Missing geographies

Abstract

This paper argues that human geography has neglected the issue of 'missing people'. Following an introduction, the paper uses four thematics, 'mapping, searching, feeling and moving', in order to explore a range of responses to missing absence and missing experience. It argues that attention to the voices of returned adult missing people would help establish new emotional geographies of embodied absence which would complement, and in places challenge, 'left behind' knowledges of absence. It is also argued that 'peopling' missing research would enable sensitive reconstructions of missing mobilities which both (1) challenge operational categorizations and cartographies of missing people as disembodied units, and (2) contribute to conceptual reassessments of disruptive human mobilities.

Living Absence: The Strange Geographies of Missing People

“…However, given that this is a lexicon already at work within police and (inter)national security and tracing agencies, we are keen to infuse it with a more substantial orientation to people and their voices. Talking in detail to people reported as missing about going absent is a deliberate attempt to record the specificity of particular missing people (after Edkins, 2011;Parr and Fyfe, 2013), and to move away from (just) collecting generic, categorical information about incidents based on operational data in order to inform police records (although our qualitative data are now being used to inform good police practice guidance and training).…”

“…Missing people struggle to inhabit public spaces in the city while maintaining their invisibility. The hour-to-hour, day-to-day tactics and strategies they employ also need to be read at a broader level, in terms of a politics of being missing, and the expression of a right to be in the city, free from interference by others, free from search (and see Parr and Fyfe, 2013). Indeed, being missing could even be cast as a transgressive act, as well as a response People [are] supposed to have equal rights" (Jim, missing seven days, repeatedly).…”

“…This paper is empirically partial, being based on findings from a UK-based research project, (2) and it is acknowledged that there are other kinds of human disappearance across the world (Edkins, 2011;Parr and Fyfe, 2013). The situated experiences of which we write still allow us to make general points about how people in crisis access relational urban topographies of the human and nonhuman.…”

“…We acknowledge that this risks a 'smoothing' of traumatic experience and domesticating it for more general consumption (cf Tamas, 2011). overlaps and differences between experiences of being missing or being homeless (see Parr and Fyfe, 2013) in that homeless people may sometimes be missing and missing people may not be homeless. The particularity of the crisis-led mobilities that missing people occupy potentially renders them unstable subjects for the purposes of analysing the city, precisely because they may not sediment their 'alternative' spatialities in ways that homeless people might: their 'flesh and stone' relations with city spaces are differently configured.…”

Searching for safe space: the absent presence of childhood sexual abuse in human geography

“…Passing reference has been made by geographers to the over-representation of CSA survivors amongst women in penal systems (Allspach 2010;Schliehe 2013), amongst homeless women and men Radley et al 2006;Whitzman 2006;Klodawsky 2006Klodawsky , 2009Christensen 2012;Hodgetts et al 2012;Fotheringham et al 2013) and missing persons (Parr and Fyfe 2013). Geographers have also begun to recognise that for children, being spatially marginalised can increase the risk of being sexually abused (Hanlon and Shankar 2000;Young and Barrett 2001;Peters 2006;Neumayer and Plumper 2007;Meth, 2013;Tutu 2013;Licona and Maldonado 2013).…”