Speed and space: rates of motion in health and wellbeing

What has followed this multifaceted rethinking of space, however, has lent posthumanist work its particular character and recent reputation; this being the dedicated attention paid to specific qualities of space, drawing them out and animating them in empirical research; each quality being both a structure/component of space and experiential texture of space. Empirically providing insight into diverse health and well-being situations and experiences, some of the most widely discussed of these qualities have been (i) Space's productive basis in material assemblages (see work on enabling mental health recovery, therapeutic baths and wells, and well-being in daily life. (ii) Space's predominant forward-moving flows and rhythms, gardening, and cycling. (iii) Space's expressive positionings, shapes, and encounters (see work on arts and crafts, dance movement therapy, and running terrain. (iv) Space's sensory properties and registers. (v) Space's constituent impulsive, habitual forms of repetition (see work on mindfulness, compulsive disorders, and home routines. (vi) Space's infectious effects (see work on drinking culture, medical tourism, and smoking areas.

Of all the aforementioned qualities of space, the first and last, assemblage and affect, have emerged as the ‘big two’ working concepts - based on the ideas of and their translation and extension by others both outside geography and inside . Assemblage is considered the spatial footing of all that turns up in life – in/as social space - even if a highly fluid and relational one with immanence being its organizing principle; a situated gathering/multiplicity of entities, relations, and events continually in the process of forming or deforming through grouping or dispersal. As certain territorializations and stabilizations emerge within assemblages, they produce. These effects may typically be identified either by a characteristic production/mode of social, affective, and material form (e.g., assemblages of health and wellbeing), or by a locational or situational context that might produce, enable or impede a production/mode of social, affective and material form (e.g., X as a health and wellbeing-enabling assemblage). Affect meanwhile has come to describe an environmental process where during encounters ‘bodies’ effect and are affected by each other positively or negatively in terms of their expressive capacities. Effects are shared between human bodies in particular as pre-conscious ‘feeling states’, often felt in the environment as the prevailing atmosphere. Here the connections to health and wellbeing are threefold (i) The boosting/joyness effects or draining/sadness effects in bodies are well-being registers in themselves. (ii) As a result of these effects, increasing or decreasing involvement might occur in specific activities that are unhealthy or unhealthy (e.g., from group exercise to group smoking). (iii) Specific institutions – from medical to public health to private companies – generate specific effects/atmospheres to encourage bodily connections and reactions with health and wellbeing consequences.

At the same time, there have also been broader theoretical attempts at capturing the many qualities of space at work in an overall process. This has involved thinking about space changing temporally, while moving beyond the rather smooth and bland idea of ‘spacetime’, as we know that the world is typically quite energetic and turbulent in the way that it advances, with the immediacy of this advancement being key. The idea of ‘whole onflow’, for example, gets at least some theoretical grip on the meta-event of the progressing moment ever-unfolding/materializing. The whole inflow is self-organizing, the combination of a multitude of micro-events, material expressions, and differentiation. Hence the whole flow explains the processes of matter's spatial and temporal unfolding in ways that are always new and unique, even as certain powerful common processes are generated by it and are at work within it (from entropic energy exchange to techno-capitalism). It further explains how these processes are participated in and registered by sentient beings, giving form to the totality of their unbroken experience. Here foundational work has begun to articulate how whole flow is ultimately responsible for the various ‘productions’ of the world, studies using health and wellbeing as a case in hand.

Our primary interest in the current paper is keeping the momentum going in posthumanist discussions of space, by focusing on ‘speed’ as a singularly important quality of space. As we shall see, speed is active and registered in every one of life's ongoing encounters, events, and relations - it defines entities and has numerous incidences in all life's productions – yet the posthumanist literature, like all contemporary geographic spatial theories, clearly lacks dedicated attention to speed (passing observations acknowledged. Indeed we are also motivated to pay greater heed to great provocation to encounter bodies, to read bodies, and to experience bodies in terms of their relative speeds and slowness (bodies defined by them as both human and non-human entities). Speed in the body is the very modulations of its capacities and activities. We feel that new sensitivities equal to these speeds promise important new insights into the events, effects, spaces, and relations by which bodies gain and experience health and well-being. Overall, the paper takes a good look at speed by offering a broad review of the ways that speed enters into contemporary social and academic thought, as well as its impacts on health and well-being. First, we consider what speed is and the myriad ways in which it arises and is registered according to science and other intellectual paradigms. Second, we consider how speed is a distinctive feature of twenty-first-century life, and the health and well-being involvements and implications of this life. Third, we consider some hidden partial precedent for a focus on speed and space in health and wellbeing research by drawing speed out of current studies where it is implicit in them and/or a minor consideration and/or obscured by other matters. To conclude, we think about possibilities for researching speed more explicitly and fully, and the generative possibilities this might open up for future health and wellbeing scholarship. We admit that moving forward with research on speed is a substantive project involving big metaphysical, epistemological as well as practical considerations, and in many respects, this paper sets up extensive future considerations and debate rather than seeking to settle them in advance.