This book explores how survivors of domestic violence navigate recovery through the scattered places of everyday life including homes, parks, cafés, bodies, speech ecologies, and digital worlds.

Drawing on interviews with eighty survivors, it offers a spatial framework for understanding why leaving does not guarantee safety and why healing follows no universal route. The book maps a “recovery archipelago” of formal services and ordinary places that can provide safety, agency, connection, pleasure, and self-expression under particular conditions. Through survivor accounts of mobility, nature, public life, home, self-care, and voice, readers gain insights into how environments can support, obstruct, or endanger recovery and how institutions can create more navigable and just recovery landscapes.

A Field Guide to Recovering from Domestic Violence is intended for scholars, students, practitioners, and policymakers in geography, urban planning, gender studies, public health, social work, and domestic violence prevention, as well as advocates, service providers, survivors, and readers seeking a grounded, survivor-centered understanding of recovery.

Kimberley Kinder is an associate professor of urban and regional planning at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. She is author of several books, including Invisible Exile: The Travel Writing of Displacement (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), The Radical Bookstore: Counterspace for Social Movements (Minnesota, 2021), and DIY Detroit: Making Do in a City Without Services (Minnesota, 2016).