Feminist and queer epistemologies have been influential throughout the social sciences by means of the development of a set of interrelated approaches involving positionality, partiality, reflexivity, intersectionality, and the highly politicized thesis of situated knowledge. This article aims to operationalize these approaches by introducing an anti-humanist, politically attuned, and historically contextualized framework, which postulates that one’s knowledge is inevitably incomplete and situated because information about the world always reaches one through a channel that is constituted by four epistemic gaps: (1) ‘possible worlds versus realized world’, (2) ‘realized world versus witnessed situation’, (3) ‘witnessed situation versus remembered situation’, and (4) ‘remembered situation versus confessed situation’.
Surprises are refuted expectations and therefore an inevitable concomitant of errors of anticipating the future. This paper argues that the timing is just right for a spatial account of surprise, or rather, for a geography of personal and social change that deploys the trope of surprise to help explain how and why change happens. Whether we are surprised by what transpires in our surroundings or we are surprising ourselves by leaping forward in impetuous deeds of reinventing who we are, the common denominator of these processes of becoming is that they produce geographical space and are produced by it.
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