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The paper offers a provocation to the geographies of health in relation to one of our governing concepts, that of wellbeing. The paper brings together government survey data from the United Kingdom with other published research into a critical argument that the dominant ways of conceptualising and practising subjective wellbeing have become toxic and harmful to wellbeing outcomes. The paper argues that a 'hyper-individualised and thwarted self' and 'supermarket model' of social resources for individual wellbeing underpins the contemporary dominant understanding of subjective wellbeing. This approach neglects wider spatial and temporal considerations such as inequality, inter-generationality and sustainability, and the rise of wellbeing as a technology of soft capitalism. The paper discusses the potential for relational approaches from the social sciences to provide a more 'wholesome tonic' to current understandings of subjective wellbeing that might rehabilitate its capability to do helpful rather than harmful work and argues for an ethical obligation to sustain critical engagement.

Through an analysis of the SP-ARK archive and the archival structure developed by the DEEP FILM Access Project (DFAP), which was a collaboration among film researchers, computer scientists, archival institutions, and a film production company, this essay explores the dailiness and feminization of filmmaking and film archival practices, which have been made visible through digital methodologies.

Despite multiple axes of variation in defining wellbeing, the paper argues for the dominance of a 'components approach' in current research and practice. This approach builds on a well-established tradition within the social sciences of attending to categories whether for their identification, their value or their meanings and political resonance. The paper critiques the components approach and explores how to move beyond it towards conceptually integrating the various categories and dimensions through a relational and situated account of wellbeing. Drawing on more fluid social sciences, wellbeing is framed as an effect, dependent on the mobilisation of resources from everyday encounters with complex assemblages of people, things and places. Through such a framing, wellbeing can be conceived of as stable and amenable to change, as individual and collective and as subjective and objective. Policy interventions then need to attend to the relationalities of particular social and spatial contexts.

Intro -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Contributors -- List of Boxes -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Chapter 1: GeoHumanities and Health -- The GeoHumanities -- Medicine, Health and the Humanities -- GeoHumanities and Health -- Bodies -- Voices -- Practices -- Conclusion -- References -- Part I: Bodies -- How to Convey That Dying Really Is Lonely -- Chapter 2: Sensing Health and Wellbeing Through Oral Histories: The 'Tip and Run' Air Attacks on a British Coastal Town 1939-1944 -- Introduction: The Sensory Turn -- The Oral History Tradition -- The Setting and Study -- Findings -- Sensing Restrictions and Change -- Sensing Air Raids -- Sensing Mitigation and Aftermath -- Sensing Normality -- Conclusions -- References -- Chapter 3: Bodies at the Crossroads Between Immigration and Health -- Immigrant Women's Bodies in a Context of Restrictive Policies -- Bodies Combining Disadvantages: Pregnant, Undocumented and Poor Women -- Geo-Humanities: Building a Bridge Between Geographies and Art Photography to Replace Women's Bodies in Sensitive Contexts -- Conclusion -- References -- Chapter 4: Beyond Therapy: Exploring the Potential of Sharing Dance to Improve Social Inclusion for People Living with Dementia -- Introduction -- Conceptualizing Social Inclusion and the Body -- Insights from the Baycrest NBS Sharing Dance Seniors Programs -- Understanding Feelings and Embodied Encounters -- Discussion and Concluding Comments -- References -- Chapter 5: Critical Places and Emerging Health Matters: Body, Risk and Spatial Obstacles -- Introduction -- A Self-Reflexive Narrative -- Bodily Sensations and Place -- Health Risks and Social Risks -- In and Out of Places -- Conclusion -- References -- Chapter 6: Sensing Nature: Unravelling Metanarratives of Nature and Blindness -- Introduction -- The Place of the Visual in Metanarratives of Nature and Blindness.

The potential applications of narrative within medical practice are attracting increased interest. In particular, personal narratives afford rich insights into how encounters with cancer and the associated provision of care are experienced, understood and represeted. Such first-person accounts are practically useful in indicating improvements to cancer care and politically significant in providing a means to enable the patient voice and legitimising experiential knowledge alongside a biomedical paradigm. However, personal narratives are necessarily and always constructed in particular social and political contexts and through existing 'meta-narratives' relating to cancer, health, illness and a flourishing life. The paper first examines work on personal cancer narratives to critically review the opportunities for narrative within cancer care. We then reflect on the crucial role of meta-narratives of cancer as framings within which personal narratives can be both enabled and constrained.

OBJECTIVE: To examine whether decentralization has improved health system performance in the State of Ceara, north-east Brazil. METHODS: Ceara is strongly committed to decentralization. A survey across 45 local (municipio) health systems collected data on performance and formal organization, including decentralization, informal management and local political culture. The indicators for informal management and local political culture were based on prior ethnographic research. Data were analysed using analysis of variance, Duncan's post-hoc test and multiple regression. FINDINGS: Decentralization was associated with improved performance, but only for 5 of our 22 performance indicators. Moreover, in the multiple regression, decentralization explained the variance in only one performance indicator; indicators for informal management and political culture appeared to be more important influences. However, some indicators for informal management were themselves associated with decentralization but not any of the political culture indicators. CONCLUSION: Good management practices in the study led to decentralized local health systems rather than vice versa. Any apparent association between decentralization and performance seems to be an artefact of the informal management, and the wider political culture in which a local health system is embedded strongly influences the performance of local health systems.

The concept of well-being has become prominent within national policy goals in the UK since the end of the 1990s. However, the concept of well-being remains ill defined, an instability that is increasingly understood as problematic to policy making. We engage with this terminological instability through an exploration of how the concept of well-being is practised discursively in local governance and critically examine the place of the concept in local policy making. In contrast to the current enthusiasm to define and measure well-being, we argue that the conceptual instability has inherent value for local governance. The concept of well-being is practised through a number of potentially conflicting discourses, but it is exactly this conceptual instability that enables a local negotiation and combination of alternative policy frameworks for local place-shaping strategies. As such, well-being not only is an overarching goal of governance but also contributes to the dynamics of the policy process.