Journeys unknown: Embodiment, affect, and living with being “lost” and “found”

Abstract

The tools, technologies, and practices people use to find their way are rapidly changing. Over the last decade, the “new mobilities paradigm” (Sheller & Urry, 2006) has enhanced how we understand our mobile lives. New mobilities research has focused attention on the ways in which we experience the world as we move through it: including the more ephemeral, fleeting, and affective practices that shape everyday mobilities. Despite this, most new mobilities research focuses on journeys where people know, or can relatively easily interpret information about, where they are going. As a result, analysis of stories about how people experience being “lost” and “found” as they negotiate their everyday mobilities is largely absent from the mobilities literature in human geography. This is problematic because the practices of trying to find our way and being lost and found fundamentally shape mobilities and produce affects which shape future journeys. This paper theorises the impact of exploring wayfinding practices for mobilities research. By bringing together conceptual insights from current mobilities research and popular accounts of being lost and found, this paper will open up discussion regarding how researchers conceptualise, articulate, and account for the lived experiences of being lost and found in their work.

An agenda for creative practice in the new mobilities paradigm

“…While sensation has been widely conceptualised through empirical and ethnographic accounts (e.g. Hughes and Mee 2018;Edensor 2010;Ingold and Vergunst 2008;Lorimer 2011), arguably, the arts are well positioned to offer techniques for accessing, visualising, expressing, capturing, and sharing instances of sensuous mobilities (Figure 1).…”

What should we do with bad feelings? Negative affects, impotential responses

“…The diagnosis of certain feeling experiences as ‘negative’ is widespread practice through geographical literatures more broadly. Jayne et al’s (2010: 549) research on alcohol and young people speculates on how ‘negative emotions … can heighten rather than lessen social divides’, while Hughes and Mee (2018: 6) direct our attention to the ‘negative emotions such as fear, frustration, or stress’ that are a hallmark of getting lost.…”

What spatial environments mean

“…In part, emotional distress caused by changing environments may be directly related to uncertainty in relation to spatial behavior. Road blocks cause distress if we don't know a good alternative route; generally, feeling lost (not knowing where we are or how to get to our destination) is a highly unsettling experience [14]. However, emotional reactions to environmental change further relate to a very different aspect of human spatial experience in which linguistic representation remains rather underexplored to date: the fact that we deeply appreciate our environments, that we relate to them not only cognitively but also emotionally.…”