Non-representational theory in health research

This chapter is about positions. First, it considers the academic disciplinary position that more-than-representational health researchers and research occupy insofar as they are “caught” between their empirical world of the health sciences and their perspective world of progressive human geography—that have quite different priorities and ideas about data—and the tensions that arise through being in such a position. It then considers health geography as a potential “bridging world” in the context of changes that the subdiscipline has undergone in recent years. Second, the chapter considers the ontological position that more-than-representational research might take and does take on the emergence of health (in other words, its fundamental understandings of health). Third, the chapter closes by discussing some epistemological positions and the methods that have been used to generate more-than-representational knowledge on health. In doing this, it sets up the following four chapters—by Andrews, Asker, Gorman, and Wray—that pay special attention to positions, methods, and data in three empirical fields of more-than-representational health research.