Negotiating Institutional Heritage and Wellbeing: 37 (Spatial Practices, 37)

The Spatial Practices series is premised on the observation that places are inscribed with cultural meaning, not least of all in terms of collective constructions of identity. Such space-based constructions can manifest in material and immaterial, explicit and implicit forms of heritage, and they are crucial factors in the promotion of a group’s wellbeing. It is this intersection of spaces, heritage and wellbeing that the present volume takes at its object. It considers ways in which institutional spaces in their materiality as well as in their cultural inscriptions impact on the wellbeing of the subjects inhabiting them and explores how heritage comes to bear on these interrelations within specific institutions, such as prisons, hospitals or graveyards.

Elisabeth Punzi, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist and Associate Professor at the Department of Social Work and Center for Critical heritage Studies, Gothenburg University. She researches the heritage of psychiatry and the meaning of creative expressions for persons recovering from mental health issues.

Christoph Singer, Ph.D., is Professor of British and Anglophone Cultural Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. He published Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville (Brill/Rodopi, 2014).

Cornelia Wächter, Ph.D., is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Dresden University of Technology, Germany. She is the author of Place-ing the Prison Officer (Brill/Rodopi, 2015). Her co-edited collections include Complicity and the Politics of Representation (Rowman & Littlefield Int., 2019).