Introduction: Critical Geographies of Optimal Experience

This chapter introduces flow as both a psychological phenomenon and a field of academic scholarship, outlining what it is understood to be, its perceived role and value, and a host of difficulties surrounding both its theoretical and empirical formulations. Subsequently, I elaborate the need for a geographical perspective in flow research to make explicit the spatial aspect of its transcendental quality that has remained under-appreciated since the inception of flow research, to affirm flow as both space- and place-making, and to rescale flow research beyond the (inter-)personal and psychological to the global geopolitical scale. This chapter also provides an overview of the structure and arguments of the volume and characterises the work as synoptic, creatively critical and deliberately provocative in seeking to facilitate the evolution of a more coherent research field and re-invigorate flow research in new theoretical, critical, spatial and moral directions.