Living through, living with and living on from breast cancer in the UK

Creative Cathartic Methodologies, Cancerous Spaces and a Politics of Compassion

Bibliographic Data

ID3977807
AuthorsClare Madge (0000-0002-9365-3208, University of Leicester, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume17
Issue2
Pages207-232
Publication date2016-02-17
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial & Cultural Geography (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1464-9365 • E-ISSN: 1470-1197
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14649365.2014.990498
OpenAlexW1996993527
LanguageEN
Citations received14
References cited70

This paper contributes to a growing literature exploring the embodied emotions involved in death studies. It does so through a creative cathartic autobiographical account of living through and on from breast cancer. In presenting this ‘storifying experience’, this UK-based paper has three key aims: first, it attempts to counter the disjuncture between the fleshy and emotional cancer journey I have travelled through and the sometimes abstract, disembodied accounts of cancer circulating in some geographical texts; second, it reveals some geographical insights that are uncovered through the use of creative cathartic methodologies which unsettle commonly held discourses about dying and surviving; and third, it poses some troubling questions for geographers working in this field with respect to the methodologies, politics and emotions of such research. In the paper, I argue that employing a creative cathartic methodology gestures towards ‘an opening into learning’ that provokes emotional enquiries about what it means to be taught by the experience of (traumatised) others. In particular, I advocate for a politicised compassion that both cares for those who are living through, with or living on from life-threatening illnesses and also cares about the complex conditions that shape their experiences, both within and beyond the academy

Aesthetics · Art · Catharsis · Cathartic · Compassion · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Existentialism · Field (mathematics · Lived experience · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Psychotherapist · Sociology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health · Law · Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics

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