The definitive version of this paper is published as Everts J, M Lahr and M Watson (2011) 'Practice Matters! Geographical inquiry and theories of practice ' Erdkunde, 65 (4) 323-334. doi:10.3112/erdkunde.2011.04.01 SummaryRecent developments in theories of practice have seen place and space taken explicitly into account. In particular, Theodore SCHATZKI's 'site ontology' offers distinctive but as yet under-explored means of engaging with human geographies. By giving ontological priority to practices as constitutive of the social, this kind of practice theory provides an integrative conceptual framework that enables the analysis of diverse phenomena in relation to each other, over space and time, as they are constituted through practices. This article develops an outline agenda for bringing theories of practice, and particularly SCHATZKI's 'site ontology', together with geographical inquiry. We elucidate this agenda through consideration of three contemporary preoccupations in human geography, comprising emotion, materiality and knowledge.2

IntroductionWhile some anxieties may be experienced on a personal level, we want to consider the broader sociological, historical, and geographical dimensions of anxiety, including how anxieties are framed, mediated, and institutionalised, how they spread and are contained, and how they shift between social fields and vary across space and time.Despite frequent claims about its centrality as a defining feature of modern life, the concept of anxiety has received relatively little attention compared with related concepts such as risk, trust, or fear. (1) As others have noted, there is surprisingly little discussion of anxiety among the founding fathers of social theory (cf May, 1950;Wilkinson, 2001). Marx wrote about alienation, Durkheim about anomie, and Weber about disenchantment but none of them spoke at any length about anxiety. It was only with the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis that there is any sustained treatment of anxiety as a psychosocial phenomenon. For Freud anxiety was a normal fact of everyday life rather than a peculiar individual affliction. He saw the increase of anxiety as an inevitable response to the evolution of civilisation which had been achieved through the``sublimation of instinct'' (1930, page 63). In his later work, Freud (1936) debated whether anxiety was a cause or a result of repression.

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The dashboard is the most striking cultural artefact of the current coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic. It reveals the fraught pandemic politics which are centred around territorial approaches on the scale of the state rather than international cooperation, democratic liberation, and local care. The dashboard is a biopolitical technology of anxiety, prompting national states of emergency. This narrow approach to framing the COVID-19 crisis is rooted in military-style pandemic preparedness planning that became fashionable in the 21st century. However, there is mounting evidence that this approach does not adequately address the uneven and unjust geographies of the present.

This paper discusses the ways in which 2009 novel swine-origin influenza A (H1N1) was announced and resonated with current pandemic anxieties. In particular, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are used as a lens through which recent pandemic anxieties can be analysed and understood. This entails a closer look at the securitisation of public health and the challenges and struggles this may have caused within public health agencies. In that light, CDC's formal entanglement with global health security and its announcement of the H1N1 pandemic are interpreted, followed by an ethnographically informed focus on various people who were engaged in the H1N1 emergency response and their practices and practical struggles in the face of pandemic anxiety.