In this editorial we ask key questions about what it means to publish ‘a journal’ in a world of publishing which is driven by individual article metrics and online access. Seeing the value of journals as venues for intellectual debate, we therefore set out a renewed vision as to how the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers can provide space for more collective and collaborative approaches to geographical debate. This approach revolves around the idea of ‘transactions’ itself and creating spaces in the journal for more commentary, debate and dialogue, alongside continuing to publish landmark papers.

This paper explores the relational geographies of laughter, life and death within nursing care homes. Death is often seen as the ultimate Other: sitting in opposition to life, at the limits of what is knowable, and therefore as something that is impossible to fully engage with. In nursing care homes, however, death remains a relatively banal element of ordinary life, and like many other aspects of nursing care home life, is often accompanied by bursts of laughter. Where most scholars position the relation between laughter and death in terms of coping -laughter as a means of pushing away emotions during encounters with death -this paper offers an alternative and more affirmative account of laughter and death. Through drawing on seven months of ethnographic engagement with two nursing care homes in the UK, the paper argues that laughter occurs, not as a means of coping, but rather as a "carrying on": a taking of our emotions forward with us and folding them into our sense of self rather than pushing them away. Further to this, I argue that this mode of enfolding affectivities is suggestive of a wider form of pragmatic micropolitics in care homes, whereby carers often work towards an "as well as possible" rather than grand, idealistic political visions. In concluding, I therefore propose pragmatics as a new framework through which geographers might further engage with the politics of care. K E Y W O R D Scare, death, laughter, non-representational theories, nursing care homes, pragmatics

This article reflects on how notions of ‘the comic’ may be of added value to geographers’ research. It is formed around the idea that there are aspects of space and society that are by nature incongruous and unsuitable to be understood through frameworks of scholarship that privilege ‘reason’ and objectivity above all else. The author thus reflects on how these notions of ‘the comic’ as a mode of thought can be applied to understanding different fields of research. Ultimately, the article draws out how using this comic mode also forms an ‘inward’ reflective process which can help to understand the often complicated positions that researchers hold. This article thus calls for an inclusion of the often otherwise ignored comic aspects of the world into scholarship so that we, as geographers, may provide fuller and more human critical analyses of space, culture and society.

Funding informationAHRC Midlands 3 Cities Studentship, Grant/Award Number: AH/L50385X/1Building on geography's ongoing interest in therapeutic landscapes (and assemblages), this article contributes a further dimension to thinking about the spaces and places of health and care. Whilst recognising the value of focusing on the variegated ways in which "improvements" in health, wellness, and well-being take shape, it suggests there is also something to be gained by addressing these spaces through de-centring "the therapeutic," and instead adopting a more-than-therapeutic approach in which the question of "what-else happens?" is brought to the fore.Drawing on eight months of ethnographic research within care homes in the UK, it notes that within these spaces many activities and forms of relation can emerge that are not necessarily focused on the maintenance or improvement of health or well-being. In particular the paper highlights: everyday homemaking by residents, friendships and rivalries between staff members, and major political events as exemplars of ordinary life within care homes that occur beyond "therapy" in its conventional sense. That said, it also notes that the therapeutic and more-thantherapeutic are relational, and as such, the paper's conclusion is that a more-thantherapeutic approach to landscapes of care can augment existing approaches through encouraging a more holistic attunement to their workings. K E Y W O R D S assemblages, Birmingham UK, ethnography, everyday life, nursing care homes, therapeutic landscapes | INTRODUCTIONWhen addressing spaces of health and care, it is difficult to think past Gesler's (1992) concept of therapeutic landscapes. Indeed, the idea revolutionised the ways in which geographers approached spaces of health and care and has been used extensively in order to unpack the complex ways in which people seek out, and benefit from, health and care in a variety of forms and places (e.g., Andrews, 2004;Conradson, 2005;Milligan & Wiles, 2010). More recent moves have sought to advance the concept, through wider consideration of what constitutes a therapeutic landscape (and the bodies that comprise it), thinking "through the different relationships at play within spaces of health … creating a more 'inhabited' understanding" (Gorman, 2017, p. 318). Whilst these moves have generated expanded conceptions of the spaces of health and care, I contend here that many analyses remain limited in scope through their insistence on the centrality of the "therapeutic" itself, rather than recognising the plurality of the spaces and places in which these relations occur, including the fact that they are also places in which other forms of relation occur that ostensibly have nothing to do with "the therapeutic" in its traditional sense.This paper, therefore, proposes an approach to spaces of health and care that pays attention to what I crudely term their more-than-therapeutic qualities and relations. Crucially, the paper's argument is not towards the abandonment or even ---

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