Space and place

Yi-Fu Tuan is a human geographer and philosopher who caught my attention for the first time last summer when I picked up his 1997 book "Space and Place: the perspective of experience" in the Open University library. As I've been considering the experiences of my mentor research participants in terms of spaciality in the context of the lifeworld existentials, this seemed an important text for me to study, and it didn't disappoint.

The play between emotion and cognition have never been far from my mind, and in this book Tuan provides a comforting, very simple, model for understanding how these "ways of knowing" help us to make sense of the world. I like the way he said that "emotion tints all human experience, including the high flights of thought" (p8). And likewise, physical sensations such as pleasure pain, heat, or cold are qualified by thought.

The orientation of the human body can also be significant when thinking about the experience of space and how time comes into the picture. Tuan said "on a temporal plane frontal space is perceived as future, rear space as past." (p40) . He goes on to talk about dignity being signified at the front and the human face commanding respect. In this one idea concerning the orientation of the human body, one can see the convergence of spatiality, temporality, corporeality and relationality. One really needs to take a pause for thought here at the interconnectedness of this human geography perspective with lifeworld studies. I have found so many useful ideas in the book. Another idea that resonates well for me in terms of understanding the place of spaciality in lived experience, is this "The world feels spacious and friendly when it accommodates our desires and cramped when it frustrates them" (p65). I know that I've heard many tales of frustration in the process of data collection, so this provides another way of understanding and expressing feelings of frustration. There are other elements of space and place that I know I'll find useful in my thesis, including the experience of distance and intimate experiences of place.

In his Dear colleagues section of his personal website Tuan said recently 'No matter how miserable or happy I am, someone “out there” has not only experienced it but has written it down and published' (http://www.yifutuan.org/dear_colleague.htm). In many ways, this sums up why I'm doing my research - to be able to write down and publish the lived experience of being a mentor for student nurses so that others can read it and know that they're not alone in their experience (which is a mixture of happy and miserable and much more, of course). It's the same, too, in my teaching role. I've recently recorded an audio resource in which students share their experiences of writing essays, and my main aim was to make the everyday, usually private activities of student writing open to others.