Towards a Research Agenda That Progresses Key Debates: Example II—Animating Emerging ‘Skilling Space’

This chapter explores the potential for a more integrated and central geographical contribution to mainstream professional practice debates. As an example is describes how geography might play a fuller and more embedded role in understandings of ‘skills’. After briefly reviewing traditional approaches to studying and understanding skill in health professional research, the chapter takes principles of non-representational theory and proposes some ways forward for future research through a deeper ontological understanding of skill and its processual, spatial emergence (summarised in the term ‘skilling space’). Finally, at the end of this last chapter attention given to the broader future geographical research agenda on health care work.