The Biosocial Life of Nostalgia, Memory and Emotion

Incorporation of the body's biological processes has a long history of being tentatively applied in geography at the risk of being deemed ‘deterministic’. This paper, however, develops an original conceptual approach, ‘biosocial geography’, to consider the body’s social and biological worlds in tandem. And in doing so, it demonstrates how a consideration of biological/neurological processes that enrich the study of memory and emotion. Specifically, this paper incorporates biological knowledge of neurological networks to enhance geography’s understanding of nostalgia, a bittersweet emotional response to the past, to demonstrate how the processes of nostalgia can enrich an individual’s connection with their immediate environment. Drawing upon in-depth interviews, mobile video ethnography, four biosensing measures (heart rate, electrodermal activity, skin temperature, and blood volume pulse), and GPS tracking from residents in three areas of Birmingham (UK), it is shown that nostalgia is a moment where the entanglement of the body and its surroundings establishes an emotional and memorial flow between bodies and space. This paper demonstrates a union of conceptual and methodological developments in the biological sciences to develop a novel way to investigate memory that incorporates knowledge from the cognitive/biological sciences and social sciences to enrich understandings of body, memory, emotion, and place.