community care' are produced, an approach that draws upon Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'territoriality' is developed. Through this we see how important it can be for service users to produce 'safe spaces' that enable forms of 'normalized' activities…
Everyday Spaces of Mental Distress
Theorising psychological activity as a spatial product appears a logical extension of moves in social theory to emphasise the role of space and place in the consideration of experience. Catalysed by turns in social and human geographies to highlight the role of space and location in constituting psychological activity, various forms of the 'spatialisation of experience' have emerged. In this paper I will follow this theoretical direction in relat…
Virtuality and Ernst Bloch
Somatic concerns of mental health service users
Theories of affect have been offered in abundance in recent times as potential remedies for the many theoretical ailments that face the social sciences. Post cognitive theories continue to grapple with new ways of thinking the unrepentantly tricky relation between the psychological and socio-material. This paper will explore some of these avenues, before arguing that theories of affect are required that can speak to specificity in terms of the ch…
Sense and the Limits of Knowledge
The work of Michel Serres has been of significant value, yet remains under-utilized across the social sciences. In this review article the long-awaited translation of his The Five Senses (1985) is explored, with particular interest in its offerings for contemporary theories of the materiality of the human condition. Serres invites the reader into a diverse and rich world of sense, from localized sites of individual bodies to global landscapes of …
Organizing the present in anticipation of a better future
The work of Henri Bergson has been influential on recent conceptualizations of the relationship between past, present, and future, particularly in studies of social remembering that argue that the past is a transformative process on the present. This paper will draw on some of the similarities in the temporal ontologies of Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, and utilize the latter’s work on theorizing the organization of the present in anticipati…
Deleuze, sense, and life
This paper offers a psychology of individuation, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of series, event, sense, and individuation to develop a way of thinking human experience that is non-reductionist and processual. Deleuze’s writing produces a conceptualization of life as multiple, novel, and yet inherently linked to the past. The desire for such an undertaking comes from the need to avoid capturing experience according to theories that prioriti…
Bodies and surveillance
Increases in the use of information media mark them out as significant forces on social and individual living. Information is continually being shared and harvested through the growing presence of information technologies across society. The technological aspects of these processes have led to questions regarding the extent to which technologies, and latterly information, are coming to define individuals, beyond the biological boundaries of bodie…
The affective atmospheres of surveillance
The spaces that surveillance produces can be thought of as ambiguous, entailing elements that are ethereal yet material, geographical yet trans-geographical. Contemporary surveillance systems form numerous connections that involve multiple times, spaces, and bodies. Owing to their ubiquity, normalization, and yet clandestine characteristics, they seem to produce an almost unnoticed aspect of everyday life. The impacts, then, of contemporary surve…
The Dynamics of Impersonal Trust and Distrust in Surveillance Systems
Empirical research concerned with the trust that individuals may or may not have in surveillance systems has largely been gauged through opinion poll and survey type research. Although these may be useful in augmenting broad patterns of trust based attitudes, this article argues that they tend to harbour theoretically weak conceptualisations of trust which may produce misleading results. We draw on relevant concepts related to notions of 'imperso…
Social media and the co-production of bodies online
Social media’s networked form of communication provides people with bodies that are combinations of embodied and technologically mediated action. This creates multiple forms of visibility within the infospheres (Terranova) of social media, which require simultaneous production of bodies in and through offline and online spaces. Bergson’s non-dualistic model of bodies as images addresses the challenges of experiencing ‘bodies online’; understood a…
Sensing Bodies and Digitally Mediated Distress
In The Five Senses (2008) Michel Serres shows how the body is not an abstracted, dislocated surface that allows for the objectification of the senses and instead illustrates how it is a process: one of continually infolding sensitivities that translate our bodily feelings into a fluid sense of the world. In this article we explore what it means to be a body in the mediated environments of everyday lives of those who visit social media sites that …
Topology and mental distress
This article develops a topological approach derived from Kurt Lewin to analyse the psychological life space/s produced in a mental health service user's home. Drawing on arguments that space plays an important part in the organisation and management of mental distress, photographs of a service user's home are analysed as topological spaces. The article argues that topological theory can contribute to community health psychology through framing p…
Mediation and digital intensities
Social media are said to offer seemingly endless ways of connecting with people in a variety of online spaces. The mediated form that such communication takes has re-opened many theoretical debates regarding the status of relationships that are organized and managed online. In this article we seek to explore these issues through the lens of topological thinking, and particularly through the work of Kurt Lewin (1890-1947). Lewin's topological psyc…
Social Psychology of Emotion
Introduction
Medicated bodies
Social media are increasingly being recruited into care practices in mental health. This article analyses how a major new mental health social media site ( www.elefriends.org.uk ) is used when trying to manage the impact of psychiatric medication on the body. Drawing on Henri Bergson’s concept of affection, analysis shows that Elefriends is used at particular moments of reconfiguration (e.g. change in dosage and/or medication), periods of self-ex…
Digital atmospheres
This article develops the concept of digital atmosphere to analyse the affective power of social media to shape practices of care and support for people living with mental distress. Using contemporary accounts of affective atmospheres, the article focuses on feelings of distress, support and care that unfold through digital atmospheres. The power of social media intersects with people's support and care-seeking practices in multiple ways and not …
Living ‘in between’ outside and inside
Affect theory and the concept of atmosphere
The concept of atmosphere is a way of emplacing affect and affect theory. Work in contemporary social geography has done much to demonstrate how elemental forces become enveloped in atmospheres. However, it tends to under-theorise the role of historically structured socio-cultural forces and the modes of engagement of persons with the atmospheric. In this paper we identify core themes in the literature – the inbetweeness of atmospheres, tuning sp…
Agents and spectres
Sociology (28 works) · Psychology (26 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Epistemology (19 works) · Political science (15 works) · Mental Health and Patient Involvement (13 works) · Social Psychology (13 works) · Mental health (12 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Psychotherapist (9 works)