معرفی
Elizabeth Gagen is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, with a Ph.D. from Cambridge, an MA from Syracuse, and a B.Sc. from Liverpool. She coordinates the MA programme, serves as First-Year Tutor, sits on the University Ethics Panel, and is editorial board member of Children’s Geographies. Her research fuses geography with sociology, psychology, and childhood studies to explore how psychological knowledge governs childhood, emotions, and mental health across historical and contemporary educational spaces.
Education:
- Ph.D. Geography – University of Cambridge
- MA – Syracuse University
- B.Sc. – University of Liverpool
Research Interests:
Gagen’s work interrogates the social construction of childhood and youth, emotional governance in schools, gendered embodiment, and the historical geographies of psychology and psychiatry. Drawing on Foucauldian theory, she traces how child-development sciences and neuro-psychological discourses shape curricula, urban play spaces, and mental-health interventions. Recent projects span the ethics of exhibiting psychiatric hospital photographs, couples’ negotiations of cardiac lifestyle advice, and youth mental-health responses to urban precarity.
Publications & Impact:
Her 2023 articles on relational healthism in cardiac care and on youth mental health in precarious urban contexts illustrate a trajectory linking emotional geographies, health policy, and pedagogic practice. Earlier influential pieces examine governing emotions through citizenship education, spatial politics of anger in schools, and aging as a cultural geography. Across 22 outputs since 2000, she consistently integrates critical theory with qualitative, archival, and creative methodologies.
Awards & Recognition:
- Aberystwyth University Visibility Award (2024)
Supervision & Grants:
She has supervised six doctoral researchers (three completed, three current) on topics ranging from youth exclusion in nightlife economies to therapeutic woodland experiences, securing ESRC and KESS II studentships. She leads ethics and methods training for postgraduate researchers and contributes to collaborative grants on public heritage and STEM engagement.
Public Engagement & Service:
Gagen co-organised the Cefn Coed Remembered museum exhibition on Swansea’s psychiatric hospital history and frequently convenes workshops on trauma-informed research, creative methods, and inclusive curricula. She is Membership Secretary of the RGS-IBG Gender & Feminist Geography Research Group and peer-reviews for leading geography journals.
