Conclusion: Hopeful Geographies of Optimal Experience

Bringing this volume to a close, this chapter provides a brief recap of the ethos and aims of the project, as well as a concise overview of the content of each part and the most prominent calls in existing work on flow to which it responds. Subsequently, it lays out in summary fashion the key ways in which flow has been progressively reconceptualised through the successive chapters, with a view to providing a more cohesive and integrated conceptual framework for flow research, before providing an overview of the diverse ways in which place has been put into flow and flow has put in its place, by highlighting the spatial qualities of flow and the significance of flow beyond the personal and psychological. Finally, it outlines four hopeful geographies for the future of flow research, which attend respectively to conceptual, spatial, methodological and societal/political aspects of flow research, before reinforcing the need for a more critical moral geography of flow to inform flow research from the individual to the global scale, if flow is to avoid being transfigured from its positive psychological moorings into its abject opposite.