Being lost: encounters with strange places

ABSTRACT

Being lost is an enduring reality of mobile life: a fundamental learning experience in which our bodies negotiate unfamiliar spaces, places, and even feelings. Yet mobilities literature continues to give the experience of being lost little-devoted attention reinforcing the problematic assumption that journeys are predictable and controllable. In response, this paper considers the significance of being lost through the conceptual lens of encounter. Drawing on interviews conducted in Newcastle, Australia, the paper offers two key contributions to the literature. Firstly, focusing on the character of being lost offers an expanded theoretical understanding of encounter which moves beyond the stranger-as-figure and engages with mobile encounters with strange places. Sharing stories of being lost offers new possibilities for how these encounters with place both enable and constrain bodily capacities during movement. Secondly, using the lens of strange encounters illuminates the significance of being lost for mobile life. The diverse ways in which bodies perform when lost, as well as carry the lingering affective memories and intensities of these encounters with them, illustrates that there are different styles of being lost which warrant attention from mobilities scholars. This paper offers a reading of four different styles of being lost: fearful, inadequate, skilful and lively lost.

KEYWORDS:

• Encounter
• strangeness
• place
• lost
• mobilities
• technology

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Kathy Mee for her invaluable support and guidance in developing this paper. Warm thanks are also extended to the two anonymous reviewers for their generous and encouraging feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. There are of course multiple ways that ‘being lost’ can be defined: physically, socially, culturally, emotionally, spiritually and so forth. Many of these different ways of being lost overlap to inform or enhance the others in any given circumstances. The ongoing difficulty in articulating what being lost really means has been the focus of other papers (see for example Hughes and Mee 2018). In this paper however I am choosing to focus explicitly on ‘being lost’ as physical dislocation from one’s familiar surroundings during a journey, and the emotions and sensations this can inspire.

2. This paper draws on Cresswell’s (2008) definition of places as ’locations with meaning’ (134). This paper will illustrate that it is precisely through the subjective experience of encountering strangeness (and different styles of being lost) that places are produced with particular meanings. Moreover, given the ways navigational tasks use landmarks and cartographically defined locations as critical markers for journeys, place is central for the lived mobilities of my participants. The ways strangeness can be experienced in and through space would produce a markedly different paper.

3. There is a larger politics to this which needs to be considered. Given the characteristics of my specific interview group – being predominantly women aged 50 years and older – interviewees reflected that broader discourses about age and gender significantly played into social perceptions about the capacities of bodies to cope with the strangeness of being lost. The problematic ramifications of these discourses is currently being explored in another paper.

4. Much mobilities literature draws extensively on posthuman discourses and/or Donna’s Haraway’s cyborg figuration to do important work exploring the ways technology is remaking the limits of human capacity and social practice. This literature clearly has resonances with this paper in the way participants draw on technologies in their mobile decision-making and behaviours and pursuing a posthuman analysis would undoubtedly deepen this paper’s analysis. However, to anchor this paper’s discussions specifically around the concepts of strangeness and place I have instead chosen to draw specifically on Licoppe’s (2016) work on locative media.

5. I want to make clear here that utilising pseudonymous places as a lens of analysis does not seek to pull apart the physical and virtual worlds; a critique that has haunted much recent literature on digital mediation (Frith 2012; Thrift 1996). Rather, drawing from Licoppe’s (2016) insights, this paper illustrates that new wayfinding technologies bring an added layer of negotiation and co-ordination to moving through strange (hybrid) places in everyday life, which ultimately impacts on our capacities to be mobile.

6. Here ‘lost’ and ‘found’ are binary opposites. This is a problematic coupling which has been discussed elsewhere (Hughes and Mee 2018) as it oversimplifies the changing temporalities and meanings of what it is to be located in place. There is a discussion beyond the scope of this paper for the ongoing struggle to articulate what the terms ‘lost’ and ‘found’ really mean.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.