Psychogeography usually refers to radical and artistic ways of walking or to a conflation of psychology with geography. In this unique work, the author makes arguments for considering psychogeography as a way to critique the contemporary world and to consider new ways of studying the interface of human beings in environments. The book begins by introducing and explaining the term psychogeography from a range of academic, activist, and artistic perspectives. Each chapter presents different approaches to doing psychogeography and there are arguments presented for why there is a need for a postpsychology. The author takes a creative and innovative approach to psychogeography by extending walking methods of research to include other forms of practice and research including playwriting and wargaming. The only book written on psychogeography from a psychological perspective, this book will appeal to researchers and students of psychology, geography, architecture, and cultural studies as well as artists, activists, and the public.

Provocateurs Will Self and Ralph Steadman join forces in this post-millennial meditation on the vexed relationship between psyche and place in a globalised world, bringing together for the first time the very best of their 'Psychogeography' columns for the Independent. The introduction, 'Walking to New York', is both a prelude to the verbal and visual essays that make up this extraordinary collaboration, and a revealing exploration of the split in Self's Jewish-American-British psyche and its relationship to the political geography of the post-9/11 world. Ranging from the Scottish Highlands to Istanbul and from Morocco to Ohio, Will Self's engaging and disturbing vision is perfectly counter-pointed by Ralph Steadman's edgy and beautiful artwork.

The term "psychogeography" is used to illustrate a bewildering array of ideas, from ley lines and the occult to urban walking and political radicalism—where does it come from and what exactly does it mean? Psychogeography is the point where psychology and geography meet in assessing the emotional and behavioral impact of urban space. The relationship between a city and its inhabitants is measured firstly through an imaginative and literary response, secondly on foot through walking the city. This creates a tradition of the writer as walker and has both a literary and a political component. This guide examines the origins of psychogeography in the Situationist Movement of the 1950s, exploring the theoretical background and its political applications as well as the work of early practitioners such as Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem. Elsewhere, psychogeographic ideas continue to find retrospective validation in much earlier traditions from the visionary writing of William Blake and Thomas De Quincey to the rise of the flâneur on the streets of 19th century Paris and on through the avant-garde experimentation of the Surrealists. These precursors are discussed here alongside their modern counterparts, for today these ideas hold greater currency than ever through the popularity of writers and filmmakers such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, Stewart Home and Patrick Keiller. This guide offers both an explanation and definition of the terms involved, an analysis of the key figures and their work, and practical information on psychogeographical groups and organizations.

Library of Science Book Club selection Discover magazine “What to Read” selection “A really great book.” —IRA FLATOW, Science Friday “One of the finest science writers I’ve ever read.” —Los Angeles Times “Ellard has a knack for distilling obscure scientific theories into practical wisdom.” —New York Times Book Review “[Ellard] mak[es] even the most mundane entomological experiment or exegesis of psychological geekspeak feel fresh and fascinating.” —NPR “Colin Ellard is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on the neuroscience of urban design. Here he offers an entirely new way to understand our cities—and ourselves.” —CHARLES MONTGOMERY, author of Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design Our surroundings can powerfully affect our thoughts, emotions, and physical responses, whether we’re awed by the Grand Canyon or Hagia Sophia, panicked in a crowded room, soothed by a walk in the park, or tempted in casinos and shopping malls. In Places of the Heart, Colin Ellard explores how our homes, workplaces, cities, and nature—places we escape to and can’t escape from—have influenced us throughout history, and how our brains and bodies respond to different types of real and virtual space. As he describes the insight he and other scientists have gained from new technologies, he assesses the influence these technologies will have on our evolving environment and asks what kind of world we are, and should be, creating. Colin Ellard is the author of You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall. A cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo and director of its Urban Realities Laboratory, he lives in Kitchener, Ontario.

"This volume attempts to make the case that our understanding of psychological phenomena can be greatly informed by a geographical perspective--one that explores the spatial organization of psychological phenomena and considers how individual characteristics, social entities, and physical features of the environment contribute to their organization. The chapters in the book highlight the ways in which social and physical features of the environment, such as local demography, political and economic institutions, topography, and climate, influence and interact with psychological processes. The perspectives described herein complement and extend theory and research in several areas of psychology, including social, personality, cultural, environmental, evolutionary, and comparative. By bringing together streams of research at the intersection of geographical psychology, I have tried to show how widely studied psychological constructs relate to and are influenced by broad social, ecological, economic, and political forces. At the same time, this research demonstrates the relevance of psychology for understanding macro-level processes. Ultimately, this book is designed to inform researchers about the value of examining psychological phenomena and their spatial components"--Introduction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).

This comprehensive volume provides an unprecedented illustration of the potential for visual methods in psychology. Each chapter explores the set of theoretical, methodological, as well as ethical and analytical issues that shape the ways in which visual qualitative research is conducted in psychology. Using a variety of forms of visual data, including photography, documentary film-making, drawing, internet media, model making and collages, each author endeavors to broaden the scope for understanding experience and subjectivity, using visual qualitative methods. The contributors to this volume work within a variety of traditions including narrative psychology, personal construct theory, discursive psychology and conversation analysis, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Each addresses how a particular visual approach has contributed to existing social and psychological theory in their topic area, and clearly outline how they carried out their specific research project. The contributors draw on qualitative sources of verbal data, such as spoken interview, diaries and naturalistic conversation alongside their use of visual material. This book provides a unique insight into the potential for combining methods in order to create new multi-modal methodologies, and it presents and analyses these with psychology specific questions in mind. The range of topics covered includes sexuality, identity, group processes, child development, forensic psychology, race, and gender, making this volume a vital contribution to psychology, sociology and gender studies.