Chloe Asker is Postdoctoral Research Fellow currently working on the Evaluating Coastal Rural Communities’ Active and Sustainable Travel: COAST project.

Chloe is a human geographer with a particular focus on health and cultural geography. Their doctoral research was funded by the South West Doctoral Training Partnership, ESRC, and centred around the therapeutic geographies and cultures of mindfulness and meditation.

They are particularly interested in the lived experiences of mindfulness and the transformative effects that the practice can have individually and collectively. They recently self-published a zine ‘journeys with mindfulness’ that traces 6 journeys with mindfulness. Alongside this, they are interested in mindfulness-based interventions that go beyond neoliberal, individualised, corporate and commodified mindfulness (‘McMindfulness’), and hope to continue work on transformational, social, queer and decolonial forms of mindfulness.

Their doctoral work advocates for feminist and embodied modes of knowledge production, drawing on geographical literature that centres care, slowness, gentleness and kindness. They argue for a ‘mindful geography’, as the ways in which we might bring mindfulness to our geographical research practices. Here, using mindfulness not as a methodology but instead as a critical and social mode of self and community care in the neoliberal institution.

Methodologically, they have worked with forms of autoethnography, ethnography, and creative participatory research. In their work, they attempt to foreground feminist, queer, and decolonial knowledges, particularly in relation to mindfulness.

Chloe is a member of the Royal Geographical Society and currently holds the position of Secretary for the Geographies of Health and Wellbeing Research Group.