La tenencia de la tierra es el derecho a la propiedad, el que está reconocido como un derecho

Bringing the concepts of affect, (emotional and somatic experiences), of the actual (lived experience), the virtual or potential (that which could happen) together with the spatialised production of mental health together, within Jim’s extract we are presented with becoming- victim. Jim’s journey is discursively rooted within his everyday spatial neighbourhood and movement - this is his route to his day centre. He punctuates and anchors the landscape by pointing out that there is a chemist on a corner near the traffic lights with CCTV nearby. Here the experiences are interactional between human (Jim) and non-human kinds (the corner). They form a crucial part of the pattern of Jim’s account by offering a recognisable context from which to unfold this own narratives which may be part of the symptoms of his paranoid schizophrenia, which are not so widely understood.

However, even before he sets out the door, he is captured within the assemblage of psychiatric practices as he is a diagnosed service user who is setting off to a spatiality designated for mental health, the day centre (the day centre is explored further in Chapter Five). Nevertheless, to some extent, he usurps and destabilises the cultural notions of paranoid schizophrenics as being violent bodies by offering a deterritorializing experiential account away from these dominant frameworks.

We are then presented with a plethora of ‘actual’ human interactional experiences, of being spat on and attacked with a knife, which are subsequently bound up with the virtual non- human elements of the criminal justice system (the lack of contact by the police and

surveillance). Here Jim is constructing a narrative of vulnerability, he wants the help of other bodies, Penny and the police as he is kind hearted and cannot enact reterritorialization alone. At this particular milieu, Jim is in the flows of becoming-victim.

But threads can break and fracture and attach to other fibres. I could interview Jim now and his accounts may well be different, he may well have become part (willingly or not), of a

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process of the continuous deterriorialized and reterritorialized experiences within other spheres. He may not attend the day centre or even be part of psychiatric services and he may have turned on his attacker and become-perpetrator-of-violence. The thing is, I don’t and can never know what becomes of Jim, where is potentialities lay in the future. This is why the middle is where the action begins (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004). I did not know Jim before this project and the probability is I will not meet him again now that the research data collection has finished. This is important to flag up as this work does not seek to tell a coherent and static story – it is not my intention to stratify Jim as a body enmeshed within the constructions of vulnerability and paranoid schizophrenia.

2.11 Discussion

In this chapter I have provided more “meat to the bones” in terms of discussing the theoretical concepts utilised within this work. I have outlined that the term ‘space’ will be used within this work as a means of conveying movement and dynamics as opposed to positioning space as static and contained. The term place will be used to discuss temporal lived experiences within specific structures i.e. psychiatric institutions, mental health day centres and home.

The concept of ‘affect’ was introduced and discussed as offering another analytic layer with the dominance of the socio-linguistic turn in qualitative methodologies (Cromby, 2011). For example, discursive constructionist can be limiting in that assumptions of self and group identity can then be stratified and stultified as bracketed off from emotional experience and change (Thrift, 2004a). Subsequently, this work is concerned with the multiplicity of the spatialised productions of mental health distress, of the divergent ways in how service users experience identity and context (Brown & Tucker, 2010). As discussed in Chapter One, this means a move towards utilising discursive and non-discursive concepts of expression and content or more specifically by adopting Deleuze & Guattari’s approach to affect.

Deleuze & Guattari’s theoretical concepts offer an array of tools from which to analyse movement, change, transformation, performance and potentiality (Cromby, 2011; Thrift, 2004a). Affect is not a static concept. As a theoretical approach affect does not seek to suspend people as being inanimate and contained within certain discursive and spatial frameworks. Instead, a primary concern is on the reconfigurations of experience and in the case of this work, the multifarious ways in which service users make sense of their own everyday experiences of mental health distress. Hacking’s (1999) offering of ‘interactive kinds’ was introduced as a vehicle to discuss how people, when classified or in this case

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diagnosed, can reformulate their experiences in line with the cultural meanings around psychiatric classifications. The limitations and problems of analysing affect and potentiality were also flagged up. In that to capture sensuality and spatialised production assumes that experiences can be positioned as tangible entities simply awaiting analysis (Brown & Tucker, 2010 ). However, the analysis of affect is interested in teasing out ontological narratives – of how service users discuss their own sense of self (Tucker, 2010c).

Space was important to discuss as there is an abundance of research literature which focus on exclusionary spaces and inequalities of access to community space for minority groups such as service users ((Painter & Philo, 1995; Parr, 1997). It was highlighted at this juncture that post-structuralist positions afford a more fluid and multiplex framework from which to explore spatialised production. Whilst there are attempts to stabilise structural spaces by the use of walls and designated rooms and more particularly within institutional and semi- institutional buildings such as schools and day centres. It was noted that it is the divergence of people who habituate spaces - it is the potentiality of those inhabitants who create the heterogeneous movement of differential potentialities.

These variants of movement were teased out further when Deleuze & Guattari’s concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization were discussed. By drawing together the cultural discursive frameworks of mental health distress (i.e. the DSM, the media representations) and the material elements of service user life (the ingestion of medication), I discussed the

‘machinic assemblage’ as a conceptual tool which positions certain groups of bodies as sharing typical traits and experiences (such as a diagnosis) (Bonta & Protevi, 2004) . The correlative concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization were introduced. Here we have movements of change whereby the codings within a machinic assemblage can be fractured and splinters of movement and change can be reterritorialized with new meanings and new possibilities of movement and identity. To reiterate, it is the movements of change, transformation and spatialised production together with the potentiality of becoming-other which are pivotal to this work. In Chapter Three I will discuss the methodological approach of this thesis together with the research data collection procedures involved, ethical

58 Chapter Three

Methodological and Analytic Considerations 3.1 Introduction

“There has been debate about whether or not qualitative and quantitative research methods can complement one another…We believe that the larger issue is the philosophical frame within which one utilizes methods; that is, one’s epistemological

and ontological frame.”

(Elliott, Fischer, & Rennie, 1999, p. 125)

In the above quotation, Elliott et al., (1999) posit that the choice of research methodology should reflect the aspirations of both the researcher and the intended project focus. These factors are important in order that the project not only maintains a high sense of coherence but that the course of direction from the outset is clearly defined. In this chapter I will discuss the underpinning epistemological objectives of this project together with the resultant choice of methodologies utilised. Consequently, the issues of methodological viability together with the overall philosophical framing of this thesis will be evaluated.

The main thrust of this thesis was to explore the narratives of spatial production from a

service users’ perspective within everyday spaces (psychiatric institutions, day centres and the home) using one-to-one interviews. To add richness and analytical depth to this method of research collection, visual ethnographies of home spaces were undertaken by two participants (the challenges of this particular method are discussed later in this chapter) together with my ethnographic accounts of performance and movement within day centres. This brief

overview will provide a framework from which to unpack the methodological trajectory within this thesis to use qualitative methods.