Thinking about environment: incorporating geographies of disability into rehabilitation science

This paper concerns the introduction of geographical perspectives and concepts to health professionals in their analysis of disability or chronic illness. It focuses specifically on a course project, which drew on geographical literature and concepts from social theory in ‘mapping’ the daily routines of people with disability or chronic illness. It presents an analysis of the daily routines of a man with HIV/AIDS, showing the close and recursive interweaving of meanings of space and bodily inscription as a man under palliative care negotiates his body, neighbourhood and medical care. It describes his changing relationship to the spaces constituting his everyday life, and their renewed meaning as medical care becomes a more prominent theme in how such spaces are used. The relevance of this mapping of the chronically ill self into place and space to health professions is discussed through the particular lens of occupational therapy, which seeks to understand theoretically the inter‐linking of client behaviour and ‘environment’ and its implications for clinical reasoning.