The affects of unpredictability for everyday

wayfinding and being lost and found

Ainsley Hughes
B Science (Geography)(Hons)
University of Newcastle

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the

degree Doctor of Philosophy in Human Geography.

March 2021
This research was supported by an Australian Government Research
Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.
 Declaration

I hereby certify that the work embodied in the thesis is my own work, conducted under

normal supervision. The thesis contains no material which has been accepted, or is being

examined, for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary

institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously

published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made. I give

consent to the final version of my thesis being made available worldwide when deposited in

the University’s Digital Repository, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968 and

any approved embargo.

Signed,

Ainsley Hughes

i
 Thesis By Publication

Co-Author Statements

I hereby certify that this thesis is in the form of a series of papers. I have included as part of

the thesis a written declaration from each co-author, endorsed in writing by the Faculty

Assistant Dean (Research Training), attesting to my contribution to any jointly authored

papers.

Signed,

Ainsley Hughes

Paper 1:

By signing below I confirm that Ainsley Hughes was the lead author, primarily responsible

for research design and solely responsible for data collection, analysis and interpretation.

Hughes wrote the first draft of the manuscript and then responded to supervisory and editorial

suggestions of primary supervisor Kathleen Mee. Mee critically reviewed multiple drafts of

the paper prior to submission and assisted with the development of argument and structure.

Hughes responded to editor and anonymous reviewers under the supervision of Mee.

ii
Paper entitled: Hughes, A & Mee, K. 2018. ‘Journeys unknown: Embodiment, affect, and

living with being “lost” and “found”’. Geography Compass, vol. 12, no. 6, e12372, doi:

10.1111/gec3.12372.

Kathleen Jeanette Mee 8/2/2021

Paper 2:

By signing below I confirm that Ainsley Hughes was the lead author, primarily responsible

for research design and solely responsible for data collection, analysis and interpretation.

Hughes wrote the first draft of the manuscript and then responded to supervisory and editorial

suggestions of primary supervisor Kathleen Mee. Mee critically reviewed multiple drafts of

the paper prior to submission and assisted with the development of argument and structure.

Hughes responded to editor and anonymous reviewers under the supervision of Mee.

Paper entitled: Hughes, A & Mee, K. 2019. ‘Wayfinding with my iPhone: An

autoethnographic account of technological companionship and its affects’. Emotion, Space

and Society, vol 33, doi: 1016/j.emospa.2019.100613.

Kathleen Jeanette Mee 8/2/2021

iii
Paper 3:

By signing below I confirm that Ainsley Hughes was the lead author, primarily responsible

for research design and solely responsible for data collection, analysis and interpretation.

Hughes wrote the first draft of the manuscript and then responded to supervisory and editorial

suggestions of primary supervisor Kathleen Mee. Mee critically reviewed multiple drafts of

the paper prior to submission and assisted with the development of argument and structure.

Hughes responded to editor and anonymous reviewers under the supervision of Mee.

Paper entitled: Hughes, A & Mee, K. 2019. ‘Co-mobility in the digital age: Changing

technologies, and the affects of presence in journeying ‘with’ others’, Applied Mobilities, doi:

10.1080/23800127.2019.1607425.

Kathleen Jeanette Mee 8/2/2021

22/02/2021

Professor Frances Martin

Assistant Dean Research Training

iv
 Acknowledgements

My deepest thanks to my supervisor Associate Professor Kathy Mee. This thesis would not

have been possible without your kindness, wisdom and remarkable generosity.

I am so grateful for everything you have done for me.

Thanks also to all the discipline staff and students in the School of Environment and Life

Sciences for your warm friendship and support at every turn.

Kind thanks to the research participants who so generously contributed.

And to Mum, Dad, Logan and all my wonderful family – thank you always for your

unwavering support, listening and constant encouragement.

v
 Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ............................................................................................. v

Abstract ............................................................................................................... x

List of Papers included in the Thesis ............................................................ xiii

List of Tables.................................................................................................... xiv

List of Figures ................................................................................................... xv

Chapter 1 – Unpredictable Mobilities .............................................................. 1

1.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................................1
1.2 Crafting Desirable Everyday Mobilities: The Quest for Control and Comfort ....................5
1.2.1 Everyday Practices ................................................................................................................................8
1.2.2 New Cartographic/Location-Based Information .................................................................................12
1.2.3 Urban and Virtual Infrastructures ........................................................................................................15
1.2.4 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................................................16
1.3 Unpredictability in the Mobilities Literature .........................................................................17
1.3.1 Immobility ...........................................................................................................................................17
1.3.2 Disruption ............................................................................................................................................21
1.3.3 A Note on Power and Everyday Politics .............................................................................................23
1.3.4 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................................................24
1.4 Project Aims and Objectives: Rethinking Unpredictability..................................................25
1.4.1 Structure of the Thesis .........................................................................................................................28
1.5 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................33

Chapter 2 - Developing An Affective Geography of Unpredictable

Mobilities ........................................................................................................... 34
2.1 Introduction ...............................................................................................................................34
2.2 Widening the field of view: rethinking body-technology relations beyond comfort,
control and predictability ...............................................................................................................37
2.2.1 Human bodies ......................................................................................................................................41
2.2.2 Non-human bodies (technologies).......................................................................................................47
2.2.3 Affects within and between bodies......................................................................................................52
2.3 Developing an affective geography of unpredictable mobilities ...........................................54

vi
 2.3.1 Reimagining the ‘quality’ of unpredictability .....................................................................................55
2.3.2 Intensities .............................................................................................................................................56
2.3.3 Temporalities .......................................................................................................................................59
2.3.4 Affective encounters ............................................................................................................................63
2.4 Conclusion: towards an affective account of unpredictability ..............................................65

Chapter 3 - A Methodological Paradox: Planning for Unpredictability..... 68

3.1 Introduction ...............................................................................................................................68
3.2 Developing an affective methodology of ‘sensitising devices’ ...............................................69
3.2.1 Aim 1: Bodies, technologies, places....................................................................................................72
3.2.2 Aim 2: Possibility, multiplicity, productivity ......................................................................................78
3.3 Researching how unpredictability is lived: methods..............................................................82
3.3.1 Document analysis...............................................................................................................................83
3.3.2 Autoethnography .................................................................................................................................89
3.3.3 Semi-structured interviews ..................................................................................................................92
3.4 Conclusion: Unpredictability and the research process ........................................................97
3.4.1 The affects of collaboration .................................................................................................................97
3.4.2 The impromptu focus group ..............................................................................................................100
3.4.3 Conclusions .......................................................................................................................................102

Chapter 4 – Paper 1........................................................................................ 103

4.1 Abstract ....................................................................................................................................103
4.2 Introduction .............................................................................................................................104
4.3 How might being lost and found be theorised? Friction, liminality and affect. ................108
4.3.1 Friction ..............................................................................................................................................108
4.3.2 Liminality ..........................................................................................................................................111
4.3.3 Affect .................................................................................................................................................113
4.4 How do we talk about being lost and found? ........................................................................118
4.5 Conclusions ..............................................................................................................................121

Chapter 5 – Paper 2........................................................................................ 124

5.1 Abstract ....................................................................................................................................124
5.2 Introduction .............................................................................................................................125
5.3 ‘Opening the black box’: human/technology hybridities ....................................................128
5.4 How are iPhone products designed as companions? ............................................................129
5.5 Building connections: companionship through sensory engagement .................................130
5.6 Building connections: companionship through emotions and affects ................................132
5.7 Wayfinding with my iPhone ...................................................................................................136

vii
 5.7.1 Story 1: Learning to move together ...................................................................................................137
5.7.2 Story 2: Learning my routine ............................................................................................................141
5.7.3 Story 3: Learning to trust ...................................................................................................................144
5.8 Looking beyond my human/technology subject ...................................................................147
5.9 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................148

Chapter 6 – Paper 3........................................................................................ 151

6.1 Abstract ....................................................................................................................................151
6.2 Introduction .............................................................................................................................152
6.3 Rethinking co-mobility............................................................................................................153
6.3.1 Temporality and the techno-community............................................................................................154
6.3.2 Relations between moving bodies: sensory communication .............................................................157
6.3.3 Relations between moving bodies: emotions and affects ..................................................................159
6.4 Autoethnography and blurring lines of participation..........................................................160
6.5 Methods ....................................................................................................................................162
6.6 Story 1: Watcher .....................................................................................................................167
6.7 Story 2: Snapchat ....................................................................................................................169
6.8 Story 3: Waze ...........................................................................................................................171
6.9 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................175

Chapter 7 – Paper 4........................................................................................ 178

7.1 Abstract ....................................................................................................................................178
7.2 Introduction: Jane’s Story......................................................................................................179
7.3 Limits for wayfinding bodies ..................................................................................................182
7.3.1 Gendered Bodies ...............................................................................................................................183
7.3.2 Ageing Bodies ...................................................................................................................................185
7.4 Conceptual tools for rethinking/remaking problematic discourses....................................186
7.5 Methods ....................................................................................................................................189
7.6 Rethinking/remaking bodily limits: stories of confidence and co-mobility .......................190
7.6.1 Confidence .........................................................................................................................................191
7.6.2 Co-mobility........................................................................................................................................198
7.7. Conclusion ...............................................................................................................................206
7.8 Postscript ..................................................................................................................................209
7.8.1 Working Abstract for Revised Paper.................................................................................................210

Chapter 8 – Paper 5........................................................................................ 212

8.1 Abstract ....................................................................................................................................212
8.2 Introduction .............................................................................................................................213

viii
 8.3 Strange Places: rethinking encounter and strangeness through the context .....................216
of being lost ....................................................................................................................................216
8.4 Negotiating bodily capacities through encounter: enablement and constraint .................221
8.4.1 Preparing for strangeness: planning ahead or diving right in ............................................................222
8.4.2 Fearing strangeness: the threat of navigational failure ......................................................................225
8.4.3 Coping with strangeness: instincts, agency, and negotiating pseudonymous places ........................226
8.5 The affective significance of strange encounters for everyday mobilities ..........................230
8.5.1 Affect/memory ..................................................................................................................................230
8.5.2 Affect/intensity ..................................................................................................................................233
8.6 Four different styles of being lost...........................................................................................236
8.6.1 Fearful Lost .......................................................................................................................................238
8.6.2 Inadequate Lost .................................................................................................................................240
8.6.3 Skilful Lost ........................................................................................................................................241
8.6.4 Lively Lost.........................................................................................................................................243
8.7 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................244

Chapter 9 – The Fickle Fortunes of Everyday Journeys ........................... 247

9.1 Introduction .............................................................................................................................247
9.2 Project Overview .....................................................................................................................248
9.3 Aims and Objectives................................................................................................................250
9.3.1 Aim 1 .................................................................................................................................................250
9.3.2 Aim 2 .................................................................................................................................................254
9.3.3 Objective 1.........................................................................................................................................258
9.3.4 Objective 2.........................................................................................................................................259
9.3.5 Objective 3.........................................................................................................................................261
9.3.6 Objective 4.........................................................................................................................................263
9.4 Thesis Contributions ...............................................................................................................263
9.4.1 Key contributions: Unpredictability, affect, multiplicity ..................................................................264
9.4.2 Methodological contributions, limitations and future directions ......................................................268
9.5 Future Directions: Fickle mobilities and the more-than-human agency of journeys .......272

References ....................................................................................................... 279

Appendix 1 ...................................................................................................... 300

ix
 Abstract

Humans envisage a world predicated on predictability; an extraordinary, romantic world that

behaves exactly as we plan; a hopeful world in which comfort, power, success and belonging

are all possible if only we could master the conditions of our own lives. By contrast, with the

addition of just two small and seemingly innocent letters, unpredictability becomes the

villainous foil to human order, fundamentally symbolic of a wild world out of control; of

chaos. These narrow visions of unpredictability as an inherently undesirable quality for life

span many social contexts, but are particularly evident when examining the practices of

contemporary urban mobilities. Transport infrastructures are designed to make movements

between places as seamless as possible, and a proliferation of tracking technologies provide

constant access to cartographic information so that unpredictability may be avoided in our

daily travels. Narrow visions of unpredictability have also been embedded in the mobilities

literature, bundled with other discipline tropes such as ‘disruption’ or ‘immobility’, and

rarely discussed as empirical experiences in their own right. Thus, despite the universality of

unpredictability, there are enduring and problematic assumptions within the mobilities

literature about the nature of everyday journeys as knowable and predictable.

The purpose of this thesis is to rethink the quality of unpredictability and its place in mobile

life. It pursues a theoretical reimagining of unpredictability which foregrounds its

multiplicities, possibilities and generative potentials, and explores the diverse ways

unpredictability is empirically lived through the everyday mobilities of bodies, technologies

and places. Grounded in a non-representational ontology, this thesis draws on theories of

affect to argue for the ways that unpredictable mobilities are ever-present, symptomatic of a

mobile life in a constant state of flux via the “ever-changing processes human and non-

x
human bodies undergo as they experience, encounter, and perform life among other bodies

within material space” (O’Grady 2018, para 1). Drawing broadly on a Spinozian

understanding of affect as the emerging capacities of human and non-human bodies to affect

and be affected (Thrift 2004; Anderson 2006), the thesis brings together a suite of affective

concepts to empirically analyse the complex relationality of the mobile assemblage.

Critically, it illustrates that the affects of unpredictability often function well outside our

human visions of how the mobile assemblage will come together, and this disconnection has

ongoing consequences for the time-spaces and socio-material force relations experienced by

bodies on the move. Thus, affect allows this thesis to reposition human ideas of comfort,

control and predictability as just a small subset of the many potential feelings and sensations

made possible as the mobile assemblage comes together in unpredictable ways.

This thesis illustrates the ways unpredictability is spatially lived through an empirical focus

on the everyday experiences of being lost and found, and performances of everyday

wayfinding – stories which thus far also remain missing from the mobilities literature. It

brings together stories of unpredictable mobilities from a variety of different moving bodies

and contexts through a qualitative mixed-method approach. This involved three key methods:

(1) document analysis of publicly available popular media sources and wayfinding

applications, (2) autoethnography of embodied experiences of wayfinding and (3) semi-

structured interviews with residents from Newcastle, Australia, regarding their lifetime

experiences of unpredictable mobilities. These stories were shaped into five papers for

publication using an affective methodology of ‘sensitising devices’ (Anderson 2014), and

thus each final paper renders visible different affective relations of unpredictable mobilities.

The first paper evaluates the utility of friction, liminality and affect as theoretical concepts for

unpacking the significance of unpredictable mobilities for daily life. The second and third

xi
papers bring together document analysis and autoethnography to explore affects of

companionship (Paper 2) and co-mobility (Paper 3) that move between human and non-

human bodies during wayfinding performances. The fourth paper draws on interview

responses to explore the politics of everyday wayfinding and unpack problematic discourses

of how aged and gendered bodies are expected to perform unpredictable mobilities. And the

final paper animates a conceptual focus on encounter to illustrate how being lost is an

encounter with strange places that is experienced in a multiplicity of ways by interview

participants.

Unpredictability will always be haunted by negative connotations and problematic

assumptions when viewed through the feeble human lenses of comfort and control. This

thesis opens up new readings of unpredictability in terms of its place as a key experience in

mobile life, its fundamental quality as generative rather than simply negative, and the

multitude of ways in which it is empirically lived. In thinking through the affects of

unpredictability, this thesis contributes to the ongoing deterritorialisation of mobilities

(Hannam, Sheller & Urry 2006) within the literature by moving towards a more-than-human

reading of everyday journeys that makes visible the agency of journeys themselves in shaping

human experiences of mobility. The thesis concludes by speculating on the utility of the

quality of ‘fickleness’ for future mobilities research to better account for the unpredictable

ways that everyday journeys unfold.

xii
 List of Papers included in the Thesis

1. Hughes, A & Mee, K. 2018. ‘Journeys unknown: Embodiment, affect, and living with

being “lost” and “found”’. Geography Compass, vol. 12, no. 6, e12372, doi:

10.1111/gec3.12372.

2. Hughes, A & Mee, K. 2019a. ‘Wayfinding with my iPhone: An autoethnographic

account of technological companionship and its affects’. Emotion, Space and Society,

vol 33, doi: 1016/j.emospa.2019.100613.

3. Hughes, A & Mee, K. 2019b. ‘Co-mobility in the digital age: Changing technologies,

and the affects of presence in journeying ‘with’ others’, Applied Mobilities, doi:

10.1080/23800127.2019.1607425.

4. Hughes, A. 2021. ‘They Can’t Read Maps: Remaking the limits of navigational

capacity through gendered and ageing bodies, Gender, Place and Culture. Under

review.

5. Hughes, A. 2020. ‘Being lost: encounters with strange places’, Mobilities, doi:

10.1080/17450101.2020.1830587.

xiii
 List of Tables

Table 1: Examples of wayfinding practices designed to craft control and comfort - drawn

from thesis papers .................................................................................................................... 11

Table 2: Five publications produced for this thesis ................................................................ 30

Table 3: Sources used for Document Analysis ....................................................................... 85

Table 4: Analysis of applications used during fieldwork. .................................................... 166

Table 5: Empirical themes considered in this thesis ............................................................. 267

xiv
 List of Figures

Figure 1: Classifieds Advertisement placed in the Newcastle Herald. .................................. 94

Figure 2: Placing lost and found on a spectrum of experience ............................................. 119

Figure 3: The message the Watcher app had sent me. .......................................................... 142

Figure 4: The location of the police car as depicted by the Waze app ................................. 172

Figure 5: Ainsley's scoreboard on Waze............................................................................... 173

Figure 6: Four styles of being lost which emerged during fieldwork ................................... 238

xv
 Chapter 1 – Unpredictable Mobilities

1.1 Introduction

Unpredictability is human order undone. Unpredictability calls to mind those tricky

encounters in which life feels volatile, unstable, undependable, unreliable, or unmanageable.

Affect is the critical root to these negative descriptions: the quality of unpredictability is alive

with the promise and potential of disarming and uncomfortable emotions. Life events marked

by the quality of unpredictability can have potentially challenging consequences which range

from mild inconvenience right through to threats to life and safety. Individuals acting in

unpredictable ways are often branded as flighty, erratic, manic, irresponsible, untrustworthy,

dangerous. The ambiguity of unpredictability heightens our anxieties (Lake & Labar 2011)

and for our lives, unpredictability can be interpreted as chaos.

Equally however, unpredictability holds the potential to be remarkable and awe-inspiring.

Yet discussions about unpredictable events or relationships seldom focus on the possibilities

for positive or productive emotions and affects. In fact, positive outcomes which spring from

unpredictable events are often expressed through the emotional register of relief: liberation

from the possibility that things could have ended poorly. Unpredictability is a gamble in

which the potential for distress usually outweighs the potential for joy. This bias towards

avoiding the negative outcomes of unpredictability reaffirms decades of empirical evidence

from the discipline of psychology on the ways that humans show a “propensity to attend to,

learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information” (Vaish,

Grossmann & Woodward 2008, 383).

1
Unpredictability is commonly positioned as undesirable for mobile life. Mobility is flows of

movement and people. Unpredictability threatens to interrupt these flows at a variety of

scales. Historically, the mobilities discipline has focused on unpredictability as ‘disruption’

and often exclusively studied it in the context of breakdowns to transport infrastructure

(Doughty & Murray 2017; Murray & Doughty 2016) and large-scale movements between

places, for example: in the potentially harrowing and dangerous journeys taken by fleeing

migrants (Amit 2012; Bylander 2018); or during disaster events such as New Zealand’s 2019

White Island volcano eruption (March, McGregor & Day 2020). As I write this introductory

chapter, the speed with which the COVID-19 pandemic has moved across the world has

interrupted the flow of international and domestic travel and transport systems in ways we

have not seen for generations. In these contexts, the consequences of unpredictability can be

severe and distressing. Given the logistical chaos these types of events cause for mobility

infrastructures, and the emotional chaos they cause for communities and individuals,

unforeseen catastrophic events often receive empirical attention both in popular media

accounts as well as the mobilities literature (see examples Cresswell & Martin 2012;

Matthewman 2017; O’Regan 2011; Savitzky 2018; Sheller 2013).

At the scale of everyday mobilities however, the quality of unpredictability has potentially

different undesirable affects for daily movement flows. It’s being stuck. Delayed. Detoured.

Impeded. Off-course. Lost. In these contexts, unpredictable events can bring negative

emotions to a journey including anxiety, frustration, isolation, fear and confusion. Being lost

can impinge on our ability to execute daily responsibilities to family, friends and colleagues.

Critically, the sources of unpredictability at the everyday scale can be markedly different to

larger scale movements, with unforeseen encounters produced by the mundane rhythms,

relations and decisions of moving bodies, rather than necessarily stemming from external

2
events. Given that unpredictability and disruption in everyday contexts is often more easily

“absorbed into the fracas of daily life” (Doughty & Murray 2017, 81; Graham & Thrift 2007)

it consistently fails to receive the same attention as those more catastrophic unpredictable

events. Discussion of these styles of everyday unpredictability still remain tethered to

descriptions of negative emotions and sensations. I argue however, that though the

consequences of unpredictability at this scale may not always be severe, they still warrant

significant attention from mobility scholars as they have critical and lasting affects for an

individual’s mobility practices, visions of oneself, and contemplation of future journeys

(Hughes & Mee 2018). Furthermore whilst some work has acknowledged that deviations to

daily mobile rhythms such as commuting can be pleasurable (Edensor 2008, 2011), a deeper

engagement with the possibilities of unpredictability for producing and enriching a variety of

everyday journeys and their affects remains limited.

Despite its neglect in the academic literature, a significant number of contemporary mobility

practices are specifically designed to avoid unpredictability by allowing humans to craft the

conditions of control and comfort for themselves during a journey. Examples at the everyday

scale include live-tracking and on-demand public transport systems, fitness tracking and

route-sharing applications, car personalisation, and most of all, instantaneous mapping

software for cars, motorbikes, bicycles, phones and even maps-made-wearable via

smartwatches. Rapid developments in wayfinding technologies continue to escalate the

number and character of personal mobility practices so that moving bodies may avoid

unpredictability, but they are also contributing to misunderstandings about everyday journeys

being easy to predict and control. According to Pooley (2013) virtual methods of

communication, privatised means of household transport, and the increasing time pressures of

modern work-to-home life have created dangerous expectations in the twenty-first century

3
“that travel will be quick and trouble free” (p38), simultaneously lowering the resilience of

individuals and transport systems to cope when disruptions occur. Unpredictability has

always been a reality for mobile life, but the way moving bodies and transport institutions

relate to it as an experiential quality is shifting dramatically (Pooley 2013). These shifts in

social values also require more ongoing attention by mobilities scholars.

The propensity to focus on negative events or information in the ways that unpredictability is

understood therefore haunts both the mobilities literature and our everyday visions of how

journeys will or should unfold. Unpredictability has largely been tied to existing mobilities

tropes such as ‘immobility’ or ‘disruption’, yet these concepts fail to fully engage with the

generative potential and multiple affects at the core of unpredictable mobilities. Furthermore,

operating within the constructed binaries of predictable/unpredictable, control/chaos and

desirable/undesirable fails to account for the lived realities in how journeys are constantly

remade, unsettled and adjusted in multiple and sometimes barely discernable ways.

The purpose of this thesis is therefore to explore how the quality of unpredictability is lived,

and to rethink narrow descriptions of unpredictability as inherently undesirable. This thesis

by publication argues that mobilities literature needs to reorient discussions of

unpredictability to emphasize the possibilities, multiplicities and productivities that

unpredictability can have for mobile life. Unpredictability is explored at the scale of everyday

mobilities, focusing on the mundane journeys bodies take in daily life – commuting, running

errands, participating in leisure and fitness activities, and day-to-day travels with family and

friends. The research animates the embodied navigational process of ‘wayfinding’ and being

4
‘lost’ and ‘found’ as critical empirical expressions of lived unpredictability which have

multiple affects for moving bodies, technologies, and places.

This introductory chapter is structured in three following sections. The first section reflects

on the ways that unpredictability is framed as an undesirable quality through mobility

practices which focus on crafting control and comfort during everyday journeys. It will

illustrate that the quest for control and comfort has not only resulted in new and multiple

personal mobility practices but has also bled into the ways cartographic information is

understood, and how urban and virtual infrastructures are composed. The second section will

consider how the theme of unpredictability has been dealt with in the mobilities literature.

This section will reflect on how unpredictability has been tied to existing concepts in the

discipline such as immobility and disruption and evaluate the utility of these concepts in

pursuing a more generative understanding of unpredictability. The third and final section will

conclude by providing aims and objectives for this project in order to rethink unpredictability

and outline how the remainder of the thesis will be structured.

1.2 Crafting Desirable Everyday Mobilities: The Quest for Control and Comfort

Control is the human attempt to master the consequences of life’s unpredictability (Raymond,

Horsfall & Lee 1997). As everyday mobility practices in the twenty-first century become

increasingly individualised and privatised, crafting desirable mobilities for oneself requires a

suite of practices which delicately balance personal freedoms, flows and controls (Urry

2012). Being able to move in an unimpeded way is desirable yet having control over the

movement process is a vital component to crafting the conditions which allow for unimpeded

5
movements. Control provides individuals with the power to craft consistency and reliability

whilst being mobile through the sensation of being able to manipulate or predict many

different parts of the movement experience, including time (or speed), location (or distance),

the performance (executing a skill, expected norms etc), and the qualities or affects

(controlling a sense of comfort, privacy, quiet, emotion etc). The increasing domination of

domestic car use in Western capitalist societies is perhaps the best example of this quest for

balancing freedom and control, as cars are valued for allowing individuals to craft

“autonomous flexible and speedy travel” (Conley & McLaren 2009, 1) on a daily basis.

Mobility is at its most desirable in contemporary society when individuals have the freedom

to control their daily movement conditions and experiences1.

Similarly, crafting comfort during everyday mobilities reflects attempts to manipulate the

affects of unpredictability and orient them towards desirable emotions and sensations.

Engaging with dispersed mobile practices, such as listening to music, navigating routes, and

monitoring performance, are critical to the ways satisfaction circulates in our affective mobile

performances (Cass & Faulconbridge 2015). For this project, comfort emerges in mobile

practices which seek to craft bodily comfort and psychological comfort during everyday

journeys. Bodily comfort includes a wide suite of practices designed to manipulate the

mobility environment so that the body experiences pleasurable sensations, with examples

including: listening to music (Waitt, Harada & Duffy 2017); adjusting the air conditioning

1 Itis important to acknowledge that control in itself is experienced in differentiated ways, embedded in the
broader social and cultural power hierarchies of our mobile lives. Those from affluent backgrounds in Western
societies are afforded the ability to self-determine how they experience freedom and control. For others, controls
on individual freedoms and mobility such as border controls, reduced access to movement and/or public space
and surveillance technologies are highly oppressive and highly undesirable (Sheller 2008).

6
(Kent 2015) in the car; manipulating commuting time for rest through blankets and

headphones (Hughes, Mee & Tyndall 2016) or for office work through laptops and phones

(Bissell 2010; Jain & Lyons 2008) whilst in train carriage spaces. Crafting psychological

comfort on the other hand includes a more varied and nuanced set of practices designed to

bring potential journeys order in an individual’s mind or release them from some of the

pressures of making mobile decisions. For some, this may include practices of ‘pre-

travelling’ (Peters, Kloppenburg & Wyatt 2010) such as planning one’s intended route the

night before a journey. It may include the personalisation of the types of spatial information

made available during a journey, such as the use of tracking technologies to monitor pace and

distance during a run (Esmonde 2019) or use of smartphones as travel companions to release

users from some of the emotional responsibility of making travel decisions under pressure

(Hughes & Mee 2019a). And for some, it may actually mean engaging with transport modes

that act as ‘body containers’ (Kellerman 2006) such as trains and boats, as the envelopment

of the body reduces the individual’s need to proactively make travel decisions. Much

contemporary mobilities literature on commuting life has argued that the consistency and

reliability of repetitive rhythms of travel and associated practices of habit can provide

psychological comfort during journeys (Edensor 2008; Bissell 2013) in everyday contexts.

Control and comfort therefore intertwine in complex ways to inform an individual’s goals

and expectations. Being able to control one’s mobility environment and apply imagined order

to journeys can bring bodily and psychological comfort. In some circumstances handing

control over to others for mobile decision-making through ‘passengering’ can also be

comforting. However, even relinquishing agency to others tends to be practised within

comfortable limits: individuals might be comfortable letting train carriages guide them, or

Uber drivers determine route for them, but passengers still realistically set the limits of time,

7
destination, and operate within social expectations of how those transport modes will look

and feel during a journey. Furthermore, feeling comfortable and relaxed versus stressed

during a journey potentially has affects for the resilience of individuals in coping with the

loss of control brought about by disruptive forces and events during a journey– their capacity

to affect and be affected (Bissell 2014a).

Because control and comfort are being increasingly embedded in individual mobile practices,

problematic social expectations about the nature of contemporary journeys are emerging

(Pooley 2013). Unpredictability is perceived as an undesirable quality and increasingly

polarised as the unwelcome ‘other’ to desirable conditions such as freedom, flow, control and

comfort. The following sections of this chapter will provide further illustration of where and

how control and comfort is embedded in a variety of daily mobile practices at the scale of the

individual, but also how the ongoing quest for control and comfort has influenced how

contemporary cartographic information is perceived and urban and virtual infrastructures are

assembled. The purpose of this discussion is to illustrate how these socio-technical practices

have contributed to a limited understanding of unpredictability as undesirable.

1.2.1 Everyday Practices

The quest for control and comfort pervades many daily practices of mobile coordination in

order to avoid or minimise the chance of unpredictable events and craft desirable affects.

These practices cut across many different areas of decision making for mobile life but are

perhaps most easily recognisable in transport related practices. For example, in many

Western contexts affluent individuals are able to craft control and comfort through the luxury

of being able to choose between several daily travel modes to satisfy their individual needs

8
(Scheiner & Holz-Rau 2007), spanning both private ownership of cars, motorbikes, bicycles,

boats, and motorhomes, as well as systems of public transport infrastructure such as buses,

trams, trains, ferries and air travel. Further decisions can be made within these travel modes

in order to craft desirable mobilities, as per the examples in the previous section of bodily and

psychological comfort. Developments in virtual communications which have altered the

temporal and spatial configuration of everyday mobilities have also embedded control and

comfort into their mechanics, with personalisation, tracking and instantaneous access to

information allowing individuals to manipulate the mobility of bodies without the necessity

of physical proximity. And beyond the scope of transport-related movements, decisions about

control and comfort can also be extended to everyday leisure activities such as dancing,

walking, running, cycling and a range of other community, gaming and sporting contexts. In

fact, in these activities it is precisely the execution of bodily movements in skilled and

controlled ways that contributes to our satisfaction and pleasure.

Wayfinding is an area of everyday mobilities which is tightly woven with these sorts of

practices of comfort and control as it fundamentally aims to eliminate many of the

unpredictabilities associated with determining the route of a journey and finding oneself in

place. Wayfinding has historically been perceived as a set of practices where “our survival

and happiness depend on ways of problem solving that are highly reliable and accurate […]

but also as fast and flexible as possible” (Downs & Stea 1977, 55). This is reflected in several

studies across different discipline areas which evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses

of different wayfinding tools in terms of speed and reliability (see examples Axon, Speake &

Crawford 2012; O’Brien, Field & Beale 2012). It is also mirrored in widespread popular

media perspectives which comment on, or advocate for, potential improvements in reliability

and accuracy of contemporary mapping systems, signage, and applications. More recent

9
academic work however has begun to expand our understanding of wayfinding as a broader

imaginative, affective and embodied experience (Milner 2016) which includes both practices

performed during moments of immediate uncertainty (such as being lost on a journey), but

also the ways that journeys are contemplated before being undertaken, and how their affects

are carried by bodies into future mobile performances. As such, contemporary wayfinding

practices are no longer solely focused on speed and efficiency as indicators of success during

a single linear journey but have grown to include a wider set of bodily practices designed to

craft control and comfort across a lifetime of everyday jouneying. Table 1 (page 11) offers

examples of just some of these diverse wayfinding practices drawing specifically from the

papers to follow in this thesis, providing a small snapshot of contemporary wayfinding

practices.

10
 Wayfinding practices designed to craft control and comfort
Pre-journey During a journey Future journeys

Emotional memories – using lessons

Planning a route before a trip –
Real time route-checking on learnt from past experiences with
downloading offline maps and
maps – via paper or smartphone undesirable mobilities to inform
preloading smartphone mapping
future practices

Contemplating route in our Ongoing development of

GPS audio cues to aid
imagination and embedding it companionship with smartphone
navigation
amongst other daily tasks over a series of journeys

Updating technology – new Private car use, and access to Inspiration to explore new places
hardware and new software familiar sensory cues and bodily through gaming and fitness
updates comforts applications

Sensory manipulation of virtual Access to particular types of

cartographic information cartographic information through
Weather checking
through screens – zoom in and engagement with specific online
out, scroll, turn, pinch communities

Organising a family member or Building resilience through

Co-mobile journeys with a
friend to digitally oversee a successful navigation and lifetime
(human) travel companion
journey experience

Personalisation of cartographic Co-mobile journeys with a

information through specific (technological) travel
applications companion

Navigational technology made

wearable during fitness runs

Tracking fitness statistics –

time, distance, pace, cadence

Taking a smartphone on a
potentially threatening journey

Connecting to others without

physical proximity

Sharing information of potential

hazards with other mobile
bodies

Handing responsibility and

agency for mobile decisions to
human or technical companions
– particularly in times of stress
or pressure

Table 1: Examples of wayfinding practices designed to craft control and comfort – drawn from thesis papers

11
Furthermore, rapid developments in virtual technologies have also influenced the nature and

extent of wayfinding practices. There is extensive commentary on the multiple ways that

spatial media tools such as online mapping and GPS enabled devices have compressed

experiences of sociality, time, place and mobility (for a review see Kitchin, Lauriault &

Wilson 2017). In terms of comfort and control however, these tools “constitute a new form

and era of geographical production/consumption in that control and creation shift from elites

and professionals to ordinary people – it is personalised geographical praxis for ‘anyone,

anywhere, and anytime, and for a variety of purposes’” (Haklay 2013, 56 in Kitchin,

Lauriault & Wilson 2017, 4). The integration of spatial information into everyday household

practices, as well as the always-on, always-ready ubiquity of these technologies, has created a

context where everyday users have the opportunity for “more control over many aspects of

everyday life”, which “in theory, […] should make it easier to adjust schedules to cope with

travel delays and disruptions, or to use technology to substitute for physical movement”

(added emphasis, Pooley 2013, 27). As Pooley (2013) and others (Evans & Perng 2017) have

argued however, it is precisely because spatial media is so pervasive in our lives that

disruptions feel increasingly difficult to cope with. The realities of mobile life, with all its

unpredictable events and disruptions, shatter these imaginaries of control and comfort that

individuals have worked so hard to craft for themselves through their everyday mobility

practices.

1.2.2 New Cartographic/Location-Based Information

With developments in virtual forms of communication, new styles of cartographic

information have also become embedded in everyday practices allowing individuals to craft

control and comfort via the personalisation of spatial information (Hjorth 2012). Wayfinding

12
in the contemporary context now includes access to an overwhelming amount of location-

based spatial data (Timpf 2002). Where historically location-based wayfinding might have

drawn from tools such as landmarks, travel guide-books or word-of-mouth to tackle problems

and locate oneself in place, spatial media2 has proliferated and intensified the quantity and

type of locational information available. Today, nearly three billion mobile and tablet

applications (apps) alone utilize some form of GPS-derived positioning information (Milner

2016). These applications allow users to tailor the locational information to services they

wish to access, with examples including: shopping (apps like Shoptopia: Your Shopping

Companion, WineCompanion), fitness (Fitness Buddy, Virtual Trainer Pro, Strava,

MapMyRun) and travel and lifestyle (Mobile Personal Safety, PackPoint Packing List Travel

Companion, FreeCamp Australia, PetrolSpy, LiveTraffic). Moreover, new communities and

communicative politics have also emerged, with crowdsource mapping services allowing

users to take control and personalise the information they wish to see depicted on maps

(Crampton 2017), rather than relying on maps provided by institutions and business. Termed

by Hjorth (2012) as the ‘commercialisation of personalisation’, this transition to a

personalised service model is described by Klauser & Widmer (2017, 220): “the banalisation

and democratisation of new spatial media, we are moving from a universalist model of

services to a model in which the basic spaces and services of everyday life increasingly

become commodities that can be differentiated and adapted to the profile of each user”. As

2 The term spatial media has appeared extensively in contemporary digital research. Kitchin, Lauriault &
Wilson (2017, 6) use the term to encapsulate the proliferation of location-based sources of information: “Spatial
media enable the handling of a diverse set of spatial data, but they also generate massive amounts of such data,
including map layers, new framework data […] location and movement traces, geotagged and georeferenced
data (related to specific phenomena), and metadata (related to posts, comments and photos). Importantly, these
data are generated on a continuous basis as spatial and locative media are used, and a much more diverse set of
phenomena and practices have gained associated locational data (essentially most activities mediated via the
web, especially those using a smartphone or tablet). These data can provide spatial histories of a media and the
places and activities captured by them”.

13
this transition has allowed for the ability to personalise locational services and information to

meet individual lifestyles, personal control 3 and comfort has become further embedded in

everyday wayfinding practices.

The implications of these changes to quantity, style and access to cartographic information, is

that information is conflated with predictability. The underlying expectation is that access to

cartographic information is key for ensuring journeys will be comfortable, predictable and

ultimately desirable. It follows that if individuals have access to the right tools and

information, they will make ‘good’ decisions, and get to their intended location safely and

efficiently. This is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, it reinforces assumptions about

technical cartographic information as rational and objective (Hughes & Mee 2019a). Despite

efforts from mobilities and digital communications scholars to highlight the ways these

wayfinding tools are partial and political in their renderings of space (Crampton 2009; Hjorth

& Richardson 2017; Leszczynski & Elwood 2015; Nash & Gorman-Murray 2019;

Pavlovskaya 2016), the ways everyday individuals relate to these technologies is still to see

them as ‘black boxes’ (Ash 2013), defined by the inputs and outputs they provide their users,

and measured for success via traits such as speed, reliability and efficiency. Secondly, by

conflating access to information with predictability, social values around disruptions, failures

and being lost are shifting. Being lost is increasingly being viewed as a personal failure,

rather than a realistic expectation of unpredictability in mobile life (Pooley 2013). The final

two papers in this thesis address this theme directly, illustrating that having access to new and

3
There has been widespread concern in both popular media contexts and academic arenas for the ways new
forms of spatial media might be impinging on personal privacy by collecting, storing, selling and disseminating
spatial data about people’s lives (examples Ajayakumar & Ghazinour 2017; Li & Goodchild 2013; de Souza e
Silva & Frith 2012; Ricker, Schuurman & Kessler 2015) – the flipside of control.

14
multiple styles of cartographic information is problematically influencing how bodies are

expected to perform their wayfinding.

1.2.3 Urban and Virtual Infrastructures

Crampton (2017, 39) considers the ways that spatial media maps and personal wayfinding

technologies do not stand alone, but “are part of an ever-forming assemblage”, co-producing

mobilities in relation with wider institutional, urban, and virtual infrastructures in city

contexts. One final aspect of control and comfort to consider then, is how these values are

also being embedded in physical and virtual urban infrastructures. In line with changing types

of cartographic information, urban design has developed support systems which facilitate

access to these styles of information (Klauser & Albrechtslund 2014). Alongside other

mobility infrastructures such as roads and electricity grids, examples which support

increasingly individual mobile practices include public wifi networks on public transport

systems (Graham 2019), QR codes on navigational signage (Geraldton City Council 2019:

“New signage aids wayfinding in CBD”), and even public artwork which is now strategically

being designed with social media and geotagging in mind (Daher 2015; Weingarton 2018).

Forms of tracking have become embedded in so many different types of urban infrastructure

and services to be able to predict and control not only how people move, but also goods and

services move, for example: live tracking of public transport systems, fitness wearables, and

even the GPS tracking of postal and food deliveries (Neff & Nafus 2016). In fact,

establishing urban and virtual infrastructures which facilitate the seamless technological

flows of mobility, people, goods and services is a key part of the ‘smart cities’ ideology

which is increasingly being embedded in urban public policy. According to Olaverri-Monreal

15
(2016) smart cities are publicly associated with a higher quality of life due to qualities such

as ‘sustainable transport systems’ and ‘connectivity’.

Much like the previous section thinking through new styles of cartographic information, this

discussion also illustrates how access to information is conflated with mobile predictability.

Urban spaces are increasingly developing infrastructures to support a variety of technological

wayfinding practices to provide individuals with the freedom to (try) control their mobile

lives. The quest for control and comfort has bled into the way urban environments are

assembled, acknowledging that wayfinding, and mobility more generally, does not occur

through a vacuum of personal practices, but has dispersed spatialities and connections to

place. In fact, sporadic failure of these urban infrastructure systems is a key source of

disruption and discomfort within the transport-focused mobilities literature.

1.2.4 Conclusion

The ongoing quest for comfort and control pervades everyday mobilities: it is embedded in

our personal wayfinding practices, new and emerging styles of cartographic information, and

urban and virtual infrastructures. These elements contribute to problematic assumptions that

journeys should be knowable and predictable, rendering the quality of unpredictability as the

unwelcome ‘other’ for mobile life. This thesis troubles these assumptions. Journeys are

continually adjusted and remade, and the process of wayfinding is far more messy and

embodied (Ingold 2000) than technical objects might lead us to believe. Furthermore,

unpredictability is not a personal or infrastructural failure, but an enduring reality of daily life

and an important dimension of mobility for how we learn about the world around us (Sennett

16
1977). I contend that unpredictability can inspire a range of emotions and affects, with the

potential to inspire as much joy as it does anxiety.

1.3 Unpredictability in the Mobilities Literature

This section of the chapter will now shift to focus on how unpredictability has been analysed

in mobilities literature. This section will argue that unpredictability has been clumsily hidden

within other critical themes across the discipline, namely immobility and disruption. These

concepts, whilst offering their own important insights, fail to fully engage with the particular

conditions at the heart of unpredictable mobilities. ‘Immobility’ is a useful analytical lens for

thinking about relations of speed, but unpredictability can occupy a range of speeds, rhythms

and events. ‘Disruption’ on the other hand, struggles to make room for the generative

potentials of unpredictability. As such, in this section I will evaluate the utility of these

concepts for this project in pursuing an understanding of unpredictability that foregrounds

multiplicity and productivity. The purpose of this section is to illustrate that the role and

nature of unpredictability as quality for mobile life has been narrowly considered, and that

this thesis aims to attend to these issues by rethinking unpredictability.

1.3.1 Immobility

Immobility has exploded as an analytical category for mobile life. In its essence, immobility

describes how flows of movement might stop, pause or slow – a critical counter-concept for

scholars concerned with the ways that hypermobility is increasingly viewed as a given

condition of mobility in contemporary Western contexts (Cresswell 2010). It has proved

17
especially useful for investigating relations of speed and stoppage in a wide variety of

empirical contexts, with just some examples including everyday experiences of waiting

(Bissell 2007) and dwelling (Bissell & Gorman-Murray 2020), reproductive mobilities

(Murray & Kahn 2020; Sheller 2020), pedestrian mobilities (Hall & Smith 2013) and the

relative immobilities of transport moorings (Blondin 2020; Cidell 2013; Kangar & Schot

2016). It has also been used extensively to interrogate the power and politics of mobility in

the relative immobilities bodies experience, or at times have imposed upon them, due to

particular aspects of their identity such as race, migrant status, gender and so on (examples

Purifoye 2020; Boyer, Mayes & Pini 2017; Zharkevich 2019; Suiman et al 2019).

Immobility has been connected to unpredictability in the literature in that unforeseen events

can delay or stop flows of movements. As indicated in the opening of this chapter, these

immobilities often take form through catastrophic events and failures which have interrupted

systems of movement – namely transport infrastructures. An excellent example was the

special journal section in Mobilities in 2011 dedicated to papers which investigated the

relative immobilities caused by Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull's volcanic eruptions, an event

whose subsequent ash cloud grounded air travel across many parts of Europe. We can

anticipate that the next few years will see similar special issues emerge on the ways the

unpredictable spread of COVID-19 halted global travel and caused different patterns of

immobility for moving bodies. In these circumstances then, unpredictability is connected to

immobility through the lens of disruption, with particular events slowing or stopping flows of

mobility. Connecting unpredictability and immobility through disruption is narrow, as I

discuss in more depth in the following section of the chapter. However, even if we think

more broadly about the conditions at the core of immobilities – slowness, stillness, stuckness

and waiting – as these vocalise qualities of speed and pace, they capture only a small

18
snapshot of the multiple ways unpredictability can potentially influence a journey. In fact,

unpredictability might sometimes cause our mobilities to speed up. Even more so however,

unpredictable mobilities have multiple affects for other aspects of a journey which

immobility as a concept does not necessarily speak to, such as changing spatialities, bodily

sensations, emotions, relations of co-mobility and so on. As such immobility might be useful

for understanding some of the changing temporalities caused by unpredictable events, but it

is not necessarily useful for this project in pursuing unpredictability as an empirical

experience rich in potential for multiple rhythms and affects.

Whilst immobility might only be partially useful for thinking through unpredictability in

definitional or empirical terms, it is more useful for thinking through how broader relational

categories operate. John Urry (2003) argued for a mobilities/moorings dialectic to explain the

relationship between mobility and immobility (in Adey 2006). For Urry (2003), there can be

no such thing as movement without “something to push off from” (Adey 2006, 86) – those

systems of relative immobility that facilitate flow such as airports, train stations, mobile

phone towers, border control check points and so on. Others have also extended this thinking

to the politics of mobility in that the mobility of some people is made possible explicitly

through the immobility and control of others. Therefore Adey (2006) argues that “we need to

consider mobilities […] in differential and relational ways. By this I mean that there is never

any absolute immobility, but only mobilities which we mistake for immobility, what could be

called relative immobilities.” (p83). The relationship between mobility and immobility is

therefore useful in exploring how to work with conceptual dualisms – something which has

appeared time and time again in the mobilities literature: fast/slow, mobile/immobile,

proximate/distant, physical/virtual, public/private, flow/disruption, lost/found, order/chaos,

predictable/unpredictable. Inspired by this work, I have been conscious to trouble these

19
couplings as they appear throughout the papers of my thesis, and overall, where Adey (2006)

argued towards a relational politics of (im)mobilities, this thesis argues towards a relational

politics of (un)predictability. There is never an absolute predictability, but only unpredictable

mobilities we mistake for predictable.

The rise of immobility as an analytical category is also indicative of the ways the ‘new

mobilities paradigm’ has inspired academics to think through means to deterritorialise

mobilities, to move away from understandings of mobility as hyperfluidity, and of place and

space as static nodes through which mobile life operates. Deterritorialising mobilities in part

also requires us to critically rethink “existing linear assumptions about temporality and

timing, which often assume that actors are able to do only one thing at a time, and that events

follow each other in a linear order” (Hannam, Sheller & Urry 2006; 13). Empirically

however, a significant amount of mobilities research still animates static ‘beginning’ and

‘end’ points to anchor their analyses – what happened as bodies moved from A to B. This is

especially true in the context of wayfinding and navigation, where finding the desired ‘end’

point of the journeys is the main goal. As such there is still significant work to be done in

undoing perceptions of journeys as singularly linear and rethinking the webs and loops of

networked time that colour mobile life. Immobility is a useful starting point for

deterritorialising mobilities as it allows us to rethink journeys without the linear necessity of

beginning and end points ‘A’ and ‘B’ by articulating that different assemblages of speed,

rhythm, flows and pause happen during everyday mobilities. Like immobility, this project

therefore responds to this call to deterritorialise mobilities by looking at unpredictable

journeys. It foregrounds multiplicity and productivity as there are many divergent paths a

journey can/will/could potentially take, and even journeys which feel as if they have unfolded

20
smoothly between ‘A’ and ‘B’ have been unsettled and remade in various, sometimes

unconscious ways.

1.3.2 Disruption

As indicated by the opening to this chapter, disruption is the concept which the mobilities

literature has used most extensively to make sense of unpredictable mobilities. Given

underlying expectations about the nature of journeys as comfortable and controllable,

unpredictable events are conceptualised as disruptions to our known or intended mobility

path or are those events which impinge on our right to travel in the way we imagine or desire.

There are two key issues with using disruption to understand unpredictability: scale and style.

In terms of scale, disruption is currently interpreted in a limited way within the mobilities

literature in that most empirical focus and significance is given to external forces which

impact upon movements and transport systems such as disasters, roadworks, traffic

congestion and so on (Doughty & Murray 2017; Murray & Doughty 2016). Yet there are a

broader suite of potential disruptions resulting from the individual lifeworlds of moving

bodies which can affect how movement is performed and experienced. For example Doughty

& Murray’s (2017, 80) ethnographic study illustrates that disruptions potentially arise from

social relationships and responsibilities of care, with examples from their participants

including: illness of people you care for, injuring yourself, break in the chain of picking

up/dropping off children, end of relationship, personal life events, tooth coming out,

relocating for work, running out of money, unwanted phone calls and so on. Key writers such

as Bissell (2015) and Anderson (2015) have also begun to explore disruptions caused by

actions of the body in terms of decaying habits (Bissell 2015b) and the psychological and

21
physiological experience of jetlag (Anderson 2015). In general however, studies such as these

- into disruption at the scale of the household and body - are still taken far less seriously than

their catastrophic counterparts as they are often simply folded back into our idea of ‘normal’

mobile life (Doughty & Murray 2017). Disruptions at these scales are underrepresented in the

literature and require more engaged attention from mobilities scholars. By exploring

unpredictable mobilities at the everyday scale this project therefore illustrates how ‘change’

can manifest within a journey at a variety of scales and through a variety of potential sources,

not just from external catastrophic events. The papers in this thesis focus explicitly on

changes to everyday mobilities at the scale of the household and the body. Critically, they

illustrate that changes at any scale can have multiple affects for how mobilities are performed

and experienced. Like immobility then, disruption, as it is currently explored by the

mobilities literature, is a useful concept for articulating only a small subset of the multiple

ways a journey can be unsettled.

The most significant issue with coupling together unpredictability and the concept of

disruption however is in the style of emotions and affects which disruption is used to

articulate. Despite the efforts of some mobilities scholars in illustrating that some mobilities

can be marked by unanticipated positive encounters (see empirical examples Gatrell (2013)

on therapeutic walking, Hjorth (2011) on urban gaming, and Edensor (2011) on commuting),

disruptions are still overwhelmingly sensed through the body as a loss of control and comfort.

Disruptions are therefore conflated with a narrow set of emotions, such as being annoyed,

anxious, upset or blindsided (see examples Amit 2012; Bissell 2014a; Howard & Küpers

2019; Jensen 2010; O’Regan 2011) and the affects disruptions have on our abilities to meet

our responsibilities, access places, and be mobile more generally have been equally limited

(see Murray & Doughty 2016 in the context of everyday routines). Scholars also need to be

22
able to account for the ways unpredictability can engender joy, fascination, curiosity, relief,

growth, satisfaction, or awe. If we take inspiration from other areas of social and cultural life,

disruptions can be political, powerful and generative. Think of the ways that community

organising in response to climate change issues can disrupt the values and infrastructures

through which urban cities are assembled (Allen, Lampis & Swilling 2015). Similarly,

Fincher and Iveson (2008) argue that unforeseen encounters can be productive and creative;

critical moments where the disorder of urban life opens up bodies to connect and identify

with forms of difference. So why not see disruptions to everyday mobilities as full of

potential for productivity? This project can give back to an expanded understanding of

‘disruption’ by illuminating the multiplicity and productivity of the quality of unpredictability

for our lived mobilities.

1.3.3 A Note on Power and Everyday Politics

Throughout this introductory chapter there have been glimpses of the ways that mobilities are

embedded in the broader power hierarchies of life. In particular, having the freedom to

control the conditions of our movement experiences is a luxury most prevalent in middle-

class to affluent Western societies, indicative of the ways that particular contexts and

spatialities ‘afford mobility’ (Sheller 2008). This thesis is written from a social and cultural

context in which the author and participants are largely free to craft comfort and control

during their everyday mobilities and participate in the ongoing quest to avoid unpredictability

(Chapter 9). For others, this is absolutely not the case, and unpredictability may in fact be the

given (and unwelcome) reality of their lives, both in their mobilities and otherwise. In this

way, moving towards a social justice praxis recognises that mobility justice is not just about

exclusion from mobility and access to mobility options, but “nurturing their social agency

and personal imaginaries, potentials, and futures” (Cook & Butz 2016, 401) – including the

23
ability to craft comfort and control. It is critical to acknowledge therefore that even as this

project seeks to expand understandings of how unpredictability is lived as a key contribution

to the mobilities literature, it does so in an academic context that already silences many

voices and diverse social and cultural experiences.

Even within middle-class to affluent Western societies however, immobilities and disruptions

are not distributed evenly across different moving bodies. Similarly, there is an everyday

politics to the quality of unpredictability, and this is an underrepresented area of the literature

that this project can speak to. Some bodies disproportionately feel the unwanted impacts of

unpredictability or are expected to perform in particular ways during encounters with

unpredictability. These concerns emerge particularly strongly in one of the papers of this

thesis which focuses on social expectations of bodily capacity during wayfinding via age and

gender. While it is beyond the scope of this thesis, the affects of unpredictable mobilities

will also be felt unevenly across bodies also differentiated by race, sexuality, disability and so

forth, and these ongoing concerns will be considered in Chapters 7 and 9. Rethinking

unpredictability requires scholars to be attentive to the ways that the qualities of

unpredictable mobilities are experienced disproportionately by different moving bodies.

1.3.4 Conclusion

This section has illustrated that unpredictability is often problematically hidden within other

key concepts in the mobilities literature such as immobility and disruption. ‘Immobility’ only

partially aligns with unpredictability as it fails to speak to changes to journeys outside of the

axes of speed and pace, but what it does offer this project is a broader understanding of how

(un)predictable mobilities might operate as a relational category. The narrow focus within the

literature on ‘disruption’ as a set of large scale, negative changes to journeys is also

24
problematic, articulating only a small subset of the ways journeys are unsettled. Rethinking

unpredictability at a variety of scales and with a variety of affects can therefore actually be

useful in reimagining how and where disruptions to mobile life occur. Furthermore, these

concepts tend to frame unpredictability as discrete ‘events’ or ‘moments’ during a linear

journey. In order to speak back to the new mobilities paradigm’s call to deterritorialise

mobilities, this project focuses on lived unpredictability as a broader quality of experience

which becomes salient in moments of affective encounter (for more detail see Chapter 2).

1.4 Project Aims and Objectives: Rethinking Unpredictability

Thus far, this introductory chapter has illustrated that given that the quest for comfort and

control pervades our everyday mobilities, particularly in contemporary Western society,

unpredictability and its affects are narrowly understood as undesirable. For the mobilities

literature, the theme of unpredictability has found itself coupled with other tropes for the

discipline such as immobility and disruption – yet these concepts fail to fully embrace the

generative potentials at the heart of unpredictability. Moreover, not only is unpredictability

narrowly understood, but the empirical realities of how unpredictability is lived, or how it is

animated as an experiential quality for mobile life have not been considered as key

experiences by the mobilities literature. As this project will demonstrate, unpredictable

mobilities are multiple in and of themselves, with multiple affects for a variety of moving

bodies, technologies and places. The temporalities and intensities of these affects are also

multiple, ranging from the fleeting and barely perceptible, right through to severe and life-

changing.

25
Inspired by these opportunities to rethink unpredictability, this project therefore moves

forward with the following aims:

1. To explore how unpredictability is lived in the context of everyday mobilities,

focusing on the affects of unpredictability for moving bodies, technologies, and

places.

2. To rethink narrow descriptions of unpredictability as an undesirable quality by

illustrating its possibilities, multiplicities and productivity for mobile life.

In order to meet these aims, this project pursues four key objectives:

1. To explore the utility of concepts such as friction, liminality and affect for

theorising how and where unpredictability emerges in mobile life.

2. To examine the ways unpredictability intersects with contemporary mobility

practices to affect the character, temporalities, proximities and presencing of everyday

journeys.

3. To examine the ways unpredictability affects the capacities of different moving

bodies and technologies as they collaborate and move together during co-mobile

journeys.

4. To illustrate the inherent multiplicity of the quality of unpredictability and its

affects for encountering place.

26
A key aspect of the aims and objectives of this project is to explore how the quality of

unpredictability is lived. As such, this project will animate unpredictability through an

empirical focus on wayfinding and the experiences of being geographically lost and found in

place. This empirical focus is animated across all five papers produced for this thesis, thus

embedding Aim 1 (how the quality of unpredictability is lived) into all published papers.

Whilst the mobilities and digital communications literature have clearly considered elements

of wayfinding for some time now, an empirical focus on being lost has been almost

completely absent from the literature4. Studies which discuss these experiences position

being lost as the secondary focus: another unwanted expression of immobility, or the

unwanted outcome of disruption or unpredictability. Its absence as an empirical experience is

fundamentally problematic as it camouflages the countless ways that journeys are unsettled,

adjusted, and remade during mobile performances and therefore further reinforces some of

the unrealistic expectations discussed in the previous sections about mobility paths being (or

at the least, should be) relatively knowable or predictable. Furthermore as this thesis will

show, there is an unexplored everyday politics to coping with unpredictability which has bled

into social values regarding what ‘navigation’ or ‘wayfinding’ actually is, who is given the

responsibility for the tasks, and how bodies are likely to perform when they find themselves

lost. It is vital to unpack the social and cultural power hierarchies which are imbued in these

experiences as this too critically impacts the lived realities of unpredictability.

4
In fact, this was the initial inspiration for this thesis. This early focus on being lost and found has been retained
in the first paper of the thesis. However, as the thesis developed it became evident that the absence of stories
about being lost and found actually pointed to broader issues in the way that the mobilities literature narrowly
deals with the theme of unpredictability, thus shifting the focus of the subsequent four thesis papers.

27
 1.4.1 Structure of the Thesis

This introductory chapter has situated how this project will address problematic gaps in the

literature regarding the concept and lived quality of unpredictable mobilities. Chapter 2

outlines the theoretical approach which has informed this project. In order to reorient

understandings of unpredictability towards its multiplicity and underappreciated generative

potentials, this project looks to affective geographies as a set of key theoretical resources.

Affective geographies are useful for this project in attuning my research towards the ongoing

and ever-changing emergent relations and sensations (O’Grady 2018) which circulate in and

through unpredictable mobilities as moving bodies, technologies and places (Aim 1) move

together through the ‘dance of encounter’ (Duarte & Park 2014). Rather than focusing on any

single conceptualisation of affect, Chapter 2 gathers together several threads of literature to

develop an affective geography of unpredictable mobilities that foregrounds possibility,

multiplicity and productivity (Aim 2). More specifically, it will draw out key literature

insights across affective geographies to reimagine the quality of unpredictability as a set of

socio-material affective force relations, considering the ‘experiential dimension’ of affective

intensity (Bissell 2009), the temporalities of lingering affects, and affective encounter as key

conceptual lenses for illuminating the significance of unpredictability for broader mobile life.

Chapter 3 outlines the methodological approach of the thesis. The chapter builds on the

discussion of affective geographies in Chapter 2 to develop an affective methodology of

‘sensitising devices’ (Anderson 2014) for conceptually and practically attuning my fieldwork

gaze towards the elements of the mobile assemblage embedded in the project aims. The

chapter outlines how this affective methodology of ‘sensitising devices’ (Anderson 2014)

was used to inform the design and execution of three key qualitative fieldwork methods:

28
document analysis, autoethnography and semi-structured interviews. The chapter considers

the methodological paradox presented by working with the theme of unpredictability in being

able to simultaneously plan for - yet remain open to - the innumerable ways the affects of

unpredictability might emerge in mobile life. Finally, it concludes by reflecting on the

methodological possibilities afforded by a willingness to embrace the unpredictability of the

research process.

Following Chapter 3, the thesis includes the five publications produced for this project. A

breakdown of the publications is included in Table 2.

29
 Objectives
Title Year Journal Status
Addressed
Journeys unknown:
1 Embodiment, affect, and Geography
2018 Published 1
living with being “lost” and Compass
“found”

Wayfinding with my
iPhone: An
Emotion,
2 autoethnographic account of
2019 Space and Published 2, 3
technological
Society
companionship and its
affects

Co-mobility in the digital

3 age: Changing technologies, Applied
2019 Published 2, 3
and the affects of presence Mobilities
in journeying ‘with’ others

‘They Can’t Read Maps’:

Remaking the limits of Gender,
4 Under
navigational capacity 2021 Place and 2, 3, 4
Review
through gendered and Culture
ageing bodies

Being Lost: Encounters with

5 2020 Mobilities Published 2, 3, 4
strangeness as place

Table 2: Five publications produced for this thesis

The first paper (Chapter 4) tested the utility of a range of conceptual tools for how we might

think about unknown journeys. It focused explicitly on Objective 1 by exploring the concepts

of friction, liminality and affect in the context of popular media accounts of living with the

unpredictability of being lost and found. The conclusions of this paper were insightful for

highlighting the ongoing difficulty in articulating exactly what being ‘lost’ and ‘found’ really

is, indicative of inherent multiplicity and subjectivity of such experiences. This paper was

30
also formative for the early direction of this thesis in highlighting the utility of affect for

thinking through the significance of unpredictability for mobile life.

The second and third papers (Chapters 5 and 6) focus on lived affects of co-mobile bodies

and technologies during unpredictable mobilities, though with slightly different focuses.

Chapter 5 is an autoethnographic account of my everyday wayfinding using a new iPhone 6+

device, illustrating the ways devices can be personalised and personified to become affective

travel companions during journeys. Chapter 6, on the other hand, also used autoethnography

to focus on the compression of co-mobilities across time and space, illustrating the ways I

was simultaneously mobile with physical and digital bodies and the affects this had for

proximity and presence. As such, both of these papers directly address Objectives 2 and 3.

The fourth paper (Chapter 7) draws on semi-structured interviews to interrogate problematic

discourses about the capacities of bodies to cope with unpredictability based on the

constructed categories of age and gender. It illustrates that problematic discourses have

performative power for how older women perform confidence during their everyday

mobilities, and ongoing affects for how they collaborate with their partners during co-mobile

journeys. Importantly, whilst some women embraced changes to their everyday mobilities

brought about by contemporary wayfinding technologies, others drew from wider wayfinding

skill sets developed across their life course. This paper therefore directly addresses

Objectives 2 and 3. Its conclusions also address Objective 4 using the themes of confidence

and co-mobility to illustrate how coping with unpredictability has multiple affects for how

women relate to place, as some interview participants were empowered to move in and

31
through new places on their own, whereas others lacked the opportunity and nerve to venture

to unfamiliar places at all.

The fifth and final paper (Chapter 8) is particularly critical in meeting Objective 4 as it

directly addresses the characteristics of multiplicity and productivity in how unpredictable

mobilities affect place. This paper uses the empirical experience of being lost to extend our

understanding of encountering the stranger-as-figure, to thinking through the possibilities of

encountering strange places. This paper offers a reading of four different styles to being lost –

fearful, inadequate, skilful and lively – each which articulate a different type of encounter,

with different affects, and different experiences of strangeness-as-place. The conclusions of

this paper argue for the inherent multiplicity of experiences of being lost, and draws on

Fincher and Iveson (2008) to illustrate that many of these affects and encounters can be

productive.

Chapter 9 will conclude the thesis. It aims to take the insights of this project about the

multiplicity and generative potentials of unpredictable mobilities into the more-than-human

realm. After outlining how the project has addressed its aims and objectives, it speculates on

the quality of “fickleness” as a way for future mobilities research to give more conceptual

agency to the journey itself. Fickle mobilities captures the sense that human control is an

illusion, and that our journeys will not be loyal in their affinities to us – they are going to

unfold in particular ways regardless of what we want or expect. Given the more-than-human

nature of fickle mobilities, some affects will become salient to us through our bodies and the

process of affective encounter, but countless more will remain hidden from view.

32
1.5 Conclusion

This chapter has provided an introduction to this project in illustrating how unpredictability is

currently narrowly understood both in the mobilities literature and in the ways individuals

expect journeys will unfold. The aims and objectives of this thesis therefore focus on

rethinking unpredictability by giving greater emphasis to the ways unpredictability is lived,

including its inherent multiplicity and generative potentials. The next two chapters will offer

an explanation of how affective geographies provided me with the tools to foreground

multiplicity and productivity, and informed the five papers offered by this thesis.

33
 Chapter 2 - Developing An Affective Geography of Unpredictable
Mobilities

2.1 Introduction

How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?

(Meno, in Plato’s dialogue, quoted in Solnit’s (2006) “A Field Guide to Getting Lost”)

How does one prepare themselves to research unpredictable mobilities when – by their very

nature – we cannot foresee how, where, or when they will unfold? How does one immerse

themselves in the relevant literatures when they cannot foresee which elements of the mobile

assemblage will prove important to unpack? Working with the theme of unpredictability

requires conceptual tools which can attune researchers to multiple forces at play during a

journey and a readiness to embrace the unexpected. In particular, these tools need to widen

our field of view to look beyond the human quest for comfort and control which dominates

daily mobility practices and give space to the variety of unforeseen and underappreciated

socio-material relations which shape journeys. The ‘new mobilities paradigm’ ushered in an

era of renewed academic interest in the embodied everyday microgeographies of mobility

(Urry 2000; Peters, Kloppenburg & Wyatt 2010; Sheller & Urry 2006), however as the

previous chapter illustrated, more work remains to be done to dismantle the distinctly human

and rationalist quality of predictability as a dominant concept for how we understand mobile

journeys. To continue to obscure the presence of unpredictable mobilities from the literature

and focus on the themes of comfort and control contributes to a problematic positioning of

human knowledge and skill mastery at the centre of mobility studies.

34
This thesis draws on theories of affect as critical conceptual resources which bring into

conversation those unexpected, intangible, yet critically significant forces and sensations

which shape journeys through human and non-human moving bodies. Drawing on a

Spinozian understanding of affect, this thesis sees affect as articulating “an ontology of

material force relations unfolding between bodies, whereby each exerts a causal effect and is

constantly impinged upon by others” (Woodward & Lea 2010, 156), embracing the widely

cited definition of affect as the emerging capacities of human and non-human bodies to affect

and be affected (Anderson 2006; Thrift 2004). This reading of affect foregrounds

relationality, connection and transitions between entities, rather than discrete and individual

bodies, as that which “enact(s) the life of everyday life” (Anderson 2006, 735, original

emphasis). Affect ontologically positions life as in a constant state of flux and becoming

through a “set of ever-changing processes human and non-human bodies undergo as they

experience, encounter, and perform life among other bodies within material space” (O’Grady

2018, para 1). Affect therefore ontologically and epistemologically anchors this thesis as I

argue that unpredictable mobilities are an ever-present element of mobile life, emerging

precisely because the broader mobile assemblage is constantly in a state of becoming in ways

we cannot and will not be able to foresee. Furthermore, by foregrounding changing capacities

and interactions as critical ways that everyday life is expressed, affect allows this thesis to

argue for the significance of unpredictable mobilities for how both human and non-human

bodies contemplate and perform mobile journeys. Returning to Meno’s contemplation that

began this chapter, affect recognises the presence and ongoing importance of those ‘things

the nature of which is totally unknown to us’, even – and especially - when we may not be

able to pin them down into comfortable rational human concepts.

35
As affect ontologically informs this thesis it has been embedded in the two aims for the

project. The first aim of this thesis is to explore how the quality of unpredictability is lived in

the context of everyday mobilities, focusing on the affects of unpredictability for moving

bodies, technologies, and places. Given the ongoing neglect of unpredictability from the

mobilities literature, affect widens our field of view to look beyond comfort and control to

various ways unpredictability is lived. Through this first aim, this thesis uses affect to

consider a wider range of bodies and socio-material forces within the mobile assemblage,

including affects sensed through human bodies (such as feelings, physical sensations,

companionship, co-presence and social politics) as well as engaging with the affects of non-

human bodies (in particular, technologies). Affect therefore guides this thesis to “de-

privilege[s] the human as the reservoir of agency in the world” (Woodward & Lea 2010, 157)

for a more complex understanding of how mobile journeys come to be understood and

performed. The second aim of this thesis is to rethink narrow descriptions of unpredictability

as an undesirable quality by illustrating its possibilities, multiplicities and productivity for

mobile life. As affect “bears witness to the complexity and multidimensionality of sociality

and materiality” (Woodward & Lea 2010 157) drawing on affect allows this thesis to

reposition human ideas of comfort and control as just a small subset of the many potential

feelings and sensations made possible when the mobile assemblage comes together in

unpredictable ways. By foregrounding force relations between bodies and the constant flux of

the mobile assemblage, affect gives voice to how unpredictable mobilities may enable

capacities, as well as potentially constrain them.

This chapter is structured as two key sections, with each one focusing on a particular way that

affect has informed this thesis. The first section will focus on how affect widens our field of

view to look beyond comfort, control and predictability for studies of mobility. In this section

36
the chapter draws together several threads of affective inquiry (Pile 2010) and illustrates how

these insights might be useful for researching the theme of unpredictable mobilities. The

themes in this section offer a rethinking of the body-technology relations that constitute

everyday wayfinding practices, looking beyond predictability for other affects sensed through

human bodies such as emotions, haptic sensations and body politics, as well as discussing

potential affects for non-human (technological) bodies. The second section of this chapter

will focus on developing an affective geography of unpredictable mobilities. This section

illustrates that affect provides a rich set of resources for exploring the significance

unpredictable mobilities can have for moving bodies. This section develops an affective

geography of unpredictable mobilities by demonstrating that unforeseen affects bring

particular qualities to journeys. These qualities can be sensed as intensities which shape force

relations in particularly acute ways and can have multiple affects for space/place and for

bodies. Finally, this section discusses the value of affective encounter as a way to begin

thinking through how the messiness of unpredictable journeys touch down on human lives.

2.2 Widening the field of view: rethinking body-technology relations beyond comfort,
control and predictability

In the context of everyday mobilities, particularly in urban Western contexts, negotiating

with unpredictable mobilities takes form via wayfinding practices that are typically expressed

through body-technology relations; navigating journeys with maps, signage, smartphones,

GPS devices or any other number of technical aspects of the mobile assemblage. These

practices, designed to craft comfort, control and predictability during everyday mobilities,

exemplify human attempts to design, manipulate and structure the mobile assemblage in

ways which lead to desirable bodily sensations and pleasurable affective atmospheres

37
“through the arrangement of objects in space” (Ash 2013, 22; Borch 2011; Jensen, Lanng &

Wind 2016). However, the pursuit of predictability can be fruitless given that journeys are

produced through a wide range of socio-material forces, many of which continue to operate

outside human consciousness and control. Even those journeys which may feel as if they

have unfolded smoothly for individual human bodies will have been produced through many

affective relations outside the human and rationalist logics of comfort, control and

predictability. Moreover, whilst comfort, control and predictability are certainly important

motivators for daily mobile practices, there are a wider range of other affects and emotions

which humans call upon in their decision-making (Slovic, Peters, Finucane, & MacGregor

2005) such as joy, curiosity, nostalgia and so forth.

If we are to widen the field of view of journeys beyond comfort, control and predictability

then – what other themes might help us shed light on the various ways that unpredictability is

lived (Aim 1)? What other affective body-technology relations might circulate through these

encounters with unpredictable mobilities? This section of the chapter draws on insights from

scholars from a range of disciplines and illustrates how widening the field of view beyond

comfort, control and predictability impacts how we might think about body-technology

relations and daily practice. In doing so, this discussion makes room for the lived experience

of unpredictability to emerge as an embedded aspect of journey-making. The following

discussion is structured as three sections considering human bodies, non-human bodies

(technologies) and relations between bodies. Rather than being grounded in any one school of

affective or philosophical thought, the approach of this section is to bring together different

threads of affective inquiry (Pile 2010). Using this approach has been critical for the

development of this thesis in ensuring that potentials, multiplicity and productivity (Aim 2)

remain at the forefront of both its theoretical and empirical investigations. In the papers that

38
follow in the thesis, the result of this approach has been that each paper develops ideas about

affective capacities and body-technology relations in different ways.

However, it should be acknowledged here than even many of the different ‘threads of

affective inquiry’ which have been included in this thesis have roots in a Spinozian view of

affect. The turn towards affect over the past two decades which continues to ripple many

discipline areas has been part of “a larger shift in ontological orientations that emphasize

immanence, indeterminacy, and relationality” (Robinson & Kutner 2019, 111) via key

thinkers such as Spinoza, Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari. Spinoza’s work on affect and

the capacities of bodies has been particularly influential for contemporary geographies of

affect, as according to Robinson and Kutner (2019, 115), “Spinoza’s monist ontology laid out

a plane of immanence within which a thinkable conception of posthuman subjectivity could

take shape”. Deleuze’s (1988) work in Spinoza: A Practical Philosophy is also widely cited,

building on Spinoza’s foundational claim that “no one has yet determined what the body can

do” (Spinoza in Ethics 1677). This claim foregrounds much contemporary work which

defines bodies via their affective capacities, rather than by function or form. As Deleuze

(1988, 123) states: “concretely, if you define bodies and thoughts as capacities for affecting

and being affected, many things change. You will define an animal, or a human being, not by

its form, its organs, and its functions, and not as a subject either; you will define it by the

affects of which it is capable. Affective capacity, with a maximum threshold and a minimum

threshold, is a constant notion in Spinoza”. These Spinozian-Deleuzian claims regarding the

affective capacities of bodies are foundational to some of the key ‘affective threads’ pulled

together by this thesis, particularly in the theoretical work of Anderson (2006), Thrift (2004),

Blackman (2012) and Woodward and Lea (2010). Thus, this thesis situates itself loosely

within a Spinozian-Deleuzian view of affect, where the temporal and dynamic capacities of

39
human and non-human (technological) bodies to affect and be affected, make unpredictability

a prevailing and undeniable feature of mobile life. Unpredictability underscores a Spinozian

logic in that no one has yet determined what the mobile assemblage can do.

Two further key features of Spinozian-Deleuzian work on affect should also be

acknowledged here for their influence on the range of theoretical work which has been

included in this thesis. Firstly, Deleuze’s attention to the potential for affects to “enter into

composition with other affects” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 257; McCormack 2007) draws on

a Spinozian conception of ‘modes’, as capacities enter into co-constitutive and more-than-

individual relations of affection (Robinson & Kutner 2019). This view of relationality

underpins the ontological framework developed in this theory chapter, as it argues mobilities

scholars need widen our field of view to consider a broader set of socio-material force

relations that co-constitute unpredictable mobilities. Secondly, this thesis also draws on those

‘threads of affective inquiry’ which have retained a Spinozian-Deleuzian understanding of

affects as being capable of both enhancing the diminishing the limits of a variety of moving

bodies. This work draws on Deleuze (1988, 125) who states: “relations of speed and slowness

are realized according to circumstances, and the way in which these capacities for being

affected are filled. For they always are, but in different ways, depending on whether the

present affects threaten the thing (diminish its power, slow it down, reduce it to the

minimum), or strengthen, accelerate, and increase it”. Thus, this thesis sees the inherent

multiplicity of unpredictability as filled with the affective potential to be both productive and

constraining for a wide variety of moving bodies. These literatures reflect key moves within

contemporary human geography and theories of affect which cannot be ignored. Whilst this

thesis situates itself within a loosely Spinozian view of affect, the theoretical engagements

which follow in this chapter have been chosen as they focus instead on the multiplicity of

40
places that scholars have taken Spinozian-Deleuzian thinking. This strategy has been

deliberately chosen for this thesis in order to highlight that affective geographies are

productive for the exploration of unpredictable mobilities in multiple ways.

2.2.1 Human bodies

Our bodies are the most readily available tool humans have for sensing the world around us.

The turn towards affect across a range of disciplines has injected renewed interest in “the

non-verbal, non-conscious dimensions of experience”: those forms of embodied knowing

through psychic and sensorial apparatuses such as “sensation, memory, perception, attention

and listening” (Blackmen & Venn 2010, 8). An affective ontology sees human bodies - just

as the life of everyday life (Anderson 2006) - as in a constant state of becoming, to be

considered as sites or devices of transpersonal affection rather than discrete and individual

entities (Deleuze & Guattari 1987). Developing a Spinozian line of thinking regarding the

ever yet-to-be-determined quality of bodies, Blackman (2012) argues:

“This new trend of body theory, with its focus on affective energies and creative motion,

characterizes bodies in two ways: by movement and process. Rather than considering bodies

as closed physiological and biological systems, bodies are open, participating in the flow or

passage of affect, characterized more by reciprocity and co-participation than boundary and

constraint (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010). If talk of the natural body was displaced within the

sociology of the body in the 1980s, then talk of the distinctly human, singular body is

displaced within affect theory with its resounding focus on multiplicity and movement”.

(Blackman 2012, 2)

41
Following these lines, this thesis sees the human body as not only a critical site in which the

affects of unpredictable mobilities are sensed and lived (Aim 1), but a critical site through

which the quality of unpredictability may be explored as more than inherently negative (Aim

2) given that bodily capacities are in themselves always yet-to-be-determined. Just as

attempts to control or predict the mobile assemblage are purely cosmetic, attempts to control

or predict how individual bodies will perform or feel during journeys is an ontological

impossibility. The entry point of affect therefore reinforces that the body itself is also open,

unbounded and unpredictable. Mobilities scholars have taken affect and body studies in

multiple directions, however in this chapter I focus on three key ways human bodies sense

and live unpredictable mobilities: emotions, sensoriality and social (body) politics.

The relationship between emotion and affect continues to be debated at length with scholars

focusing largely on distinguishing (or blurring) the boundaries of the psychological realms

within which each operates. Emotion is generally understood as personal sensations which

become labelled as particular feelings (Shouse 2005) and affect through a Spinozian-

Deleuzian lens as the prepersonal or transpersonal (Pile 2010) capacities of bodies to affect or

be affected. Rather than engaging with these debates here, this thesis instead draws on work

which seeks to articulate the relationship between emotion and affect. Puar (2009) suggests

that if affect is impersonal, then emotion is the capture of affect or sensation, and for Shouse

(2005, para 11) the two concepts have a reciprocal relationship: “without affect feelings do

not “feel” because they have no intensity, and without feelings rational decision-making

becomes problematic. In short, affect plays an important role in determining the relationship

between our bodies, our environment, and others, and the subjective experience that we

feel/think as affect dissolves into experience”. For unpredictable mobilities this means that at

times unexpected affects are felt with such personal and temporal intensity they are pinned

42
down by human bodies and labelled as emotions or feelings, whereas at other times the

affects of unpredictable mobilities remain far more unconscious, intangible and often well

outside the human field of view. Focusing on the relationality between affect and

emotion/sensation will prove important later in this chapter in developing an affective

geography of unpredictable mobilities, as well as in subsequent papers.

Emotion is critical to researching unpredictable mobilities as it is entangled with the risk-

taking and decision-making processes called upon during the lived experience of wayfinding.

Spatial navigation and negotiation involve more than simply being able to locate oneself on a

map: they are forms of psychological world-building and learning processes which help

humans develop ‘inhabitant knowledge’ about the world around them (Ingold 2000; Sennett

1977). Yet all too often wayfinding is framed as a rational decision-making process in which

humans seek to solve the spatial ‘problem’ of being lost, making decisions based on ideas of

speed, reliability, efficiency and success, and from seemingly ‘objective’ sources of

information such as maps, devices and signage which ‘represent’ space and place (Kitchin &

Dodge 2007; MacEachren 1995; Perkins 2003; Taylor 1991; Wood 2010; Wright 1942). The

theme of ‘predictability’ also fits within this problematic rationalist logic. Psychological

studies however have long pointed to emotion and affect as vital and undeniable decision-

making resources that humans use in daily life:

“The experiential system is assumed to be intimately associated with the experience of affect,

which refer[s] to subtle feelings of which people are often unaware. When a person responds

to an emotionally significant event [...] the experiential system automatically searches its

memory banks for related events, including their emotional accompaniments.”

(Epstein 1994, 716 in Slovic, Peters, Finucane & MacGregor 2005, 4)

43
The ongoing focus on predictability as a yardstick for human decision-making underplays the

critical importance of emotion in our daily lives. Drawing on theories of emotion and affect

therefore contributes to destabilising seeing wayfinding as a techno-rational body-technology

negotiation and widens the field of view to appreciate emotions as important ways humans

negotiate the complexities of unpredictable mobilities. The stories included in the papers for

this thesis illustrate that a wide variety of emotions are entangled with mobile decision-

making.

Beyond wayfinding, emotions are also a key way unpredictable mobilities are lived and

experienced through human bodies (for example, in the thrill or terror of being lost). Chapter

1 illustrated that thus far unpredictable journeys have been scarcely considered by the

mobilities literature, and even when considered they are connected to a particularly narrow

suite of negative emotions. As such, questions about emotion are embedded heavily in the

research design of this thesis (Chapter 3) and all five papers that follow illustrate that a wide

variety of emotions are entangled with lived experience of unpredictable mobilities: with

fear, anxiety, stress, anger, disbelief, emptiness, isolation, disappointment, relief, wonder,

pride, joy, curiosity, thrill, comfort, accomplishment, reassurance, surprise and happiness all

being expressed by participants. Emotions are the ‘connective tissue’ between the embodied

self and place - “comfort, belonging, desire, and fear felt in and through the body shape

attachments to place” (Gorman-Murray 2009, 414). As such, we need to widen the field of

view and give the emotions of unpredictable mobilities significant attention as they are

experiences which shape how everyday life feels for human bodies.

The second theme considered in this section is sensoriality. The body can scarcely be

considered without discussing the ways that human bodies actually feel their environments:

the basics of sight, touch, sound, smell, and taste (Paterson 2007). But far from simply

44
providing humans with feedback about their worlds, the senses are enmeshed with affect.

According to Hamilakis (2017, 171) “sensoriality cannot be separated from affectivity: in

other words, that the primary role of the senses is not to allow the organic body to operate,

but to enable affectivity, to establish affective connections, to allow us to be ‘touched’ by

other bodies, by things, by the atmosphere, and by the world in general”. Affect compels

physical actions and enables and constrains physical bodily capacities (Abrahamsson &

Simpson 2011; Deleuze 1988; Deleuze & Guattari 1987). Affects can manifest into emotions

or physical sensations that are felt in the body: a stomach in knots with the looming

uneasiness of not being able to recognise its surroundings, or the warm sting of sunburn that

lingers on a body returning home from a holiday. Furthermore, there are specific sensorial

experiences associated with unpredictable mobilities that can have affects for how bodies feel

and perform. For example, Paper 1 considers how bodies who are lost can feel as if they are

in a liminal state of being: a sensation in which the body feels dislocated from familiar

surroundings and where the micro-percepts of sight, sound, taste, smell and touch feel as if

they fail to connect the body to its surrounding environment. This dislocation has affects for

visions of oneself, physical performances and altered perceptions of time and space. Like

emotion then, sensoriality is a key way that unpredictability is lived through the human body

and exploring the ways affect and sensoriality shape journeys further widens our field of

view beyond the rationalist logics of control and predictability.

The senses are also important for this thesis however in thinking through the ways that

contemporary wayfinding technologies are used by human bodies in response to

unpredictable mobilities. Mobilities, spaces and places are engineered in ways to try and

make navigation as easy as possible and there are a wide range of empirical studies which

pay particular attention to the technical and infrastructural systems which facilitate navigation

45
in our everyday lives (examples Ishkawa et al 2008; Li & Goodchild 2013; Xiao & Zhang

2002). Importantly however, the rapid proliferation of information and communication

technologies (ICTs) which assist wayfinding over the last decade has sparked a significant

shift in how wayfinding is performed in daily life. Now, spatial information is accessed and

manipulated through touch as fingers flick, pinch and pull at smartphone screens. Virtual

companions communicate through audio prompts. And wearable smart watches vibrate on

arms to indicate turn-by-turn map directions. Haptic sensation has therefore become even

more embedded in daily mobility practices and an important mediator for how we sense

space and place, building “a sensory knowing-ness of the fingers that correlates with what

appears on the small screen.” (Richardson 2012, 144). But as Paper 2 will demonstrate,

haptic sensation is not only important to performing the basic functions of technical

wayfinding objects in accessing spatial information, but also produces affective relations for

how human bodies relate to objects with intimacy or companionship, and how human bodies

extend connections to other bodies across time and space. For example, Sadat, Hossain and

Mahmud (2014) found that the amount of pressure applied on iPhone screens “varies with the

user’s emotion and substantially it increases when he [sic] is in excited or angry moods” (p2),

illustrating how the micro-senses of touch can become overlayed with emotion or affective

force. Considering the affective sensoriality in this way further dismantles predictability as a

dominant lens of analysis for mobility practices and illustrates the ways emotions and affects

are thoroughly woven into so many elements of human journey-making and body-technology

relations.

Finally, human bodies are, of course, also produced through the power geometries of

everyday life. In rejecting an essentialist view of human bodies - and recognising that bodies

are discursive and multiple - affective geographies see the identities/subjectivities that bodies

46
perform as constructed and reinforced through socio-political ideologies and institutions

(Moss & Dyck 2002; Woodward & Lea 2010). In particular, this thesis is interested in how

relations of power and subjectivity have affects for the spatiality of bodies, as well as the

limits placed on bodies. For example Paper 4 illustrates that female and ageing bodies are

often restricted from performing everyday navigational tasks. These household roles -

reinforced through social discourse - result in some older women lacking the navigational

confidence to explore new places (ie they are spatially restricted) as well as having limited

opportunities to experiment with the skills of wayfinding (ie limits are placed on their

navigational capacities). These examples from Paper 4 illustrate that affects are shared

between moving bodies as “we do continually and simultaneously give shape to each other,

sometimes violently, sometimes lovingly” (Verhage 2014, 103). Most importantly, there is a

multi-directional relationship between affect and the power geometries of everyday life in

that “social differences require sustained performance and, as such, have affective power in

themselves.” (Woodward & Lea, 2010, 164). There is an undeniable and long history of

feminist scholarship which has sought to dismantle these kinds of problematic identity and

body categories, and the resurgence of affect has only reinforced further the constructed

nature of human bodies (Deleuze 1988). Affect is therefore useful for this thesis in widening

our field of view beyond control and predictability to explore the ways that power and

discourse also affect lived experiences of unpredictable mobilities, and the ways affects are

not shared equally across human bodies, nor across body-technology relationships.

2.2.2 Non-human bodies (digital technologies)

As Chapter 1 illustrated, wayfinding technologies have become an increasingly ubiquitous

part of contemporary mobile life. In part, this ubiquity has inspired a broader turn towards the

‘digital’ within human geography. Much recent work on the ‘digital’ extends beyond the

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materialities of those computational technologies we have come to know in our everyday

lives, “to encompass ontics, aesthetics, logics and discourses” (Ash, Kitchin & Leszczynski

2018, 26). According to Ash, Kitchin & Leszczynski (2018), three key moves can be

identified within the ‘digital turn’ in human geography literatures. These include:

geographies through the digital (the digital as a site, mode, and object of/for the production of

knowledge, including critical cartography and feminist critiques of representation);

geographies produced by the digital (the ways the digital mediates the contemporary

production of space and socio-spatial relations, with implications for political economies,

smarts cities and the politics of the ‘digital divide’); and geographies of the digital (exploring

the digital as a particular geographic domain with its own logics and structures, including

practices and communities such as cyberspace, gaming, social media, and the ubiquity of

algorithms and datafied space). The empirical papers that follow in this thesis are an

engagement with and across each of these three areas, illustrating that the infrastructures,

practices and epistemologies of digital wayfinding tools are critical to the production of

cartographic knowledges, relations between bodies and with urban spaces, and the

development of particular digital communities and modes of everyday practice. Furthermore,

many of the critiques offered in Chapter 1 of this thesis regarding the distinctly human logics

of comfort, control and predictability - facilitated by problematic assumptions that

contemporary wayfinding technologies provide users with rational and ‘objective’ spatial

information – tap into existing debates within digital geographies about the implications of

the increasing role of ‘code’ in structuring everyday human activity (Dodge & Kitchin 2005).

Thus, this thesis situates itself within this broader turn towards digital geographies with a

specific focus on how digital bodies are intertwined with everyday expressions of mobility.

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More specifically however, to widen the field of view beyond comfort, control and

predictability, this chapter is guided by recent work from digital geographies exploring the

potential affects 5 of non-human bodies (technologies) and their contribution to the mobile

assemblage. The affects of digital communication technologies reorder the human field of

view or the ‘horizon of possibilities’ for human action (Dodge & Kitchin 2005; Richardson

2012; Leszczynski 2014). Viewed through a post-human lens, wayfinding technologies are

consciously used to extend the limits of what human bodies can do (Wilson 2009). For

example the audio prompts built into running smartphone apps and delivered to human

bodies through headphones, provide information such as pace and distance which can help

human bodies make decisions about whether to move faster and push their physical

capabilities (see the autoethnographic accounts in Paper 2). The turn-by-turn directions

provided by in-car GPS devices can provide users with the confidence to travel via new

routes and through new places. At the same time however, the affective relations between

users and technical objects can also hold the potential to constrain bodily capacities. Human

bodies can bump buttons which stop devices working or move into areas that wifi signals

don’t reach. Some technologies will only function in ways that can be exclusionary for

particular types of bodies. What these insights indicate is that when the affects of

technologies collide with human lives they can therefore expand and restrict our capacities

for movement (Deleuze 1988; Spinney 2007) in terms of physical movement markers like

speed and distance, but also to move in the way we had hoped or imagined. Drawing on

affect therefore helps reimagine the body-technology relations of wayfinding as emergent,

reciprocal transactions which contribute to the ongoing shaping of bodily capacities, rather

5
There is an ontological and ethical dilemma in that researchers – as humans – cannot speak for non-human
bodies. We can however, theorise how their affects might intersect with human bodies and simultaneously
acknowledge that the affects of non-human bodies are things ‘the nature of which is totally unknown to us’.

49
than seeing these technologies as ‘black boxes’ defined solely by their textual outputs for

users6 (Ash 2013).

Emotions are also critically bound up in how human bodies relate to wayfinding

technologies. Increasingly, users ascribe wayfinding technologies with human emotions and

characteristics as a way to negotiate body-technology relations. For example, Li, Rong and

Thatcher (2009) explore the idea of technology ‘trust’, suggesting that the perceived

trustworthiness of technology has a significant influence on user behaviour. Their empirical

investigations revealed that users often personified their devices as a ‘virtual advisor’ and

measured their emotions towards technology using inter-personal attributes such as ‘honesty’,

treating them as social actors subject to social rules. Sadat, Hossain and Mahmud (2014)

examine human affection for smartphones, suggesting that users’ behaviour towards their

smartphones is moderated by voice and body language to communicate emotions such as joy,

anger, pleasantness, dominance and so on. Furthermore, Wegner and Ward (2013) illustrate

that users invite personal assistants like Siri into their social circles, treating her as a trusted

companion whom they can offload memories to, just as they would a human partner. These

empirical studies are indicative of a new wave of research on ‘affective computing’ which is

already recognising body-technology relations are flush with affect and emotion. For this

thesis, these literatures indicate that rationalist concepts such as control and predictability can

6
Recent work in digital geographies has highlighted a myriad of ethical dimensions which come with ‘opening
the black box’. Amoore (2020, 5) argues that in doing so we must “institute arrangements that are good, ethical,
and normal, […] to prevent the transgression of societal norms by the algorithm”. Namely, there are ongoing
debates of the implications of blurring the boundaries of the human/technology subject, in terms of who is held
accountable for the ethical decisions made by non-human bodies. Examples include Amoore’s work on the
governance of algorithms in security, policing and militant procedures (Amoore 2009; Amoore & Raley 2016)
and Dodge and Kitchin’s (2007) work on the governmentality of automated cars and carspaces. Whilst these
important debates lie outside the immediate context of this thesis, there are links between this work and
questions raised by forfeiting individual (human) agency when using wayfinding tools such as GPS devices and
apps to guide everyday travel decisions.

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no longer be considered the only lenses of analysis for how technologies affect human

capacities whilst on the move. The papers of this thesis draw extensively on these insights to

further widen the field of view for how wayfinding technologies are understood during

mobile life.

Thus far, this discussion of technical objects as non-human bodies is somewhat handcuffed

by our inability as researchers to step outside our human bodies. The way we understand and

relate to technical objects will always be within a human knowledge framework, meaning

much pre-existing work on affect and technology focuses on how body-technology relations

restructure human experiences. The work of James Ash (2013) however goes some way to

acknowledging those affects of technical objects which operate outside of human

consciousness. Ash develops Bryant’s (2011) idea of objects having ‘perturbations’ which

structure affective atmospheres for both the humans and non-humans within them. A key

example from his influential paper (Ash 2013) discusses how the various signal strengths

emitted by iPhones - depending specifically on how they are held by their users - create

perturbations which can serve to speed up or slow down timespaces of information access for

human bodies. Ultimately however, Ash (2013) suggests that “humans can attempt to

demarcate and map the overlapping atmospheres at which specific objects (such as wireless

signals) are present, but their exact proximity and extension often remains out of reach or

vague, precisely because many of the perturbations that take place between objects are

inaccessible to humans and, indeed, other objects” (p27). This reading of the affects of

technical objects proves particularly useful for Paper 2 as it develops ideas about human-

technology companionship. Overall, Ash’s (2013) understanding of the affects of objects

illustrates the power of affective geographies to “de-privilege[s] the human as the reservoir of

agency in the world, instead founding action upon a series of bodies-in-moving-relation that

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incorporates both the human and the ‘more-than-human’” (Woodward & Lea 2010, 157).

Once again, affect has proved a useful tool for widening the field of view beyond

predictability to acknowledge the multiplicity of affects which contribute to journey-making

– many of which, as Ash (2013) illustrates – ‘the nature of which is totally unknown to us’

(Meno, in Plato’s dialogue).

2.2.3 Affects within and between bodies

In part, rejecting narrow techno-rational views of wayfinding also requires acknowledgment

that using such devices is a more-than-singular and more-than-linear process7 marked by the

potentials for a multiplicity of affective relations. Throughout the previous sections we have

already begun to see glimpses of the various ways that relations are shared across body-

technology subjects. This speaks to a broader ontological question for how affects are

disseminated or shared across different elements of the mobile assemblage: a question which

has already prompted significant debate from scholars working with affective geographies.

As suggested by Pile (2010) working out exactly how affects are mobile themselves is

incredibly difficult, and many scholars have problematically drawn on “metaphors such as

circulation, transmission and dissemination which imply substance and a particular style of

movement relation” (p16). This challenge is particularly acute for a subdiscipline such as

mobilities whose foundational interests lie in describing and interrogating movement.

7 Alltoo often wayfinding is framed as a singularly linear process: users request information from devices,
devices provide an output, users interpret this data and make decisions about which route to take.

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Whilst being conscious of these types of challenges, this thesis focuses less on describing

exactly how affects move between bodies, but how affect moves across time and space to

bring multiple bodies into relation with one another during a journey. According to

Woodward and Lea (2010, 8) affect “connects bodies, and makes them proximate, by flowing

between them”. Affect is both within and between bodies (Deleuze & Guattari 1987).

This line of thinking sheds some light on how we might begin to understand how seemingly

disparate and often unforeseen events which crop up during unpredictable mobilities can

come together to influence the mobile capacities of human and non-human bodies. The ways

that affects ‘makes proximate’ seemingly disparate elements of the mobile assemblage whilst

on the move reappears several times throughout the papers of this thesis. For example, Paper

1 uses affect to hypothesise how the experiences of being lost and found can linger in bodies

as sensations and memories which inflect how future journeys are performed: affect flowing

through a body to make different journeys feel proximate across time and space. Paper 2

explores affects such as intimacy and companionship which emerge as a human body learns

to move with a new smartphone device, illustrating how the separate life journeys of human

and technological bodies become proximate in acute moments of encounter. Paper 3 develops

ideas about the nature of co-mobility in the digital era through the affects of ‘presence’

afforded by technologies which simultaneously make proximate - both physically and

virtually - co-present bodies during a journey. Paper 4 explores the affective power of social

politics/discourse for navigational capacity, illustrating how older women’s wayfinding

confidence is the embodied outcome of disparate affective messaging across a lifetime made

proximate in moments of uncertainty. And Paper 5 focuses on the multiplicity of styles to

being lost, and how these affective encounters make proximate different affects for how

strange places are perceived.

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Affect therefore provides us a new way to think about unpredictable mobilities: one which

normalises unforeseen connections between seemingly disparate elements of the mobile

assemblage. It continues to displace the human experience as the “reservoir of agency in the

world” (Woodward & Lea 2010, 157) and instead illustrates that affect holds potential for a

variety of different relations to emerge by bringing together multiple human and non-human

bodies during both single journeys, and between journeys across time and space. In fact, as

the papers of this thesis illustrate, affect flowing through a body can make proximate the

feelings of multiple journeys across an entire lifecourse. Ultimately, this reading of mobile

life clearly extends well outside the pursuits of comfort, control and predictability which are

so often used to describe human mobility experiences. The next section of the chapter will

build on these ideas and move towards developing an affective geography of unpredictable

mobilities in order to unpack and reimagine the character and significance of unpredictability.

2.3 Developing an affective geography of unpredictable mobilities

Affective geographies provide this thesis with a rich set of conceptual resources to reimagine

what unpredictability is, and how it operates as a quality of experience for mobile life. The

following sections of this chapter therefore develop an affective toolkit to guide empirical

analysis throughout the thesis. Drawing on an ontology of affect, this section begins by

reimagining unpredictability to focus on possibilities, multiplicities and productivity, rather

than control. Then, the chapter discusses the affective power of unpredictability for how

bodies move through their environments that is sensed via changes in intensities and

temporalities of places and for bodies. Finally, this section concludes by turning towards

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affective encounter as a way of articulating how the unpredictability of journeys touches

down on human lives in specific moments where elements of the mobile assemblage become

salient to moving bodies. However the myriad affects of journeys themselves remain well

outside the human lenses of knowledge and control.

2.3.1 Reimagining the ‘quality’ of unpredictability

“Feelings have a way of folding into each other, resonating each other, interfering with each

other, mutually intensifying, all in unquantifiable ways apt to unfold again in action, often

unpredictably” (Massumi on affect, 2002, 1)

Referring to a body, place, object or experience as having a particular ‘quality’ refers to the

process of assigning that thing a particular set of associated feelings or sensations. Whilst

qualities can appear to human bodies as intrinsic to particular environments or experiences,

they are ultimately the result of the human processing of affect through cognition (Harman

1990). Qualities are therefore an expression of the capture of affect. As Chapter 1 illustrated,

the quality of unpredictability is used to express human order undone and so the emotional

markers used to describe it as a quality of experience position it as the feared ‘other’ to

human comfort and control: unpredictability is (un)stable, (un)dependable, (un)reliable,

(un)manageable and the (un)known. These descriptions are predicated on a problematic

worldview that sees the accumulation of human knowledge as key to understanding

mobilities. Why must those unpredictable things - ‘the nature of which is unknown to us’ -

necessarily be feared, othered and assigned negative qualities? Why are unpredictable

mobilities rarely described using other words with more open quality associations, like

mysterious, curious, strange or fickle? Inspired by the ways that affect is ontologically

55
framed as changes in capacity (Anderson 2006; Deleuze 1988; Thrift 2004), this thesis

reimagines the quality of unpredictability as fundamentally operating as a category of

affective force relations for change, rather than an inherent set of characteristics.

Unpredictability functions outside of human consciousness (comfort/control) with undeniably

real affective consequences for the timespaces and socio-material force relations experienced

by bodies on the move. Such a view steps away from placing a value judgement on

unpredictability as undesirable, and instead sees unpredictability as inherently multiple, full

of potential, and equally productive for mobile life as it is constraining (Aim 2).

Once we reimagine the quality of unpredictability as a broader category of affective force

relations, possibilities open up to think through various ways unpredictability can alter human

perceptions of time and space (including, but not limited to, those feared feelings of being

‘out-of-control’). Furthermore, by redirecting the focus of unpredictability to capacities, an

affective reading of unpredictability as quality helps articulate how experiences with the

unknown can have ongoing significance for future journey-making, visions of the self and

place relations. As such, this section of the chapter develops an affective geography of

unpredictable mobilities by theorising how unpredictability is sensed as shifts in the

intensities and temporalities of mobile experience. It will draw on key concepts from

affective geographies including intensity, temporality and encounter to develop an affective

toolkit for researching the lived experiences of unpredictability.

2.3.2 Intensities

Affective intensities articulate the potency of experience. If affects are shifts in capacity,

affective intensities describe the relative strength of how those shifts feel during particular

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moments of encounter: strong, weak, subtle, lasting and so on (Bissell, Vannini & Jensen

2016; Deleuze & Guattari 1987). Intensities are “central to how our surroundings feel as we

encounter and move through them” (original emphasis, Surmartojo et al 2016, 35). According

to Bissell (2009, 1) intensity is therefore a way of “coming to know the qualitative

experiential dimension of affect as diminished or heightened”. Scholars have already taken

up affective intensity as a conceptual tool for examining a range of empirical themes,

however intensity is particularly useful in the context of unpredictable mobilities as

deviations from routine (Bissell 2009), and therefore predictability, are frequently connected

to particularly acute shifts in affective capacity. For example, of vibration, Bissell (original

emphasis, 2009, 483) writes:

“Some vibrations slide to background milieu, whilst others demand to be noticed. A

heightened sensitivity might emerge from the inclusion into the soundscape of the journey an

unexpected noise which confounds the habitual circuits of sense‐making whilst travelling. Or

a slight change in motion; a sequence of unexpected lateral jerks and winces. Perhaps a sense

that something is not quite as it should be. A sense that heightens intensities and quickens

heartbeats.”

Whilst written specifically about vibration, this work illustrates the affective intensity of

unpredictability – those unexpected and out of the norm events during this train journey

result in moments of heightened affective intensity, with results for how bodies feel in their

environments. These insights prove a useful guide for the papers of this thesis as fieldwork

participants describe how some lived experiences of unpredictability came with different

emotional and affective intensities to others, and this was often connected to context, routine

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and habit. For example Paper 5 argues that the affective intensity of being lost in a familiar

environment – where the expectation of being able to control mobilities is also heightened –

is actually far more intense than being lost in a foreign environment. ‘Intensities’ provided a

lens to explain why some experiences of unpredictability were particularly significant and

therefore easy for participants to recall during fieldwork interviews, or were chosen to be

shared by popular media users from my document analysis methodology, whereas countless

others across their lifecourse slid into the background of mobile experience.

But intensity is not only a useful concept for unpacking the strength of relations in-the-

moment, as intensities are also woven with different temporalities which can ‘make

proximate’ relations across time and space. Affect flows through bodies to connect disparate

experiences and give them acute and fresh intensity. For example, both popular media users

whose stories were gathered through document analysis and fieldwork interview participants

described how strong emotional memories of being lost (or successfully finding one’s way)

on previous journeys could bubble up during a future journey and quickly escalate feelings of

uneasiness or satisfaction. Moreover, many participants suggested that the new body-

technology performances required by wayfinding technologies only served to further

intensify such experiences (Surmartojo et al 2016) as they were forced to learn to perform

their mobilities with new and complex non-human companions. For others, affective

intensities could also feel cumulative, with participants describing that the stress of

unpredictable mobilities made other pressures during a journey “feel heavier”, with bodies

feeling ‘mounting’ intensities as journeys became increasingly unpredictable. This

cumulative impact could span a single journey (Paper 1 and Paper 5) or even span a whole

lifetime to inflect navigational confidence (Paper 1 and Paper 4). These examples are

indicative of the earlier commentary from this chapter on the ways the affects of

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unpredictable mobilities are shared across body and technology relations to make proximate

seemingly disparate elements of the mobile assemblage. Affective intensity has therefore

proved a particularly useful conceptual tool for this thesis in illustrating the multiplicity of

strengths with which unpredictability is experienced, and often, the extreme significance that

unpredictable mobilities can have for mobile life.

2.3.3 Temporalities

Affect ontologically elucidates a world in a constant state of becoming and marked by

relations of flux and change (O’Grady 2018). However within this complex web of relations

“some associations cohere and persist (such that we take them as concrete and permanent)”

(Woodward & Lea 2010, 57) whereas others feel like they expire more quickly. Affects

themselves are therefore felt with different temporal qualities such as fleeting, transient,

lingering or sticky. Furthermore, as affects shift capacities, one of the ways affects can be

realised is through altered bodily perceptions of time (such as bodies animated by feelings of

suspense (Thain 2017), anticipation (Adams, Murphy & Clarke 2009), waiting (Bissell 2007),

boredom (Anderson 2004) or dislocation (Anderson 2015). This section of the chapter

considers how the quality of unpredictability is temporally realised for bodies and for places

in two key ways: firstly, by sticking or lingering within these elements of the mobile

assemblage, and secondly by compressing or altering how time and space feel for human

bodies during a journey. Thinking through the changing temporalities of affective capacity

therefore provides this thesis with another set of affective resources with which to unpack

unpredictable mobilities.

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 2.3.3.1 Temporality and space/place

Scholars have worked with ‘affective atmospheres’ as one way to theorise how affects are

shared relationally between co-present bodies (Anderson 2009; Brennan 2004). Affective

atmospheres are often connected to spaces or places to articulate how affects are

simultaneously anchored to, and mobile within particular environments. For example,

mobilities scholars have discussed the affective atmospheres of mobility ‘moorings’

(Hannam, Sheller & Urry 2006) such as train carriage spaces or airplane cabins (examples

Bissell 2010; Hughes, Mee &Tyndall 2016; Lin 2014) and how affects can be shared

relationally between bodies moving within those spaces. This thesis takes up these ideas

about how affect can become temporally situated through atmosphere to theorise how

unpredictability can both move with individuals in space and feel anchored to particular

places. For example, in the same way that scholars have argued that affective atmospheres

can dwell within public transport moorings, participants in my thesis described the affective

atmosphere within the personal car space when encountering unpredictability. Participants

shared stories of the mounting tension within the car space when driving repeatedly around

the same streets trying to find an unknown location (Paper 1) – tensions that significantly

escalated the longer wayfinding took, the closer participants came to failing some sort of

personal responsibility (eg missing an appointment time) and critically, significantly

escalated when sharing the car space with others (such as a partner – see Paper 4). Once

parked, leaving the vehicle provided a temporal ‘break’ away from this atmosphere and

signalled a new stage in the navigational process as bodies transitioned from navigation-by-

car to navigation-by-foot.

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In the same vein, an atmosphere of unpredictability can also persist in place across the

lifecourse of an individual’s wayfinding experiences. Several interview participants, as well

as my own autoethnographic reflections, described how memories of being lost in a place

made them/myself associate that place with being ‘difficult’ or ‘tricky’ in contemplating

future journeys. Not only did these sorts of lingering atmospheres influence how particular

places are perceived, but they also constrained the mobility of some participants. For

example, Paper 4 shares the story of a group of older women who no longer drive to Sydney

as they do not feel confident in navigating the city’s complex arrangement of motorways,

multiple exits and fast-moving traffic. Affective atmospheres therefore provided this thesis

with a conceptual tool for thinking through how the quality of unpredictability is mobile

within individuals and yet simultaneously temporally anchored to particular spaces and

places.

Finally, affect can also temporally make proximate bodies across distance (Woodward & Lea

2010), and therefore alter human perceptions of space and place. In particular, there is an

extensive literature of the various ways new smartphone devices, with the capabilities to

support a range of different travel apps and tools, connect distant bodies to allow them to feel

co-present during the same journey (Green 2006; Southern 2012). The second and third

papers in this thesis illustrate the ways that wayfinding technologies compress how distance

is experienced as disparately located bodies can feel proximate during a journey. Clearly

then, not only is unpredictability temporally realised through the stickiness of its affects to

particular spaces and places, but unpredictability is manifested in affects that connect

disparate bodies to alter the bodily perception of distance. Alongside intensity then,

considering these temporal dimensions of affect is an important aspect to developing an

affective geography of unpredictability.

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 2.3.3.2 Temporalities and bodies

Just as affects can feel temporally anchored to spaces and places, affects can also ‘seem to get

into’ bodies (Probyn 2010) or ‘stick’ to bodies and linger within them (Ahmed 2004; Kofoed

& Ringrose 2012; Diaz-Fernandez & Evans 2020). Sticky or lingering affects emerged across

all papers of this thesis in the ways that the affects of unpredictability were internalised to

influence how individuals viewed themselves and their navigational capabilities; and this

internalisation ultimately impacted the decisions they made during performances of everyday

wayfinding, and the overall scope and spatiality of their movements. Ahmed (2004) and

Kofoed and Ringrose’s (2012) work on ‘sticky’ affects is particularly useful here as it brings

together work on affect and subjectivity to unpack those “force relations which (temporarily)

glue certain affects to certain bodies” (p9). In particular, Paper 4 explores the politics of

wayfinding through the identity categories of age and gender to illustrate how the affects of

problematic discourses about navigational capacities lingered within particular types of

bodies in ways that constrained their mobile practices across the lifecourse. In developing an

affective geography of unpredictable mobilities it is therefore useful to consider not only how

the reimagined quality of unpredictability can persist in spaces and places, but also be

internalised and linger within particular bodies.

Another way that the affects of unpredictability are temporally realised is through altering the

human body’s perception of time - speeding up, slowing down or suspending the everyday

rhythms of bodies. Unpredictability dislocates human bodies from the familiar habits,

rhythms and time geographies associated with everyday mobilities, and this experience can

place the body into a liminal state of being in which time feels to move differently.

Anderson’s (2015) work on jetlag is particularly insightful here as it brings together several

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of these themes regarding the relationship between bodies, affect and temporality. Anderson

(2015) argues that jetlagged bodies are placed in a liminal ‘state’ by being dislocated from

the familiar time geographies of everyday life, often resulting in them performing behaviours

outside of the norm, such as sleeping at irregular times. Critically, jetlag lingers within these

bodies for several days beyond the mobile mooring of the airplane cabin in the quality of

‘grogginess’ meaning that altered perceptions of time are both immediately felt post-travel,

but also longer-lasting for bodies across days or even weeks. Inspired by this work, the

papers in this thesis illustrate that being lost similarly places bodies into a liminal state which

causes them to experience time differently, such as the way time seems to tick faster as

bodies deal with being lost on the way to an appointment. Like distance then, this discussion

illustrates that the quality of unpredictability operates as a category of force relations which

can compress, slow or alter how bodies sense time. Affect therefore provides this thesis with

a set of conceptual tools for more nuanced readings of the complex relations between affects,

bodies and time.

2.3.4 Affective encounters

Many of the affects of unpredictability operate outside human consciousness as they are

“entangled in a ceaseless process of assemblage” (Duarte & Park 2014, 259; Haraway 2008).

Given the ‘ceaseless’ intertwining of affective relations in unpredictable ways, this thesis

turns to the concept of affective encounter as a way to articulate how some affects are

rendered recognisable through bodies via cognition, whilst countless others remain as

impressions that are impossible to articulate, or in fact, are completely inconceivable for

human subjects. According to Colman (2005) (in Kofoed & Ringrose 2012, 9), affect in a

Spinozian-Deleuzian-Guattarian understanding “is the change, or variation, that occurs when

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bodies collide, or come into contact. As a body, affect is the knowable product of an

encounter [...], yet it is also as indefinite as the experience of a sunset, transformation, or

ghost”. In this quote, Colman (2005) articulates the ongoing multiplicity and variability of

affect, but most usefully, uses ‘encounter’ to articulate that some affects become more salient

than others when bodies collide. The concept of encounter therefore provides this thesis with

a neat way to contend with the vast and ongoing unknowable-ness of unpredictable

mobilities. Encounter illustrates that in some moments, the elements of the assemblage which

have influenced our mobilities feel much easier for human bodies (and indeed, scholars) to

identify - even if only with benefit of hindsight. Reflecting on the document analysis,

autoethnography and semi-structured interviews conducted for this thesis, the individual

vignettes which have been included in the final paper are particular moments of encounter in

which participants have felt they can identify some of the disparate elements which came

together to produce that particular mobile experience. My own positionality as a researcher

working with affect attunes me to multiple layers even within these participant encounters,

yet many more affects would remain outside our collective grasp. In developing an affective

geography of unpredictable mobilities, encounter is therefore a useful way to think about how

and why particular styles of journeys are made significant via the human processes of

cognition.

Finally, drawing on encounter also assists this thesis in rethinking narrow descriptions of

unpredictability as an undesirable quality by illustrating its potential productivity for mobile

life (Aim 2). As encounter theorises the coming together of bodies, it rejects placing inherent

value judgements on events and instead offers a reading in which bodies have the potential to

be both enabled and/or constrained when they temporally affect one another. This thesis

specifically draws on the construction of productive encounters offered by Fincher and

64
Iveson (2008), who argue that encounters are critical moments where the disorder of urban

life opens up bodies to connect and identify with forms of difference. They argue: “city life

can both constrain and enable our capacity to explore different sides of ourselves and to craft

new identifications through encounters with others as strangers” (Fincher & Iveson 2008,

145). This construction of encounters as productive is useful for exploring unpredictable

mobilities. Paper 5 builds on these ideas to illustrate some of these productive relations: for

example, in how repeated encounters with navigating tricky places can strengthen

navigational confidence and resilience or how the liveliness and conviviality of being lost can

provide a platform for new relations to space and place. Encounter is therefore useful in

rethinking the qualities of unpredictable mobilities in ways that foreground not only the

experiential multiplicity of journeys, but also the potentials and productivity that the

unknown can have for mobile life.

2.4 Conclusion: towards an affective account of unpredictability

The purpose of this chapter was to illustrate that an affective ontology of mobile life makes

space for mobilities scholars to appreciate and normalise those things ‘the nature of which is

totally unknown to us’ – in other words, unpredictable mobilities. In particular, affect

accounts for how seemingly disparate elements of the mobile assemblage can come together

to influence how bodies feel during their mobile journeys. As affect foregrounds the

continual unfolding of relations in time and space, it repositions unpredictability as a given

reality of mobile life, rather than a deviation from how we imagine mobilities can and should

unfold. In the discussions that followed, this chapter illustrated the complex ways that affects

become intertwined with, and shared across human bodies, non-human bodies, spaces and

places in markedly unpredictable ways. Affect is therefore an appropriate choice for the

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theoretical grounding of this thesis and has thus been embedded in the overall aims of this

project.

This chapter has illustrated that affective geographies contribute to the theoretical

development of this thesis in two key ways. Firstly, it has demonstrated the utility of affect

for widening our field of view to reconsider the body-technology relations of navigation and

wayfinding in ways that look beyond problematic and rationalist concepts of comfort, control

and predictability. Secondly, this chapter developed an affective geography of

unpredictability to guide the empirical directions of this thesis. Affect reimagines the quality

of unpredictability as a style of socio-material force relations, rather than an inherent set of

characteristics. The concepts of intensity, temporality and encounter proved a useful set of

resources for unpacking the affects unpredictability can have for mobile life. This section of

the chapter also provided glimpses of the empirical investigations to come to illustrate how

these resources translate to the exploration of unpredictable mobilities.

This approach to gathering different threads of affective inquiry (Pile 2010) was deliberately

chosen for this thesis in order to highlight that affective geographies are productive for the

exploration of unpredictable mobilities in multiple ways. Certainly, there are important and

extensive critiques elsewhere that would suggest theories of affect might be applied to this

project differently if it was conceived in a way that was more fundamentally grounded in

Spinozian or Deleuzian literatures, however engaging with those nuanced critiques here

would potentially constrain the multiplicities and productivities afforded by working with

affect in this way. Therefore, developing this style of affective geography of unpredictable

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mobilities aligns with the aims and objectives of this thesis, and is a critical step in

establishing the underappreciated significance of unpredictability for studies of mobility.

What cuts across this chapter is that human subjects conceive journeys in limited ways by

focusing on a small set of rationalist logics, knowledges and practices, ultimately stripping

the quality of unpredictability of its potential. Inspired by these insights, and by thinking

through the relationship between unpredictability and encounter, the conclusions of this

thesis therefore develop on an affective geography of unpredictability to speculate on the

ways that we might reposition mobile journeys as more-than-human.

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 Chapter 3 - A Methodological Paradox: Planning for Unpredictability

3.1 Introduction

The previous chapter’s discussion of affect was guided by Meno’s contemplation from

Plato’s dialogue: how will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally

unknown to you? The chapter explored the productivities of affect for providing researchers a

theoretical basis from which to appreciate and normalise those things which are unknown to

us - including the presence of unpredictability in mobile life. However, Meno’s

contemplation is not merely theoretical, but practical too. Scholars working with affect have

been forced to confront the challenge of developing research methods which engage with the

messiness and complexity of affect and generate forms of data that ‘capture’ affect in a

variety of empirical settings. Meno’s concerns have been widely echoed in contemporary

debates (Blackmen & Venn 2010; Spinney 2015) regarding affective methodologies; for

example Kundsen and Stage (2015, 2) ask: “how do you identify affective processes and

discuss their social consequences through qualitative research strategies if affect is bodily,

fleeting and immaterial and always in between entities or nods?”. In response, scholars

working with affect have turned to research methods which focus less on “content and

structures of social signification” and more on “reflecting inventively on where and how

affect may be traced, approached and understood” (Knudsen & Stage, 2015, 2). Affective

methodologies require new ways of being sensitive to – “noticing” (Blackmen & Venn 2010,

9) – the empirical material we work with. Guided by these discussions, the purpose of this

chapter is to outline the methodological approach which has been used by this thesis in order

to notice, elicit and collect stories of the “bodily, fleeting and immaterial” (Knudsen & Stage

2015, 2) affects of unpredictable mobilities.

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This chapter is structured in three key sections. The first section outlines the methodological

approach for the thesis which has been developed in line with the project aims. It illustrates

how developing an affective methodology sensitises researchers to how unpredictability is

empirically lived through moving bodies, technologies and places (Aim 1). It also considers

how affective methodologies invite a style of critical reflection and contemplation of

empirical material that foregrounds possibility, multiplicity and productivity (Aim 2). The

second section explains how the research methods were carried out. This project used a

qualitative mixed-method approach which included document analysis, autoethnography and

semi-structured interviews. Rather than focusing on any particular case study place, group or

single mode of mobilities, the thesis designed these three methodologies with a broader

empirical focus on lifetime experiences of feeling geographically lost and found, wayfinding

at the everyday scale, and the influence of technology on contemporary expressions of these

experiences. Finally, the chapter concludes by reflecting on the unpredictability of the

research process and the opportunities that researchers are afforded when they are willing to

work with the theme of unpredictability, both in terms of an empirical focus, but also in terms

of the research process itself.

3.2 Developing an affective methodology of ‘sensitising devices’

For the best part of twenty years scholars have wrestled with competing definitions, theories,

difficulties, paradoxes and contradictions surrounding the term ‘affect’ (Anderson 2014;

Hemmings 2015). This diversity is one of the strengths of affect as a theoretical construct

(and of non-representational theory more broadly), in that it opens researchers up to the

multiplicity of ways affective life is mediated, produced and experienced. However, the

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diversity of theories of affect brings methodological considerations. In developing an

affective methodology, researchers must consider both “how to analytically approach

[fieldwork] via concepts”, ie: the selection of which affective concepts will guide the

methodological approach, and “how to get the right materials to address research interests”,

ie: the selection of methods (Knudsen & Stage 2015, 7). Far from being prescriptive or linear

steps in the research process, these dual concerns are mutually constitutive of how fieldwork

unfolds. The affective concepts embedded in the project’s aims guide the selection of

methods, and the selection of methods creates a context in which the affective concepts

embedded in the project can be rendered visible through fieldwork. In this section of the

chapter I consider the former: how to analytically approach fieldwork via key affective

concepts.

According to Anderson (2014, 12), a critical aspect of developing an affective methodology

is the identification of affective concepts that will guide empirical investigations, or as he

terms it: developing an ‘affective vocabulary’. In developing an affective vocabulary

researchers reorient difficult questions about ‘what affect is’ to how particular affective

concepts focus fieldwork towards particular patterns and relations of affective life. Anderson

(2014) argues that by choosing to employ affective concepts such as ‘emotions’, ‘moods’,

‘bodily capacities’, ‘atmospheres’, or ‘structures of feeling’ in one’s analysis would all render

visible critically different affective relations. Therefore, the affective concepts we choose to

guide our projects become ‘sensitising devices’: “designed to attend to and reveal specific

types of relational configurations” (Anderson 2014, 12). Rather than operating as a

prescriptive set of methodological processes and resources, developing an affective

methodology of ‘sensitising devices’ is therefore about designing methods that allow the

researcher to attune themselves to - or ‘notice’ (Blackmen & Venn 2010) - different ways

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affect can be “traced, approached and understood” (Knudsen & Stage 2015, 2). For the

mobilities sub-discipline, the turn towards an affective methodology has therefore inspired

both a rethinking of ‘orthodox’ research methods in ways which sensitise researchers to

affective forces, as well as the exploration of the potentials of new embodied mobile

methods8. For this project, Anderson’s (2014) understanding of ‘sensitising devices’

therefore informed how I designed my use of three key qualitative methods (document

analysis, autoethnography and semi-structured interviews) so that I might sensitise myself to

key affective forces.

Guided by these insights, this section develops an affective methodology of ‘sensitising

devices’ which were used to attune my own fieldwork investigations to the core concepts

embedded in the aims of this project. Developing an affective methodology of ‘sensitising

devices’ was critical as it directed my fieldwork gaze to elements of the mobile assemblage

of particular interest such as bodies, technologies, and places (Aim 1), whilst simultaneously

leaving space for the possibilities, multiplicities and productivities at the heart of

unpredictability to catch this gaze in any given moment (Aim 2). As such, these conceptual

devices are a key means through which I could practically attune myself to affective forces:

they helped me notice particular things in the field. The concepts discussed in this section of

the chapter therefore critically informed the methodological design of this thesis, both in

terms of its empirical focus and how the final research methods were selected and carried out.

8 At the time of thesis confirmation and fieldwork ethics approval, this project intended to use some additional
methods which are not included in the final thesis. For example, I planned to conduct walk-and-talk interviews
with new University of Newcastle students as they completed their everyday wayfinding around the campus
space. This fieldwork plan was designed based on insights from the mobilities literature around the potentials of
‘mobile methods’ to immerse both researcher and interviewee into the shared embodied experience of
movement (Merriman 2014). Unfortunately, despite widespread recruitment attempts across campus, no
participants were secured. Thus, the focus of my fieldwork – and this chapter - shifted towards a rethinking of
‘orthodox’ research methods in ways that would sensitise me to affective forces.

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 3.2.1 Aim 1: Bodies, technologies, places

The ‘turn towards affect’ has widely been linked to a re-invigoration of bodily research

methods, inspired by a heightened interest in the “non-verbal, non-conscious dimensions of

experience and a re-engagement with sensation, memory, perception, attention and listening”

(Blackmen & Venn 2010, 8; McCormack 2007, Davidson & Milligan 2004; Wylie 2005,

Simonsen 2007, Dewsbury 2010). Given this connection, the literature on affect and the body

is both diverse and contested, and therefore a myriad of different conceptual approaches

could plausibly be used to explore the relations of unpredictability experienced by bodies on

the move (for a comprehensive review of the variety of affect-body concepts and relations

see Blackmen & Venn 2010). For this project however, two core concepts which emerged

during the literature review stage of the research process (Chapter 2) guided the empirical

design of this thesis: emotions and bodily capacities.

Emotion is critical to researching unpredictable mobilities as it is entangled with the risk-

taking and decision-making processes called upon during the lived experience of spatial

unpredictability. Furthermore, the diverse emotions which are experienced by human bodies

on the move form the ‘connective tissue’ between the embodied self and how unpredictability

is felt in place as Gorman-Murray (2009) argues “comfort, belonging, desire, and fear felt in

and through the body shape attachments to place, and play an under-recognised role in

mobility” (p414). An affective reading of emotion therefore acted as a conceptual ‘sensitising

device’ which guided the methodological design of this thesis across all chosen methods

(document analysis, autoethnography and semi-structured interviews) in several ways. An

interest in the emotive dimensions of unpredictability for human bodies informed the

selection of popular media texts for document analysis. I specifically targeted online lifestyle

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media pieces – often written in the author’s first person – as these were most likely to contain

highly emotive language, key experience anecdotes and even emotive comment responses by

other members of the public. Emotion was also embedded into other research methods which

focused on the experiences of human bodies, including detailed and deliberate reflections

about my emotions in autoethnographic field diaries (Punch 2012), and several questions

specifically designed to elicit responses about emotion were prepared for semi-structured

qualitative interviews. An affective reading of ‘emotion’ therefore proved an important

‘sensitising device’ for directing my fieldwork gaze towards particular bodily expressions,

both in terms of my own emotional responses experienced during autoethnography, and the

emotions of others expressed via a range of textual and verbal forms.

Alongside emotion, this project also leaned on an understanding of ‘bodily capacities’ as a

‘sensitising device’ which helped shape the design of research methods in ways which

rendered visible affective forces. Chapter 2 argued that affects are relational shifts in bodily

capacities, drawing on the widely cited definition of affect as the emerging capacities of

bodies to affect and be affected (Anderson 2006; Thrift 2004). This is described by Anderson

(2014, 10): “affects pertain to capacities rather than existing properties of the body. Affects

are about what a body may be able to do in any given situation, in addition to what it is

currently doing and has done”. In developing an affective methodology then, the guiding

question becomes: how might one practically attune themselves to shifts in bodily capacities?

This required thoughtful consideration for how to design my qualitative methods in ways that

were sensitive to multiple changes in the physical and imagined capacities of human bodies

dealing with unpredictability on the move. In terms of physical capacity, autoethnography

was selected as a particularly suitable method through which to sensitise myself to shifts in

physical capacities by allowing me to use my own body as an instrument for research. I chose

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to attune myself to moments in which unpredictability enabled or constrained the physical

capacities of my body, including detailed reflections in my field diary about my physical

performances and the bodily sensations I experienced. By contrast, an attentiveness to shifts

in the imagined capacities of bodies was embedded into the design of all three research

methods across the project. Popular media texts were coded for evidence of the way bodily

capacities were temporally affected by unpredictability. Changes to my own capacities to

navigate comfortably and successfully were recorded in my field diary. And questions were

prepared for semi-structured interviews which specifically targeted themes such as

confidence and co-mobility as a way to direct the fieldwork gaze towards shifts in

navigational capacity. Furthermore, pursuing these themes generated follow-up conversations

about the body politics of wayfinding, which proved to be critical to the ways that imagined

capacities of human bodies are expressed and performed in daily life. Thus, like emotion,

thinking through ‘bodily capacities’ proved to be particularly useful as a ‘sensitising device’

for practically directing my fieldwork gaze towards particular sets of affective relations.

Whilst emotion and bodily capacities were key concepts in developing an affective

methodology relating to human bodies, Chapter 2 illustrated that considering the relationality

between human and non-human bodies is critically important for any project grounded in an

affective ontology. For this project the affects of non-human bodies were mostly explored

through contemporary wayfinding technologies such as smartphones and GPS devices. As

such, thinking across human/non-human relations and hybrid subjectivities (Haraway 1991)

became important to this project in exploring the ways human and technological lives are

becoming increasingly intertwined. However, perhaps the most useful ‘sensitising device’ for

practically planning to research the affects of technology is James Ash’s (2013)

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‘perturbations’ (drawn from Bryant 2011). In his paper, Ash (2013, 21) describes the

affective influence of ‘perturbations’:

“The concept of perturbation emphasizes that the active communication between non-human

and inorganic entities can generate atmospheres that have effects on humans within these

atmospheres outside of a particular emotional or affective register, through the way they

actively generate space and time.”

In his paper Ash (2013) draws on the example of an iPhone device to illustrate how the

perturbations of smartphone devices shape the timespaces human beings experience, outside

of their consciousness or intentionality. Inspired by his work, and in an attempt to bring voice

to the affects of technological objects I therefore designed all three project methodologies in

ways which attempted to attune my fieldwork gaze to the perturbations of wayfinding

technologies. Firstly, this included rethinking ‘orthodox’ understandings of document

analysis to account for the interactive nature of contemporary spatial media (Leszczynski

2015). The ‘outputs’ of wayfinding devices such as on-screen instructions, maps and pictures

are interactive by nature, meaning that the assemblage of technology ‘text’ (Hine 2000) made

available to me during my fieldwork is inherently fluid; another user would likely receive a

different set of ‘documents’ depending on how their personal selections intersected with the

invisible and autonomous decisions made by the device itself.

Thus, being critically reflexive of my own positionality was fundamental to my document

analysis as it became vitally important to think through how the intertwined relations of

companionship between my body and the ‘perturbations’ of my autonomous technological

75
device shaped the data I was able to ‘capture’. For my project, researching the affects of

contemporary technical objects therefore blurred the lines between traditional document

analysis and embodied autoethnography. The living documents produced by the wayfinding

devices I used required my embodied participation to be able to ‘access’ them, but

simultaneously, the embodied performances required of me during autoethnography were

generative (Coleman 2013; Law 2004) of the fieldwork ‘documents’ I accessed, both in the

immediate moments of using these devices and also in shaping what sorts of ‘technology

text’ would be made available to me in the future. Wayfinding technologies thus act as a

temporal conduit for particular human-non-human relations, and following the work of

Haldrup (2017, 54), I utilised autoethnography to “direct attention to its potentials for

exploring our emotional and sensuous relations with the mutable objects themselves and the

affects and effects they generate”.

Critically however, Ash’s (2013) work on ‘perturbations’ pushed me to consider the ways

that technical objects will also have an autonomy which operates outside my methodological

design. Thus, it also became important to reflect on the ways that the lifecourse of my project

intertwined with the lifecourses of objects themselves – an idea which proved formative for

the second and third papers in this thesis. As such, Ash’s (2013) ‘perturbations’ was a

particularly useful ‘sensitising device’ for thinking critically about how to interpret the sorts

of fieldwork images and messages I received from wayfinding technologies in the context of

my project design, but also for their role in the broader assemblage of unpredictable

mobilities.

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Finally, in order to fulfil the aims of this thesis I required an affective vocabulary which

allowed me to practically explore the significance of unpredictability for our mobile lives.

How could I prepare myself to ‘notice’ those moments of unpredictability which had

particular ongoing significance for the mobile lives of myself and my participants? How

would I recognise them when – by their very nature - the assemblage of mobile elements that

create unpredictability remain outside the human field of view? To address these questions

my thesis drew on an affective understanding of ‘encounter’ as a ‘sensitising device’ for

practically attuning my fieldwork gaze to particular moments of significance: that is

‘encounters’ as the moments in which some affects become more salient than others (Colman

2005). In particular, ‘encounter’ allowed me to notice the diverse temporalities and intensities

of unpredictable journeys. Everyday wayfinding is experienced in multiple rhythms: during

some parts of the journey time and space don’t seem to matter, yet in an instant

unpredictability can bring these elements of the mobile assemblage sharply into focus

through encounter. Moreover, drawing on ‘encounter’ as a ‘sensitising device’ also allowed

me to contend with scale and place. Feeling geographically lost is the expression of

unpredictability as and through particular places during journeys, and ‘encounters’ with the

unpredictability of place can span a variety of spatial contexts, from the small and mundane

journeys around familiar places, right through to the extraordinary contexts of foreign ones.

These insights therefore guided the design of all three fieldwork methods in helping me both

plan for, and ‘notice’, the significance of encounters with unpredictability. For example when

conducting document analysis using popular media articles about wayfinding, I specifically

looked for texts in which authors shared stories of particular moments they had been lost, and

critically analysed the details they had chosen to include about where, when, for how long,

who they were with, and where possible, how this story has ongoing affects for their future

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mobilities. Similarly, the autoethnographic accounts which appear in the thesis papers include

reflections on how encountering unpredictability through this project shaped my own mobile

practices outside designated ‘fieldwork’ journeys. And in terms of semi-structured interviews

I specifically planned questions of my participants regarding why particular stories stuck out

in their minds, or how particular encounters had shaped their future journey-making practices

or returns to specific places. Encounter was therefore a sensitising device through which I

could attune myself to the various affective forces which circulated through particular

fieldwork stories.

3.2.2 Aim 2: Possibility, multiplicity, productivity

Using affect as methodology requires a delicate balance of the investigation of specific

relational phenomena, with an appreciation for the radical openness and multiplicity of

affective life. Affect is full of ontological paradoxes like these: it is specific yet open,

inarguably real, yet fundamentally inexpressible, tethered to specific bodies, and yet beyond

them. Therefore, developing a differentiated affective vocabulary is a critical first step that

“enables us to attend to the complexity and multiplicity of affective life, whilst also opening

up different ways of understanding how affective life is mediated, organised and occasionally

surprises” (Anderson 2014, 12). However, a Deleuzian understanding of multiplicity stresses

that what counts is “not the terms or the elements, but what there is “between”” (Deleuze &

Parnet 2002): multiplicity understood through assemblage as a temporary grouping of

relations, the “‘lines’ between things, as becomings, that is, always in process, changing,

moving” (Coleman 2013, 6). Thus, whilst the ‘sensitising devices’ discussed in the previous

section are important in planning what to look for when researching affect, focusing too

heavily on a narrow set of affective dimensions risks missing out on “particular textures of

life […] and makes a mess of what it does seek to understand because it fails to account for

78
complexity” (Coleman 2013 referencing Law 2004). There are risks involved here, and

throughout the design of my methodological approach I have been conscious not to fall into

the trap of seeing emotions, capacities, perturbations and encounters as disparate static

elements. As such, attuning myself to the possibilities, multiplicities and productivities of

unpredictability became a ‘sensitising device’ in its own right both in the design of research

methods and during the empirical analysis phase of this thesis.

Fundamentally, ‘noticing’ multiplicity and the possibilities of affective life to always-be-

otherwise takes time and reflection. Often the immediacy of fieldwork experiences belies the

complexities of the phenomena we seek to explore. One of the strengths of using affect as a

methodological approach is the way it encourages the researcher to dwell with their empirical

material, with ongoing critical reflection affording the opportunity to notice things differently

and in multiple ways. According to Punch (2012): “by simply paying attention […] emotion

and affect become more approachable as analytical objects” (in Knusden & Stage 2015, 6)

The aim of an affective methodology is therefore not to bend data to make particular relations

visible, but instead to dwell at the moments where data becomes affectively involving:

“during the process of coding, some things gradually grow, or glow, into greater significance

than others, and become the preoccupations around which thought and writing cluster”

(MacLure 2013, 175 in Knudsen & Stage 2015, 6). Dwelling-with my empirical material was

absolutely critical to the way I approached my fieldwork in order to sensitise myself to

multiplicity and possibility, and thus address the second aim of this thesis. This practically

involved sitting-with and revisiting empirical material countless times to see what ‘glowed’

during the coding process – something that was sometimes in itself, completely

unpredictable. For example, one of the key papers which emerged during this thesis focuses

on the lived politics of wayfinding via bodily assumptions about age and gender. None of the

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questions that were planned for semi-structured interviews focused on these themes, but on

returning to my coded interview transcripts I couldn’t help but see responses about these

aspects of identity. Once I began to ‘notice’ these themes, more and more references to age

and gender felt as if they jumped out at me from the materials I had gathered. This was the

case for all the empirical material collected for this thesis: the longer I dwelled with the data I

had captured, the more the affective relations between elements felt visible. Embers glow.

Ideas spark. And bright glowing flames find form.

‘Noticing’ the multiplicity of affective life in our work also practically involves collaboration

- co-dwelling-with empirical material - an aspect of affective methodology that tends to be

overlooked in methodological literature9. Being able to discuss empirical material with others

brings about a new level of meaningful critical reflection by decentring the thoughts and

experiences of the author’s human body. For a PhD student, the principal supervisor is

undoubtedly a primary critical collaborator in this process both through direct writing

feedback, but more often, the more informal discussions around fieldwork experiences. By

way of example, in the third paper of this thesis, my supervisor Kathy’s presence is essential

to the fieldwork stories which were included. Specifically, members of Kathy’s family

(unpredictably) became involved in the research process through commenting on the

fieldwork journeys I was undertaking. It was only on reflecting on these types of unexpected

‘presencing’ in subsequent conversations with Kathy that the multiplicity of co-mobile

9
This discussion draws some parallels with methodological literature around collaborative autoethnography and
multivocal biography (Lapadat 2017) – however, unlike these methods, co-dwelling-with empirical material is
not always an intended part of the research design, but an unpredictable outcome of the way affects move
between bodies.

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relationships began to glow within my work10. Thus, being able to sensitise yourself to the

multiplicity of unpredictable mobilities is not always practically easy; but the style of

dwelling-with empirical material invited by affective methodologies allows the discussions

with, and reflections of, other key academic collaborators to help particular affects glow and

ultimately render multiplicity more visible. Thus, perhaps we can think of our academic

collaborators as sensitising devices too.

Overall this section of the chapter has illustrated that the identification of affective concepts –

or an ‘affective vocabulary’ (Anderson 2014) - is critical to developing an affective

methodology. These concepts act as ‘sensitising devices’ which attune researchers to

particular sets of affective relations during fieldwork experiences and are a critical means

through which researchers working with affect prepare to make sense of the messiness and

complexity of affective life. For my project, the core concepts of emotions, capacities,

perturbations, and encounter proved critical for the design of my research methods. However,

the strength of affective methodology is in its openness to embracing multiple realities –

something particularly important given the focus of this thesis on unpredictability. Being

sensitive to multiplicity in the ways these relational phenomena were experienced through

fieldwork was therefore also critical to the methodological approach of the thesis. Answering

Meno’s contemplation in the context of this chapter then, comes in the form of a

methodological paradox. How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is

totally unknown to you? One must plan for unpredictability yet simultaneously remain open

to surrendering to its will.

10
In fact, the influence of others during my autoethnography glowed so strongly that the entire premise of the
third paper is about co-mobility.

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3.3 Researching how unpredictability is lived: methods

This chapter has thus far developed an affective methodology of ‘sensitising devices’ to

guide the fieldwork approach of this thesis. This section of the chapter will now explain how

each of the three specific qualitative methodologies (document analysis, autoethnography and

semi-structured interviews) were carried out: “how to get the right materials to address

research interests” (Knudsen & Stage, 2015, 7). Across these three methodologies, this

project has embedded a broader empirical focus on how unpredictability is lived (both

temporally and spatially) in two key ways: through the everyday experiences of being lost

and found and everyday wayfinding. Being lost is the everyday spatial expression of

negotiating with an unpredictable world that is “larger than our knowledge of it” (Solnit

2006). By contrast, being ‘found’ is the (problematic) binary opposite, whereby places have

undergone the temporal transition to feeling familiar, knowable and predictable. Wayfinding

then, is the process of actively negotiating with unpredictability through our mobile

performances.

The project was intentionally designed with this broader empirical focus on unpredictability

as a direct response to the lack of mobilities literature on the ways unpredictability is lived.

As Chapters 1 and 2 indicated, even when it does appear in mobilities literature, discussions

about unpredictability or disruption are usually confined to temporal ‘events’ (such as natural

disaster or transport system outages) and rarely considered as empirical experiences in their

own right, worthy of deep and engaged exploration. Using a qualitative mixed-method

approach was a suitable choice for this project in exploring how unpredictability is lived for a

variety of moving bodies in a variety of contexts (Bissell 2010; Hitchings 2011): spanning

the publicly available accounts of others through popular media texts, the living documents

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generated by contemporary wayfinding spatial media, the embodied performances of the self

through autoethnography, and the experiences of participants through semi-structured

interviews. As the following sections will show, this empirical focus is embedded not only in

the initial selection of these three research methods but has ongoing implications for how the

methods were carried out.

3.3.1 Document analysis

There were two overall styles of document analysis used for this thesis: document analysis of

popular media texts and document analysis of spatial media through the use of wayfinding

technologies. These styles of document analysis contributed to the project aims in slightly

different ways. Table 3 is an overview of the different purposes document analysis was used

for, and indicative sources for these documents.

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 Sources Used for Document Analysis
Purpose Type of source Example Sources What does this tell us?

The Conversation

Lifestyle media articles LifeHacker.com

Experienceproject.com
Contextual Collect stories about the lifetime experiences of being
understanding of being Radiolab.org lost and found for a variety of moving bodies
lost, found and Newcastle Herald
wayfinding
Sydney Morning Herald Collect stories about the capabilities of contemporary
(Aims 1 and 2)
Associated wayfinding tools, and how they are being used to
The Australian
perform mobilities in people’s everyday lives.
User Comments The Guardian
Various websites which review
media and technology

Explore how various wayfinding apps allow you to

share wayfinding information with others in your
network.
Document analysis of a Facebook
Select and review a variety of ‘place pages’ (egs
variety of spatial media
Wayfinding apps and/or Westfield Kotara or Merewether Ocean Baths) to
– the capacities and
social media platforms explore what types of information these pages provide.
affects of contemporary
wayfinding tools with GPS capability
Locate one’s position on a map using GPS technology
Google Maps
(Aims 1 and 2) and get directions.

Find/get directions to individual car spaces including

Parkopedia
distance, availability, cost, hours.

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 Find your way around campus buildings and rooms,
Lost on Campus
get tips from other students, see most popular services.

Compare petrol prices nearby via postcode, report fuel

Petrol Spy Australia
prices to help others.
Testing ground for most
Record workouts using GPS, get fitness statistics,
useful apps which apps
Map My Run share progress with other users, view suggested runs
will be integrated into
near you.
autoethnography
Real time Sydney Trains transport information, use
Trip View
interactive maps to customise to your trip.

Find nearby restaurants and sort via distance, price,

Urbanspoon
and popularity.

Live updates about traffic conditions and incidents

Live Traffic NSW
which might affect your journey.

Travel information showing nearby things to do, and

iGetAbout Australia
how to contact local tour operators.

My Location – fake a landmark Use Google Street View to virtually travel the world,
selfie take ‘selfies’, and share ‘fake’ location with others.

Nominate a contact to ‘watch’ your journey on a real

Watcher – Get Home Safe
time GPS map for safer journeying

Community-authored traffic mapping service where

Waze Traffic App users help each other avoid accidents, locate police
cameras etc

Table 3: Sources used for Document Analysis

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Firstly, document analysis of popular media texts was used as a way to gain a contextual

understanding of how the lived experiences of unpredictability are understood in the popular

media imagination – a key source of empirical data given the lack of academic literature on

the subject. Producing popular media texts, as a form of written or oral commentary, is one

way in which people engage and connect with the world around them (Fairclough 2003). But

far from being mere representations of the world, texts are part of the process in which the

‘realities’ we come to know are constructed (Lees 2004). Texts have a performative power,

and actively produce the phenomena they speak of (Bissell 2015a). Furthermore, the

semantics and tones adopted by texts can have affective ends (Bissell 2015a), influencing

how audiences ‘feel’ about a particular topic. Bissell (2015a, 15) writes that “commentary is

powerful because it crystallises in speech the more vague and ambient forces that comprise

the city’s transport environments; affects that transcend the phenomenological experience of

individual[s]”. As Bissell’s (2015a) quote suggests, individuals only have modest powers of

moderation in the process of story-telling, and so by weaving together a variety of different

stories and commentaries from popular media sources, I can begin to build a picture of the

current collective experiences of being lost/found and wayfinding. This is possible as these

documents provide living stories, and the semantics and tones of the texts have affective ends

(Bissell 2015a), influencing how users ‘feel’ about their topics.

For this purpose, document analysis was conducted by searching for popular media items

which focused on the lived experiences of wayfinding and emotional experiences of being

geographically lost and found. I analysed a total of 43 popular media items which were

drawn from lifestyle commentary pieces from websites, magazines and blogs. The popular

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media items I analysed generally came from Australian, American and British sources 11, and

a few other international publications. This style of popular media commentary was targeted

as it generally included first person stories and reflections, with a high degree of situational

specificity and emotive language. Thus, these types of stories tended to include critical

reflections on how unpredictability intertwined with those elements of the mobile assemblage

of particular interest: bodies, technologies and places. The user comments on these pieces

were also included in the document analysis as a source of further information for the

emotional responses of the public. The information from these articles was coded for

common themes, focusing specifically on the emotions people experienced, use of

contemporary wayfinding technologies, body politics associated with navigating bodies, and

the multiplicity experiences that were discussed regarding being lost and found. The outputs

of this research method were used as a contextual backdrop for the early formation of the

thesis, but also appear as key vignettes in the first publication.

Secondly, document analysis was conducted using the spatial media ‘outputs’ of a series of

digital wayfinding applications. Given the pervasiveness of contemporary technologies

during wayfinding performances, the ‘technology text’ (Hine 2000) outputs of smartphone

and GPS devices such as maps, images, messages, audio directions and so forth are

documented accounts of the ways humans and technical objects communicate and perform in

everyday life (Leszczynski 2014; Knudsen & Stage 2015). Specifically, my document

analysis involved the exploration of approximately 30 different wayfinding apps using a new

11
As such the contextual understanding I gained is largely based on the experiences of Western middle to upper
class adults and generally discusses mobility in urban areas via a range of different travel modes. This has been
acknowledged in the thesis papers which draw on these sources.

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iPhone 6+ which was purchased for this project, as well as the exploration of social media

platforms such as Facebook for how they communicated spatial and place-based data.

Initially, these 30 apps were explored in a static setting, which involved me downloading and

exploring the apps’ various capabilities and recording notes, screenshots and reflections,

without being mobile. Like the document analysis conducted using popular media texts, this

initial exploration was formative in giving me a contextual understanding of the sheer

diversity of wayfinding tools available, and the staggering number of potential ways they

could be integrated into daily life. From here, a selection of approximately 10-12 apps were

identified as most comfortably aligning with my own existing everyday mobilities, and thus

were integrated into my use of autoethnography (which will be discussed more in the

following section).

Thinking critically about undertaking this document analysis picks up on earlier ideas in this

chapter about the blurring of methodological lines between document analysis and

autoethnography. Whilst my own use of these 30+ wayfinding applications occurred in a

physically static setting, the interactive nature of them as fluid and living documents

highlights the generative and performative nature of the research process (Law 2004). For

many of these applications I was required to set up a personal profile (often stating age,

gender, occupation and so on) and input application preferences which would shape the app’s

functionality (such as the activation of location services, notifications, or allowing connection

to my existing social media platforms). As such, the ‘outputs’ or ‘documents’ I subsequently

accessed were a direct product of my own actions and positionality in the research, and others

working with these applications would likely have very different experiences. Thus, in many

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ways, even my initial explorations with these applications felt closer to a form of

autoethnography. Knusden and Stage (2015, 6) reflect on the ways that the bodies of

researchers become intertwined with spatial media documents, thus rendering visible the

transmission of affect across human/non-human subjects: “with mobile media data collection,

the visual data becomes very closely linked to embodied experiences and therefore offers the

potential to develop knowledge of affective realm and the micro-perceptual shocks that move

bodies”. Given these insights, reflecting on these processes remained critical to the way

fieldwork vignettes from these methods were included in papers for publication.

3.3.2 Autoethnography

Autoethnography is a “form of self-narrative that places the self within a social context”

(Reed-Danahay 1997 in Butz & Besio 2009). Autoethnography aligns with the non-

representational approach embedded in this thesis given its own “epistemological position

that the slippery nuances and particularities of experience – emotions, feelings, bodily

responses – are integral to the constitution, understanding, and representation of social or

cultural phenomena.” (Butz 2010, 6). As such, in the context of my research aims,

autoethnography was a suitable methodological choice as it allowed me to use my own body

as a research instrument for exploring the emotions, feelings and bodily responses of being

lost/found and everyday wayfinding. An affective methodology recognises the value and

usefulness in using the researcher’s own body as a key site to sense the changing capacities

and relations of in-between at the heart of affective life, as Knudson and Stage (2015, 5)

argue:

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 “…research questions about affect become increasingly more answerable if they are

concretely linked to specific bodies (for instance, the researcher’s own body) in specific (and

empirically approachable) social contexts, as this makes it more likely that the researcher can

actually collect/produce material that allows for empirically based argumentation. Asking

research questions with strong situational specificity is, in other words, the first necessary

step towards empirically grounding the analysis of affective processes.”

The autoethnography conducted for this thesis involved the use of a new iPhone 6+ and a

series of approximately 10-12 navigational applications (apps). I integrated the use of the

phone and apps into my everyday mobilities across a six month period from October 2016 to

March 2017. I used the phone and apps on roughly 6-8 journeys per week during this time,

for a total of approximately 168 journeys. During this time I kept a multimedia diary to

record my observations, which included my own written (and emotive) reflections, as well as

device screenshots, and audio clips. These mixed-media elements of my field diary were a

key source of empirical material produced via this method and were integrated into the

papers for publication.

Using autoethnography in this way had important outcomes for my project. Firstly, adopting

a narrative approach in my autoethnographic reflections allowed greater scope for drawing

out and communicating the intimate ‘emotions’, ‘bodily capacities’, and moments of

‘encounter’ involved in everyday wayfinding – right down to the micro-perceptual practices

of touch, sight, sound, taste, smell and feel. By intensely sensitising myself to these elements

of my own mobile performance I was able to critically engage with affect with a depth not

possible using document analysis alone. Where document analysis was formative for my

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contextual understanding of how unpredictability is lived, autoethnography was formative for

my embodied understanding of it. Indeed, this is one of the key benefits of using

autoethnography as a method, as it “radically foregrounds the emotions and experiences of

the researcher as a way to acknowledge the inevitably subjective nature of knowledge, and in

order to use subjectivity deliberately as an epistemological resource.” (Butz & Besio 2009,

1662). Secondly, using autoethnography holds potential for giving (some) voice to the

technological objects themselves – voices which were minimised and/or silenced in the

popular media accounts gathered through document analysis. Autoethnography allowed my

reflections to focus intensely on the small, yet significant moments of encounter with my

iPhone 6+ amidst a complex and fluid broader technological assemblage (Wilmott 2016). By

putting into action an affective understanding of ‘perturbations’ (Ash 2013) through

autoethnography, I was better equipped to recognise and reflect on the ways my iPhone 6+

device might operate outside my own intentionality. As such, using autoethnography was a

particularly useful method for addressing Aim 1 of this thesis.

Of course however, mobilities research (and indeed research in other fields) is entwined with

the researcher’s own relative positionality during all stages of the research process

(D'Andrea, Ciolfi & Gray 2011). The critical decisions researchers make in terms of design,

participation and reflection, coupled with their personal beliefs, all result in knowledge and

stories which are partial and filtered (D'Andrea, Ciolfi & Gray 2011), and my own

experimentations with autoethnography are but one lens through which subjective and

socially constructed digital realities take form (Schwartz & Halegoua 2014). Furthermore, as

this chapter has discussed in the context of both document analysis and autoethnography, my

use of these methods as non-representational activities “collapse the distinctions between

representing and performing experience” (Butz 2010, 6) and thus my research methods do

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not ‘capture’ affects but generate them. Critical reflexivity is therefore central not only to

developing an affective methodology more broadly but is particularly important when using

autoethnography (Adams & Jones 2011; Lapadat 2017), so reflections on my positionality

have been included in all papers which draw on my autoethnographic accounts.

3.3.3 Semi-structured interviews

Where autoethnography was an insightful methodology for how my own body performed the

affects of unpredictable mobilities, in order to fulfil the aims of this thesis it was vital to bring

a multiplicity of voices to my work (Aim 2). Like countless others I therefore turned to the

qualitative interview as a longstanding method for exploring diverse “interpretations,

experiences and spatialities of social life” (Dowling, Lloyd & Suchet-Pearson 2016), used in

my thesis to pursue the ways various bodies experienced being lost/found and everyday

wayfinding. My own approach to conducting semi-structured interviews was to undertake an

affective analysis (using the ‘sensitising devices’ identified in this chapter and waiting to see

what ‘glowed’) of semi-structured interviews conducted by conventional techniques (Latham

2003; Lloyd & Suchet-Pearson 2017). However, guided by Bissell (2014b, 1951), I was also

conscious that in order to leave space for unpredictability in the research process my

interviews should be “loosely structured” in order to create “sites of expression and

receptivity for the affective forces that are moving bodies”.

3.3.3.1 Recruitment (and its challenges)

As indicated in this chapter, my project was designed with an intentionally broad focus on

how being lost/found and everyday wayfinding is experienced for a variety of moving bodies,

technologies and places (Aim 1). To align with this aim, the recruitment criteria for semi-

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structured interviews was also left intentionally broad. Only three key criteria were chosen to

limit the potential recruitment for the project; one practical and two theoretically informed.

Practically, I chose to target residents from the Newcastle area in order to be able to feasibly

conduct in-person fieldwork interviews. From a theoretical standpoint, I chose to limit

recruitment to adults aged 18 years and older, as this was both more ethically appropriate and

adult participants were more likely to have had independent or autonomous experiences of

everyday wayfinding. I also chose to limit participant recruitment to those adults who owned

and/or used a GPS enabled device in their everyday lives, as considering the influence of

contemporary technologies is a key aspect of my research aims.

Once these recruitment criteria were selected, I advertised for participants by several means

including: several social media posts on community and University endorsed pages, physical

posters placed in key community locations around Newcastle, and a newspaper

advertisement. Despite multiple attempts, the recruitment of participants was particularly

challenging and difficult. The most fruitful of my recruitment methods turned out to be a

newspaper advertisement placed in the classifieds section of the local newspaper, the

Newcastle Herald (Figure 1). Using my PhD project funding, I was able to run this

advertisement for five days, across Thursday to Monday. From this, I began attracting my

initial interview participants, however uptake was still incredibly slow. In a stroke of good

fortune, one of the initial participants who responded to the advertisement offered to share the

advertisement with a women’s community group 12 she was a member of – a significant

development in my methods which saw my participant recruitment ‘snowball’ (Noy 2006).

12This required a variation to my approved Human Ethics Proposal to include the recruitment of community
groups.

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 Figure 1: Classifieds Advertisement placed in the Newcastle Herald.

In total, I was able to secure 20 semi-structured interviews with Newcastle residents. Of this

group of 20, 17 participants identified as women, and 3 as men, with 14 aged 50 years and

older, and 6 participants under the age of 50. Given these group dynamics, and thanks largely

to the acquisition of participants through the women’s community group, issues of age and

gender became absolutely central to the empirical stories I was able to record. These

dynamics are discussed in detail in the fourth paper of this thesis: ‘They Can’t Read Maps’:

Remaking the limits of navigational capacity through gendered and ageing bodies.

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All interviews were conducted face-to-face with participants in public settings (generally

coffee shops) and lasted between 30 minutes and 2.5 hours. The interviews were recorded

using an iPhone recording application and field notes were taken simultaneously. After the

interviews were conducted, the recordings were transcribed and coded.

3.3.3.2 Interview Themes

The purpose of these interviews was to elicit stories of everyday wayfinding and lifetime

experiences of being lost and found. Following theories of practice set out by Cass and

Faulconbridge (2015), the interviews sought to draw out different elements of performances

by looking at materials (tools they used for example, smartphones and in-car GPS), meanings

(how their performances tie to wider social ideas/expectations) and competencies (their

ability to execute skills and feel satisfied) of their practices. Thus, to write my questions I

brought together an empirical focus on the practices and performances of wayfinding and

being lost and found with the affective vocabulary of ‘sensitising devices’ I have developed

in this chapter. The indicative interview questions listed on Appendix 1 therefore cluster

loosely around these devices, for example:

• Questions about emotion: How does using these technologies make you feel? Do you

ever feel stressed or anxious using them? In what circumstances do you feel that

(emotion)?

• Questions about bodily capacities: How do you use these technologies? Do you

consider yourself a good navigator? Does using these technologies change that

opinion of yourself?

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 • Questions about perturbations: What kind of impact do you think these technologies

have on your everyday life? Do you think these types of technologies are important?

What happens if these technologies don’t work as planned? What other methods do

you call on?

• And questions about encounters: Do you have stories about being lost? Follow ups:

What happened? How did you find your way again? How did you feel about the

experience? Have you been back to that place since? How did you feel about

returning there? Were you able to remember how to get around that place next time?

A full list of planned interview questions can be seen in Appendix 1.

Designing my use of semi-structured interviews in this way was important in practically

planning to see how unpredictability was lived in the context of my participants lives. The

questions I designed acted as ‘sensitising devices’ in directing the intentions of the interview

towards affective forces. Of course, however, keeping interviews “loosely structured”

(Bissell 2014b) was critical for allowing a multiplicity of affective forces (Aim 2) to be

rendered visible. Drawing on the affective methodology I developed earlier in this chapter,

the empirical analysis that followed focused therefore on dwelling-with the stories and

interview transcripts to see what ‘glowed’. The arguments generated by this process form the

final two papers of this thesis by publication.

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3.4 Conclusion: Unpredictability and the research process

Unpredictability is full of unbridled potential. It can shock, scare, surprise, excite and inspire.

From a theoretical standpoint the broader purpose of this project addresses the importance of

embracing unpredictable mobilities. What undertaking the fieldwork portions of this project

has illustrated to me however, is that a willingness to embrace the unpredictability of the

research process truly makes for a deeper and richer fieldwork experience. My own

methodological development as a researcher comes in the form of a paradox: working with

an affective methodology of ‘sensitising devices’ has prepared me for the practicalities of

researching affective life, whilst simultaneously opening me up to recognise the radical

possibilities and opportunities afforded by unpredictability - wherever it may spring from. As

such, this chapter concludes by discussing areas within the fieldwork process in which

unpredictability guided the research outcomes in ways well outside of the fieldwork plan I

had set out to complete, and the important lessons these moments might hold.

3.4.1 The affects of collaboration

In this chapter I have suggested that we might think of our academic collaborators as

‘sensitising devices’ which help generate new readings of affective life in our work that we

might not have otherwise been perceptible to. Or instead they might help us attempt to clarify

via words those fleeting and often inexpressible affects of our fieldwork experiences. The

example I offered earlier in the chapter illustrated the way Kathy’s presence was influential

as a sounding board in co-dwelling-with my empirical material, and thus shaping how my

arguments took form. This is perhaps somewhat expected given her position as my primary

supervisor. However, discipline colleagues also frequently embody this role by co-dwelling-

with empirical material through a range of different activities where research outputs are

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informally discussed such as workshops, presentations, conference trips, general office

conversation and spontaneous meetings in the lunch room. This was evident countless times

during the development of my own thesis as colleagues generously acted as sounding boards

for research ideas, ultimately becoming affectively involved in what ‘glowed’ within my

work (and me in theirs). Importantly, many of these moments of affective collaboration with

both Kathy and other colleagues occurred during those ‘informal’ moments of collaboration

rather than during structured feedback activities (such as writing feedback), illustrating the

ways that the affects of collaboration are shared unpredictably between working bodies.

These insights resonate with contemporary ideas about collegial and collective care in

academic spaces that I have been exposed to throughout the development of my thesis. In

2019, discipline colleagues (past and present), including myself, from the University of

Newcastle gathered to celebrate 25 years of a fortnightly Geography reading group and used

the event to co-author a paper about the productivities of informal activities like a reading

group for academic life (see Ey et al 2020 for the full paper). In this paper we use assemblage

thinking to reflect on several ways that collegial care takes form during reading group: from

human relations of support via sharing, listening and debate; to the materialities of a shared

reading group space and morning tea rituals; to the affects of reading alone, reading together

and reading with others’ work in mind – all forms of affective presence and collaboration

which resonate with the conclusions of this chapter. Thus, I see that being exposed to these

ideas via participating in reading group and the co-authorship of the reading group paper, was

in itself a ‘sensitising device’ that attuned me to the affects of collaboration, playing a critical

role in helping me ‘notice’ the important presences and contributions of others in my work.

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As I continue to reflect upon many of the key arguments and pieces of fieldwork evidence

which have made their way into my papers for publication however, I can’t help but see a

multitude of other presences and voices outside of the academy. Kathy’s family became an

influential co-mobile presence during my journeys using the Watcher app. My friends appear

in several of the fieldwork stories in Paper 3 as illustrations of the ways journeys include both

proximate and distant co-mobile others. And in fact, this is an argument I may never have

come to had one of my friends not unwittingly asked what I was doing on my phone during a

co-mobile driving journey. Thus, again and again, a myriad of people emerged as affective

producers – collaborators – in the research stories I was generating. The intensity of their

presence in my work was itself unpredictable, but each of these individual encounters also

shaped my fieldwork direction in unpredictable ways.

The lessons I take from these moments of unpredictability are therefore about acknowledging

the borderlessness of what constitutes ‘research’. Like those informal moments of academic

collaboration, so many of the most insightful and influential stories which I have gone on to

include occurred on journeys where I was not planning to be “doing” fieldwork. In some

stories my friends ‘activated’ the research space through conversation or presence. In others,

it was my iPhone 6+ which ‘activated’ a fieldwork experience by sending me a notification

when I wasn’t expecting it (Paper 2). I believe that developing an affective methodology was

critical in preparing me to embrace the unpredictability of these moments as critical

fieldwork experiences.

Furthermore, these moments illustrate that working with affects requires the

acknowledgement that ‘research’ can and will always transgress bodily bounds, both human

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and non-human, academic, participant and beyond. In my papers I reflect on the ways that

conducting this fieldwork changed some of my own practices in contemplating future

mobilities, however I also found that friends who have been unpredictably drawn into my

research also changed their practices too. For example, as a result of one of the stories in

Paper 3 regarding Snapchat, one of my friends initially turned off location services, but

eventually went on to delete the app entirely, rethinking their previously held ideas on

privacy, surveillance and technology. Therefore, there are ethical considerations here for the

ways affects move between bodies and linger with people who aren’t necessarily research

‘participants’. Whilst these types of considerations have been discussed in the context of

autoethnography (see Lapadat 2017), less has been said for how scholars working with affect

ethically contend with the ongoing and lingering affects of research for a variety of bodies:

both participants and family and friends. By contrast, how do we also account for the

valuable contribution of their affective presences in our work? This is a question

fundamentally at odds with many of the demands of contemporary academic authorship.

These moments of unpredictability indicate to me there is a need for future scholars to think

critically about the affects of collaboration for methodological inquiry.

3.4.2 The impromptu focus group

Just as the lines between research and daily life become blurred, so too are the borders

between different types of methodologies. In this chapter I have already discussed the ways

working with affects can transgress the boundaries of document analysis and

autoethnography. However, there was another key moment in the methodological

development of my thesis which blurred methodological boundaries between semi-structured

interviews and focus groups. After receiving ethics approval to approach community groups

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for interview recruitment, I arranged to meet with the women’s community group ‘The Last

Wives of Stockton’ (see Paper 4) to circulate my recruitment material and briefly introduce

the project. These women meet weekly for catch ups in a café in their local suburb. Upon

attending my first coffee meeting and passing out recruitment materials, a few of the women

asked if I could stay and they could participate in an interview immediately rather than

organising a separate date, and I of course, obliged. Once all the necessary consent forms had

been signed, I took my first participant to a separate table and we commenced an interview.

About 15 minutes in, another participant approached and said “Oh I wanted to do mine today

too! Can I join in? Thanks! Now what were you talking about?”. Suddenly, I found myself

conducting an interview with two participants. Then, sometime later, one of the women was

recounting an anecdote of a driving trip she had taken with another member of the group, so

called back to her across the café to recount the details. From here coffees arrived, and my

participants wanted to move back to their original table. Suddenly, I now had 12 participants

all wanting to do their interview now – so consent forms were hastily passed around and an

improvised focus group began. Even within this emergent methodology there was more

ongoing unpredictability to contend with – at different times the conversation would bounce

easily from person to person, at other times side conversations broke out, and occasionally

someone would “need to leave soon” so they would dominate the floor for a few minutes to

answer questions then leave. The temporalities and structure of these interviews-come-focus-

group were far from conventional, far from ordered, and far from what I had planned.

Completely unpredictable.

However, the material generated by this experience with the impromptu focus group is

undoubtedly some of the richest and most engaging material to come out of my PhD,

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sparking many thoughts for future inquiry and resonating strongly with others when

presented at conferences and discussed across coffee tables. The affects of this encounter

with the impromptu focus group therefore continue to move between bodies well outside the

research space. What is the point of empirical research, if not to affectively move others with

what we experienced? Whilst, as researchers, we are trained to be flexible and adaptable to

the many ways fieldwork can unfold, I believe working with the themes of affect and

unpredictability throughout my thesis positioned me particularly well for embracing the

productivities in these moments. Thus, there are lessons in this thesis for the potentials of

unpredictability to enrich our understanding of social life in theoretical, empirical and

methodological terms.

3.4.3 Conclusions

Like Meno’s contemplation, the methodological approach I have developed in this thesis

comes in the form of a paradox. Developing an affective methodology required me to bring

together seemingly contrasting ideas: a set of appropriate ‘sensitising devices’ (Anderson

2014) to attune my fieldwork gaze to particular elements of affective life, with a critically

reflexive openness to the possibilities and multiplicities of my fieldwork experiences. In this

thesis I have animated this methodological approach through three qualitative methods:

document analysis, autoethnography and semi-structured interviews, in order to explore how

unpredictability is lived for a variety of moving bodies in a variety of contexts. Whilst the

methodological design outlined in this chapter has been instrumental in helping me meet my

research aims, the place of unpredictability in the research process cannot be ignored, and

undoubtedly made for a richer fieldwork experience.

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 Chapter 4 – Paper 1

Published as:

Hughes, A & Mee, K. 2018. ‘Journeys unknown: Embodiment, affect, and

living with being “lost” and “found”’. Geography Compass, vol. 12, no. 6,

e12372, doi: 10.1111/gec3.12372.

4.1 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

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4.2 Introduction

Humans have a fundamental and pervasive need to orient themselves (Downs & Stea 1977).

This has required us to develop spatial skills and tools to locate our bodies within time, space,

and place. However, just like other aspects of mobility, our ability to perform these skills can

be disrupted and we can experience disorientation and disconnection from the world around

us. But just as quickly as our connections to the world can be disrupted, they can be remade

in new ways. Therefore, navigating one's body through time and space involves a complex

tangle of performances, decisions, knowledges, relations, and affects. Acknowledging the

shifting, relational, and embodied nature of mobility has been a key trope of the ‘new

mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller & Urry 2006).

Yet much of what is currently written about mobility still carries an underlying assumption

that the mobility path is known or intended; that bodies know where they are going. Our own

experiences, and stories of friends and family and in the media, tell us this is not always the

case. Despite this, consideration of how mobility paths may be disrupted so that one feels lost

remains largely absent from the literature. So too is the related experience of being found:

finding, returning to, or remaking one’s mobility path.

‘Lost’ and ‘found’ are illusive terms. Despite their use in the everyday vernacular and

popular media accounts, they are often not explicitly used in mobilities research. Instead, the

term ‘wayfinding’ opens up an avenue for thinking about how the experiences of being

lost/found might enter the literature. Ingold (2000) theorises wayfinding as the process

through which people “‘feel their way’ through a world that is itself in motion, continually

coming into being” (p155). He (and others) sees this distinct from the term ‘navigation’

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which implies a method of determining route (Milner 2016); interpreting cartographic

information for a world fixed in advance (Ingold 2000). The term wayfinding helps

encapsulate the complexities of everyday mobilities—its embodied performance,

complexities, emotions, and affective qualities. The neglect of empirical stories about this

type of embodied wayfinding from the mobilities literature is problematic, as being lost and

found fundamentally shapes the way that bodies perform mobilities and come to know the

world around them. This paper will address some of the neglected aspects of being lost and

found by unpacking the problematic assumptions that the mobility path is known and that

people increasingly use objective and technical forms of knowledge to find their way around.

The first key assumption in the literature is that the mobility path is known or that bodies

know where they are going. This has arisen from a narrow consideration of what can disrupt

or change a journey. Much of the mobilities literature tends to focus on large scale, external

forces of disruption, which require people to rethink their initial intended mobility path.

These might include breakdowns in, or fragile transport infrastructure (example O’Regan

2010), natural disasters (Litman 2006) or technological mishaps (Garnett & Stewart 2015;

Xiao & Zhang 2002). This narrow focus implies that journeys and routes are predetermined

and gives little scope in thinking about a variety of sources of change to a journey. It betrays

the temporal and multiple ways that our bodies come to experience a sense of orientation and

disruption, and fails to appreciate some of the more everyday, emotional or intrinsic forces

which might influence the path someone takes during a journey. It also tends to frame

disruption or change as an intrinsically negative force, impinging on the comfort of moving

bodies. This underlies other areas of literature also, where disruptions to the expected norms

of travel are seen to unsettle comfort and consistency (for example, passenger congestion on

trains - Cheng 2011).

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The inattention to multiple stories of being lost and found in mobilities literature has also

extended to studies of the changing tools that humans use in everyday wayfinding. In the

minority world, we are currently in a technological context where locative information is

almost instantaneously available through smartphone and GPS enabled devices. This context

has in part contributed to a second underlying assumption in much of the literature: that

spatial knowledge is objective, rational, and easily accessible by anyone. Much contemporary

literature presents wayfinding tools as a group of technical objects/ tools that disseminate

cartographic information. These studies typically focus on maps, GPS enabled devices, and

signage, and subscribe to the dominant framework of seeing wayfinding as a technical-

rational solution to spatial problems by focusing on the reliability and effectiveness of such

technologies in communicating cartographic information for navigation (see examples

Garnett & Stewart 2015; Xiao & Zhang 2002). Such studies frame these technical objects as

black boxes, defined solely by the inputs and outputs they provide (Ash 2013). But

wayfinding, including using technical objects, is always embodied and performed in a

multitude of ways, and with varying degrees of comfort and intensity. Research on these

aspects of wayfinding practices focuses on how people draw on other types of knowledge to

find their way, for example, their personal histories and experiences. Notable examples

include how movement is affected by memory and people's ability to recall information to

construct mental maps (Meilinger, Knauff & Bülthoff 2008; Pickering 2001); how spatial

knowledges and practices are learned (Aporta & Higgs 2005); and how aspects of people’s

personalities and experiences affect movement, including their past travelling habits (Bissell

2015b), confidence (Cornell, Sorenson & Mio 2003), and ability to exercise control during

movement (Kent 2015; Waitt, Harada & Duffy 2017).

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Despite these notable examples, however, studies concerning these types of personal and

embodied spatial knowledges are given far less attention than their technical counterparts and

are often not explicitly connected to wayfinding, or experiences of being lost and found at all.

This has perpetuated a limited view of wayfinding, where technical objects are viewed as the

most valuable navigational tools available for producing objective spatial knowledge,

allowing any user to make rational and informed decisions about their mobility. Such a view

fails to account for the ways different spatial knowledges, emotions, and affects impact on

how mobility is embodied and performed. As such, there are two overall problematic

assumptions in the mobilities literature which this paper seeks to confront. Firstly, that the

mobility path is known or intended, meaning bodies know where they are going. And

secondly, that spatial knowledge is objective, providing people with rational spatial

information which assists efficient decision- making about mobile behaviours. In challenging

these assumptions, the aim of this paper is to explore the embodied everyday mobilities of

being lost and found. More specifically, this paper is concerned with how we might theorise

the impact of being lost and found for new directions for mobilities research.

This paper therefore focuses on two key conceptual research questions. Firstly, it asks: how

might being lost and found be theorised? This discussion draws on existing ideas from

mobilities research such as friction, liminality, and disruption, to unpack the embodied

experience of being lost and found. It also explores the conceptual potential of analysing

these experiences through the lens of affect. Complimentary to this broader discussion, this

paper also addresses a second question: how might we talk about being lost and found? This

section of commentary challenges the semantic dichotomy of the terms lost and found,

opening up critical thought around how future mobilities research might think and write

about these experiences.

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Throughout these discussions, this paper draws on stories from news and social media

accounts of everyday wayfinding to ground its arguments in lived experience. The four short

stories chosen illustrate the ways people use contemporary technologies and practices to

navigate their mobile lives. They help explore the critical potential of some of the key

concepts of the paper: friction, liminality, and affect and the complexities involved in

articulating what being lost and found means. In doing so, this paper therefore addresses a

third critical research question: how are the experiences of being lost and found lived? In

drawing together these three research questions, this paper offers the mobilities literature an

important commentary on how turning our attention more directly to being lost and found can

expand our understanding of what it means to be mobile.

4.3 How might being lost and found be theorised? Friction, liminality and affect.

4.3.1 Friction

The new mobilities paradigm brought an ontological shift towards seeing immobility,

disruption, and disconnection as enduring realities within a mobile world supposedly

dominated by speed, global flows, and unimpeded movements. Friction has been a key

conceptual tool for grappling with disruptions during movement. Tim Cresswell (2010) has

been a particularly influential voice in writing about friction in the mobilities literature,

exploring aspects of the mobile world in which movement is stilled, stopped, or slowed

(Cresswell 2010). The most critical aspect of Cresswell’s (2010) understanding of friction is

that it is a generative force which both stops or stills movement, whilst simultaneously

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propelling it forward. For Cresswell (2010, 107): “friction suggests an ambiguous, two-sided

form of relative stillness that is both impeding mobility and enabling it.”

To apply the concept of friction to the experience of getting lost, we need to consider what

exactly is being slowed down, stopped, or stilled when a body is lost? What other types of

relations does being lost generate? According to Rebecca Solnit (Solnit 2006, 23), the

experience of getting lost involves a particular suite of socio-spatial relations, in which "the

world has become larger than your knowledge of it". For Solnit (2006), the friction in being

lost is between what is known and what is unknown. However, many other types of frictions

could be identified in the experience of being lost or found. These frictions might arise from

the multiple forms of spatial knowledge a person has, the practicalities or materialities

associated with movement, the mode, or method of movement, or they may be the product of

imagined and personal decision-making during bodily performances. Rather than develop a

singular framework of friction then, we can again draw on Cresswell (2010) who asserts that

“we might think instead of a generative typology of frictions” (p107). Focusing on the

generative aspect of Cresswell’s friction also brings into focus how being found might fit into

the discussion. Moving away from an intended mobility path (simply put: feeling lost) opens

up opportunities for new or reconfigured movements in and through new spaces (feeling

found). As this paper will illustrate then, friction(s) can provide a useful lens through which

to explore the relations of being lost and found.

The following short story exemplifies the theoretical potential for friction to account for both

the disruptive and generative aspects of being lost. This story was widely circulated across

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international media outlets, as a classic example of how modern technologies might influence

our wayfinding experiences:

“Noel Santillan, a 28-year-old from New Jersey, typed the wrong address into his hire car's

CPS and ended up taking a six-hour diversion to the fishing village of Siglufjordur in the

north of Iceland, the Visir newspaper reports. His error was to type the word Laugaryegur—

with an extra “r”—instead of Laugavegur (one of the main roads in the capital Reykjavik)

where he expected to find the Hotel Fron. After driving for some time in poor road

conditions, he thought something was amiss, but ploughed on regardless: “I was very tired

after the flight and wanted to get to the hotel as soon as possible. That’s why I kept driving. I

did enjoy the scenery on the way. I've never seen anything quite like it,” he told Visir.”

(BBC News, 2016)

American tourist Noel Santillan found internet fame when he blindly followed his GPS

instructions some 6 hr past his intended destination in Reykjavik, to an isolated fishing

village on the other side of Iceland. Noel's story is particularly useful in illustrating how

being lost and found can be understood through the lens of friction. Many moments of

friction can be identified in Noel’s story—his movement along his planned or intended

mobility path was slowed down significantly. Rebecca Solnit (2006) might argue that the

friction in Noel's mobility comes from his own partial knowledge of the new spatial context,

and the little influence surrounding landscape and signage had on his performance, which

rendered him in a world that was larger than his knowledge of it. Friction is also apparent in

the practicalities of his journey, as the capabilities of his GPS defined how his mobility path

and destination were laid out, against the larger scalar constructions of street, town, country,

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north, south, east, and west. However, what is so compelling about this example is how it

illustrates that friction is generative. Upon finding himself at the opposite end of the country,

he was amazed by the countryside and hospitality of local people and eventually chose to

extend his stay in Iceland. In essence, the moments of friction that helped Noel become lost

also meant that he found himself in a new spatial context with previously unforeseen

connections to the world around him.

Stories like Noel's do not necessarily have to be pleasurable to be generative, as for others,

the discomfort or anxiety that one might feel finding themselves in an unfamiliar place can

establish new relations between bodies and space or place. Thinking through the generative

potential of frictions is one way to articulate the relations between bodies and spaces which

occur during acts of movement, and which are currently hidden in most mobilities literatures.

4.3.2 Liminality

Whilst it is useful to unpack the different frictions that occur as bodies become lost or found,

friction only goes so far in helping understand how bodies might perform or feel during these

experiences. We can also draw from literatures around liminality and disorientation to

theorise how being lost or found might be conceived as a transitory “state” where the body

experiences shifting socio-spatial relations. Thomassen (2014) suggests that the liminal refers

to the “betwixt and between” which provides us with a “break from the normal” (p30). What

then does the liminal mean for mobility and the experience of being lost or found?

To unpack this term, we can draw on the work of Jon Anderson (2015), who discusses jet lag

as a liminal experience. He suggests that jet lag acts beyond physical symptoms and puts

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bodies into a “state” of liminality, or disorientation, which are the “holistic consequences of

leaving one set of socio-spatial relations and moving to another” (p6). In this liminal, or

disoriented, “state” we may see the world differently and become separated from familiar:

geographies, times, performances, and the self. Applying this to the experience of getting

lost, the liminal could be seen as the boundary between the familiar and what remains foreign

or yet to be learned. When we become lost, we are dislocated from familiar geographies

(quite literally!) but can also experience a different perception of time and feel uncertainty in

our performances and knowledges. Thus, following Anderson (2015), we might think of

being lost as a “provisional world of experience” that emerges when the body moves from

one set of spatial relations to another. What is particularly useful about Anderson's (2015)

liminal “state of being” is that its dislocating nature evokes emotional responses. For some, it

can be an uncomfortable and unwelcome experience, whilst at other times, it can be

pleasurable and generative of new unimagined relations to the social and cultural world.

To think through how this liminal state of being might play out in lived experience, consider

a second short story. This story was taken from an internet lifestyle blog, in which the author

detailed her experiences of using modern technology to wayfind in her everyday life. She

writes:

“I spent 60 frustrating minutes last week trying to find a coffee shop in Santa Fe for friend.

“It's the best coffee I've ever had” she cooed as she handed me the printed-out online map

and directions. “You're going right by there anyway”. Right by? I sure did. I went around

more times than I could count. I kept whizzing past, turning around, and whizzing past again,

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glancing down, somehow, at those worthless printed directions amidst three furious lanes of

traffic. It has to be here, right? The GPS said it was.”

(Skala, 2016)

This story illustrates the value of liminality for understanding some of the more embodied

aspects of being lost and found. The author describes their sense of movement as whizzing,

turning, and whizzing past again, experienced through the sensory registers of confusion, in

which they remain unsure of the relations between their body and the surrounding

environment. This author questions their own driving performances and sense of self, trying

to work out whether to trust the GPS directions or start to call on other spatial knowledges. In

this moment, the body is in a temporary, liminal “state”—a particular provisional world of

experience—where it is attempting to disentangle and make sense of changing socio-spatial

relations. This story indicates the potential for considering further the complex emotions and

affects which are transferred between people and wayfinding tools as they embody the

experiences of being lost or found.

4.3.3 Affect

Emotions are therefore a critical component of how we come to know about the world during

movement. Traditionally, the term being lost has evoked negative feelings of discomfort and

stress, and being found connected to relief and safety. However, this simple dichotomy belies

the complexity of being lost and found. Emotions extend beyond the site of the body to

influence how people relate to one another, the space around them, the quality of their

movement, and their feelings about present or future movements. This line of critical enquiry

has increasingly been explored within the mobilities literature using the theme of affect.

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Whilst emotion is largely characterised by the perception and interpretation of individual

feelings (Conradson & Latham 2007), affects are the inexpressible, intangible, but inarguably

real ways (Pile 2010) in which emotions are externalised by beings and press upon the social

world. Affects are not known and derived from a single point of view or experience but are

the transpersonal capacities for a body to affect or be affected (Pile 2010 in Anderson 2015).

The mobility of one being (be that a human being, inanimate object, etc.) relationally affects

the mobility of others. Take for example a key paper by David Bissell (2010) in which he

argues that the “being with” other passengers during rail travel, and the interactions which

unfold, create affective atmospheres which determine what passengers feel they can cope

with and heighten or diminish emotions such as anxiety. Moreover, emotional or bodily

experiences can have affects that linger, influencing how the body feels about future

movements (Hughes, Mee & Tyndall 2016).

Thinking through affect is a key way to make connections between the emotions of

wayfinding, and how this might give rise to feelings of being lost or found. Negative

emotions such as fear, frustration, or stress which can occur when one is lost are part of the

practice and performance of mobility, and impact on how the individual feels about future

movements or dwelling in a particular place. Similarly, pleasurable feelings such as

discovery, excitement, or opportunity may also affect the practices of being lost. The

multitude of affects produced by the experiences of being lost or found remain unconsidered

in mobilities literature thus far.

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Affect is not only useful for thinking through relations between bodies, movements, and

emotions. Contemporary literatures have begun to explore the implications of affect for

human interactions with technical objects. Technical objects can define the capabilities of the

human body, which has a variety of affects on performance and experience (for example, see

Spinney 2007). Ash (2013) extends this idea even further to suggest that technical objects can

relate to each other, and human beings, outside of human consciousness or intentionality.

These technical objects have “perturbations” which create atmospheres that generate

particular experiences of time and space for both humans and non-humans (Ash 2013). This

is a dynamic view of technical objects and their affects which thus far has not been

commonly adopted in studies of mobility.

The conceptual work of Ash (2013), and theories of affect more generally, is helpful in

exploring stories of the various ways wayfinding affects our capacity to be mobile, and the

ways we live with being lost and found. For instance, if we consider popular media stories

where people have felt lost or are trying to find their way, affect can help get at how these

experiences play upon the quality or intensity of the movement, as well as the potential of

future movements. This is something that using the lens of liminality might fail to fully

express: how being lost/found can have lasting impacts on how bodies feel about and perform

future movements.

The following story, taken from a series of comments that users wrote in response to an

article on The Guardian website, gives a glimpse of this. The theme of the thread specifically

focused on users sharing their experiences of feeling lost:

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 “I once went to a shopping centre that I didn’t know, went in one shop, got totally

disorientated, panicked, managed to get back to the multi storey car park and spent what

seemed like a lifetime trying to find my car. It was awful. I have never been to new shopping

centres on my own since. I am 46 years old and I feel like a child.”

(written by website user Melissa, from The Guardian 2011, emphasis added)

Using theories of affect, we can understand that there were particular qualities to Melissa's

movements in the shopping centre: she moved in a way that was unsure, uncomfortable, and

she experienced the sense of disorientation that is so frequently associated with being lost.

But for Melissa, the extreme intensity of this experience has affected her capacity for

movement through new shopping centre spaces in the future—she no longer moves within

these spaces by herself. Furthermore, this movement experience has had lasting affects for

how she views herself, her mobile behaviours, and even her capacity to be mobile. As such,

this example is powerful in illustrating that theories of affect can help reveal the ways in

which fleeting, liminal, and transitory moments in which people feel lost or found are

actually significant in terms of their everyday mobility.

Certainly, this was a theme that was reflected in many different popular media accounts of

wayfinding and illustrates the potential for using affect as a lens of analysis. The following is

a similar account by Foy (2016), taken from a (partly) autobiographical novel in which he

interrogates the origins of navigation. He describes the experience of falling asleep in his car

and waking up to an unrecognisable landscape around him:

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 “A strange terror gripped me then (...) It was a panic somehow augmented by the emotional

memory of similar situations, whose outcomes lay beyond the haze of fatigue, in a place I

could not quite recall. That feeling was matched by the desperation with which as soon as

panic furloughed my motor centres, I catalogued as quickly as possible what I could see or

touch: steering wheel, windshield, and beyond the glass, a tall, highway-style lamp post, a

dark stand of white pines. I remember the relief that washed over me when geophysical clues

crossed lines on a mental map, suggesting a solid position and memories connected to them:

car, rest area, highway”

(Foy 2016, 2)

In this story, it is clear that the “emotional memory” of being lost before has had a lasting

impact on how this person feels about their current situation, giving rise to feelings of terror

and disorientation illustrating how these emotions and memories affect our embodied

performances. The author beautifully articulates how this terror and panic affected their

performance, as they quickly search for physical cues using sight and touch to try and remake

their connections to the surrounding environment. Stories such as this bring to light the

potential of an affective and performative understanding of being lost and found, as past

mobile experiences, and embodied practices, affect the quality of movement.

The stories in these preceding sections illustrate why it is so important to find ways to

theorise how we live with being lost and found. There are clearly many popular media

accounts which consider the multiple ways that these experiences are embodied. It is clear

there needs to be greater consideration in the mobilities research community about how these

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experiences fundamentally shape our mobile lives, both in the moment, and in contemplating

future journeys.

4.4 How do we talk about being lost and found?

Throughout this paper thus far, our arguments have rested heavily on the terms lost and found

to describe and theorise the experiences of others, as these are terms used widely in everyday

vernacular and popular media accounts. “Lost” and “found” however often carry the weight

of framing these experiences as distinct, definable, and most problematically, in binary

opposition. In reality, it is difficult to determine when or where being lost ends and being

found begins. These are fluid experiences, which fluctuate in severity and temporality.

Furthermore, as these experiences are inextricably connected to people's perceptions,

feelings, and performances in the world, the terms lost and found are inevitably felt

differently by different people. As such, we feel there is a need to use these terms sensitively

and more importantly, to explore new ways of writing about such experiences.

In order to think through how we might articulate being lost and found, we can draw on

Ingold (2000). For Ingold (2000), wayfinding helps create “inhabitant knowledge”:

knowledge of the world created through the embodied process of doing. Thus, being lost or

found is part of an embodied process of doing that forms a spectrum of experiences.

Modelling these experiences on a spectrum is therefore one potential device for rethinking

the lost/found binarism (Figure 2, below). The key benefit of thinking about lost and found

on a spectrum is that there is room for fluidity between the two poles of experience, helping

to express the ways that being lost and found can be felt with varying levels of intensity and

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temporality. This might prove a useful methodological tool for future mobilities research, as

one could imagine participants indicating how they felt during different mobile experiences

on the spectrum. Certainly, the spectrum could also be created using different aspects of

being lost and found, allowing researchers to draw out particular understandings or stories

from participants.

Figure 2: Placing lost and found on a spectrum of experience

Again, we can turn to media stories to see the analytical potential of thinking about being lost

and found as a spectrum of experience. On a comments thread facilitated by The Guardian

(2011), site user Bibekdeep describes trying to navigate his immediate neighbourhood for a

particular business. He says: “I had a feeling it was on a certain street”. What is interesting

about this statement is that you could not place Bibekdeep's notion neatly into the category of

“lost” or “found.” He is neither totally unsure nor totally convinced of the business's location,

and we might speculate that in this moment, he lies somewhere towards the middle of our

spectrum. Bibekdeep draws on his inhabitant knowledge—what he knows of the surrounding

location through experience—to express an intuitive guess as to its actual location. At

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different points in Bibekdeep's journey as he acted upon this hunch and navigated his way to

the business, his place along the spectrum would obviously change.

The difficulty in describing one's experience as either lost or found is reflected in many of the

popular media accounts. The following is another example, taken from an internet travel

blog:

“We had no idea where we had landed, other than that it was in the wrong place. Still, the

Nuvi (GPS) was confidently talking up a storm. Turn left here, turn right there - no crisis of

confidence on the part of the GPS. My wife, on the other hand, was having a fit. When the

road narrowed to a single car's width and we were forced to navigate a series of 90-degree

turns above an escarpment, she dug her nails into my arm: “The GPS is taking us in the

opposite direction,” she said. “Can you understand that??”

(Cooper 2009)

In the very first line, this story states that: “we had no idea where we had landed, other than

that it was in the wrong place.” This expresses the curious dilemma of feeling both

simultaneously lost and found. This person has some spatial knowledge of the wider

connections between their body and time and space, despite not knowing their precise

location. Certainly, this is an experience many of us are familiar with, and feeling lost or

found comes with varying degrees of severity. Perhaps then, this story could also be placed

on the spectrum (Figure 2), as this helps us understand the multiple scales at which one can

be lost or found. It also accounts for the pulsing temporalities of being lost and found, as

different moments in the journey can move fluidly back and forth along the spectrum.

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Using a spectrum to conceptualise how bodies might be lost and found also reinforces that

focusing on rational spatial knowledge is not enough. It is nearly impossible to depict on a

spectrum exactly how much rational spatial knowledge a person has. Spatial knowledge

always remains partial, incomplete, and embodied. Therefore to place being lost and found

on a spectrum needs to move beyond thinking about rational, location based knowledge, and

acknowledge that how bodies feel is important.

Clearly, there are multiple ways of being located that the terms “lost” and “found” cannot

always cope with, illustrating the need to explore different ways and devices of expressing

such experiences. We have offered just one potential device here, and so in this paper, we

invite others working in this area to interrogate the lost/found binarism further to try develop

a more nuanced discussion of how we understand our mobile lives.

4.5 Conclusions

This paper has considered the utility of drawing on the conceptual tools of friction, liminality,

and affect as starting points for how we might unpack being lost and found. We hope the

paper opens up discussion about a wider range of critical conceptual tools or terms for

thinking and writing about being lost and found, given these experiences remain such critical,

yet illusive, aspects of our mobile lives.

We argued that affect is particularly useful for exploring the multiple and changing relations

that exist between bodies, space, knowledge, technology, and emotions. The stories

employed throughout this paper reveal a few glimpses of the ways that being lost and found

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play out in everyday mobilities. We need to consider a greater range of performances of

being lost and found, and how they might vary with age, gender, physical capacity, mode of

transport, and financial resources to name just a few. Exploring such stories will provide

insights into how being lost and found makes a difference to people’s access to everyday

spaces in the city. Similarly, there will be methodological questions to address, in finding

appropriate methods to elicit some of the more fleeting aspects, affects, and emotions one

might experience being lost and found.

The impacts of new technologies on being lost and found require deeper exploration by

mobilities scholars. As Foy (2016) argues:

“Will putting all our faith in GPS and related technologies diminish us in some way? Does

the ensuing inability to get lost somehow sap our ability to seek and find new directions,

geographical and otherwise? And is navigational fear […] something we actually need in

order to start exploring, and keep at it too, whether it be deep space or the flight paths of

quarks? It seems very important we investigate how these changes affect our lives.”

(Foy 2016, 12)

These are questions too big for this paper to confront. Yet they signal important directions for

mobilities scholars attempting to grapple with the many complexities of navigation and

wayfinding in contemporary contexts, particularly given the rapid proliferation of GPS

technologies. Cartographers, psychologists, and designers are already concerned with the way

people's cognitive mapping skills are changing (see examples Leshed, Velden, Rirger, Kot &

Sengers (2008); Ricker, Schuurman & Kessler (2015)). We are witnessing a shift in

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longstanding notions of what it means to know one’s place in the world, how we ‘read’ space

and learn about our surroundings, and what it really means to be lost. It is important that

mobilities scholars are sensitive to the fact that our mobile lives remain subject to the

unknown and that we take seriously the conceptual, empirical, and methodological challenges

of researching how we live with being lost and found.

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 Chapter 5 – Paper 2

Published as:

Hughes, A & Mee, K. 2019. ‘Wayfinding with my iPhone: An autoethnographic

account of technological companionship and its affects’. Emotion, Space and

Society, vol 33, doi: 1016/j.emospa.2019.100613.

5.1 Abstract

Location-aware technologies such as GPS devices and smartphones are integral to everyday,

mundane navigational practices or ‘wayfinding’. The personalisation, portability and

popularity of these devices means that wayfinding can be accomplished with near-instant

access to place-based information. But how do people connect to these devices in more

intimate, emotional, and haptic ways? To address this question, this paper draws on

autoethnographic fieldwork involving wayfinding devices, using a series of iPhone

navigation apps. The paper presents a series of short narratives taken from my field diaries

exploring the ways in which I perceived and performed my iPhone device as a companion

during my everyday mobilities. The paper focuses on three mechanisms that facilitated

relations of companionship: product design, sensory engagement and emotional/affective

encounters. Building on these insights, the paper argues that relations of companionship with

technological devices come into focus in particular moments when the life cycles of the users

and their devices collide. The various emotions and affects, which circulate in these

moments, are critical to how we make sense of space, place, and our mobilities, as well as

ongoing engagements with human/technology relations.

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5.2 Introduction

I had to get a new iPhone for this project. She13 is the latest model - an iPhone 6+. She is

sleek, shiny and large in my hand. But instead of feeling excited by having the newest model

phone at my fingertips, I actually felt guilty when I used her for the first time. I felt like I was

betraying my own personal, smaller iPhone 5, with her own numerous display scratches and

sightly glitchy software. I had often been frustrated by my annoyingly dated iPhone 5, but in

the shadow of this new 6+ heavyweight, I looked upon her with a mix of pity and affection.

Sure, she had led me astray a few times before, but it wasn't entirely her fault, and she had

done nothing to warrant total abandonment.

(Excerpt from my field diary 5/9/2016)

There is no shortage of anecdotal and academic evidence that relationships between

technology, space and the self are intensifying (Lomas 2015; Thomas & Revoir 2010; Reuver

et a1 2016; Chotpitayasunondh & Douglas 2016). In part, this intensification comes from a

technological era marked by the characteristics of “diversification, multiplication and

proliferation” of digital spatial information technologies (Leszczynski 2014, 1). Amid the

myriad uses for such technologies, location-aware technologies such as GPS and smartphone

devices, and their accompanying software, are viewed as integral parts of everyday

navigational practices, or ‘wayfinding’ 14. Today, nearly 3 billion mobile and tablet

applications (apps) utilise some form of GPS-derived positioning information (Milner 2016).

13 Throughout my fieldwork reflections I adopted the pronoun of “she” to describe the persona of 6 as my
female companion. This has implications beyond the scope of this paper for the way that the personified iPhone
taps into debates about gender (Karlan 2015).
14‘Wayfinding’ refers to determining route and executing movement along that path encompassing both the
imagined and embodied performances of navigation (Milner 2016).

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The personalisation, portability and popularity of these types of handheld devices has meant

that everyday wayfinding can be performed with near-instant access to various forms of

cartographic or place-based information (Leszczynski 2014).

But amid these intensifying relationships, how might contemporary wayfinding technologies

be challenging longstanding assumptions about relations between technological artefacts,

space and the self? Research on contemporary wayfinding technologies and their mediation

of space has thus far clustered around two central poles. The first are studies largely from the

disciplines of information and communication technologies that examine the design of

locative devices for users, analysing them using axes of efficiency and reliability (see

examples Garnett & Stewart 2015; Xiao & Zhang 2002). The second are studies at the

intersection of cartography, geography and psychology, which seek to understand the

influence these modern wayfinding technologies are having on spatial cognition. Many of

these studies are critical of technological wayfinding devices, suggesting that they are

diminishing people's navigational skills (Richer et al 2015) and potentially leading them into

dangerous situations (Leshed et al 2008). Such accounts have also gained significant traction

in the media, with ‘death by GPS’ (Milner 2016) stories focusing on the most extreme cases

of GPS malfunction and human (mis)trust of technology (Iceland Magazine 2016; Dorian &

Reilly 2013; Cockle 2011).

Each of these areas falls into the trap of framing these technologies as ‘black boxes’ defined

in terms of the inputs and outputs they provide their users. As such, relationships between

technology, space, and the self are (largely) viewed as rational, and the type of spatial

knowledge produced is presented as objective. Such assumptions are problematic in two

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ways. Firstly, they assume that devices provide users with objective cartographic

information, and that secondly, users interpret this information to perform their mobilities in

a way that will most efficiently manoeuvre them between locations. This view gives little

recognition to the multiple, embodied and messy ways that people ‘do’ the act of wayfinding

(Ingold 2000). This paper looks beyond these rational conceptions of technology, space and

self, and uses autoethnography to illustrate: firstly, how emotional, intimate or haptic

connections between technologies, space and self might be made, and secondly, that

individuals make multiple and messy connections when wayfinding with technology.

To address these questions, this paper focuses on the ways that individuals perceive and

perform their wayfinding devices as travel companions. The word companion, from the Old

French compagnon, means “fellow, mate, or friend” (Vocabulary.com 2018). Drawing on

Donna Haraway's cyborg figuration, this paper argues that relations of companionship are

one example of how humans and technological lives are becoming increasingly intertwined.

This paper unpacks how relations of companionship take form by drawing on an

autoethnographic account of my own wayfinding using an iPhone 6+. The paper makes three

contributions to our understanding of how contemporary wayfinding technologies and

practices are remaking relationships between emotions, space and society. Firstly, it ‘opens

the black box’ regarding what wayfinding technologies can do, how they are used, and what

sorts of mobile experiences they produce. Secondly, the paper explores how specific relations

of companionship are brought into focus by individuals during wayfinding through the lens

of the cyborg figuration. Thirdly, the stories of this paper reveal the multiple sources of

knowledge that people draw upon to interpret space and perform their everyday wayfinding.

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The paper uses my autoethnographic accounts to highlight how connections (and

disconnections) between myself, and my device, are made in emotional, intimate and haptic

ways. Acknowledging the importance of emotion in how we perform wayfinding has

implications for what it means to be mobile in the digital age.

5.3 ‘Opening the black box’: human/technology hybridities

Engaging with dispersed mobile practices, such as navigating routes, listening to music, and

monitoring performance, are critical to the ways satisfaction circulates in our affective mobile

performances (Cass & Faulconbridge 2015). Technology has become a central mode through

which practices of satisfaction and comfort take form (Cass & Faulconbridge 2015), by

extending the capacities of our mobile performances and increasingly allowing people to

‘problem solve’ whilst on the move. In turn, technological devices have become valued as

critical travel tools.

But thinking through the ways smartphone devices might be positioned as travel companions

calls for a deeper engagement with the ways that devices cross the boundaries of being

viewed as discrete objects or tools and come to be thought of as relational counterparts. Many

contemporary studies exploring human/technology relations have drawn on Donna Haraway's

cyborg figuration as a means of articulating the transgressing of boundaries between

human/animal, organism/machine and physical/non-physical (Wilson 2009); a relational

ontology where “the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred: mind,

body, and tool are on very intimate terms” (Haraway 1991). What resonates most from

Haraway's figuration for this paper, is the importance of co-evolution across

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human/technology hybrid lives. Haraway suggests that humans and technologies participate

in the shared experience of co-evolution as a companion species (Lupton 2017). Human and

machine entities are therefore “linked by relationships of association, connection and

companionship” in which “both subjects and objects shape reality in a ‘dance of

encounters.”’ (Duarte & Park 2014, 260). The remainder of this paper looks to how treating

devices as companions aligns with Haraway's cyborg figuration.

5.4 How are iPhone products designed as companions?

There are design qualities to iPhone devices which evoke Haraway's cyborg

metaphor/hybridity in very deliberate and specific ways; ways which are somewhat unique to

Apple branded products. Perhaps the defining feature of the iPhone compared to other

smartphone brands, for many people, is the level of personalisation possible. This is true not

only of the iPhone's basic system settings (including classic examples of personalisation of

wallpaper, ringtone etc) but also the types of information users can access or manipulate

through software apps. As of June 2016, iPhone users could choose between some 2 million

different apps to download (Costello 2017), allowing them to tailor their iPhone usage.

According to Hjorth (2012) the iPhone is a particularly successful example of the

‘commercialisation of personalisation’.

Apple does not just encourage users to personalise their iPhones. Many of the technological

features they have created also encourage users to personify their iPhones. The inclusion of

human-like features such as the personal assistant ‘Siri’, who is able to respond to voice cues

to perform tasks, does some of the legwork in creating affective and emotional connections

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that position the device as a companion. Direct references to the way Siri will co-evolve as a

companion alongside her user are even embedded into the marketing strategy for iPhone

products. For example: “Siri can even anticipate what you might need to help you breeze

through your day” (Apple 2018, emphasis added).

Moreover, many of the software apps available to users through the app store evoke a very

literal sense of companionship by describing themselves as “an essential companion” (Apple

App Store 2017) for a variety of tasks. Examples include: shopping (Shoptopia: Your

Shopping Companion, WineCompanion), audio or music (Audio Companion, DancePal;

Ultimate Irish Dance Music Companion), fitness (Fitness Buddy, Virtual Trainer Pro) and

travel (Companion: Mobile Personal Safety, PackPoint Packing List Travel Companion).

According to Jane Vincent (2015), the flexibility and adaptability of modern mobile systems

in responding to user needs fosters familiarity between the user and their device, affirming

the role of the phone as a companion.

5.5 Building connections: companionship through sensory engagement

iPhones engage our senses in ways that influence our embodied perception of space, place,

and (te1e)presence (Richardson 2012). Richardson (2012) suggests that this: “coupling of

tools and bodies is effectively articulated by the term intercorporeality, which describes the

irreducible relation between technologies, embodiment, knowledge and perception” (p135).

Richardson 's (2012) construction of intercorporeality resonates nicely with Haraway's

broader cyborg configuration in blurring the lines between human and machine. Relations of

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companionship between users and their iPhones are one way cyborg ontologies are

performed.

Companionship is embodied in the sensory engagements required in using mobile devices

which rely heavily on the sensory registers of talk, touch and sight to engage their users.

Traditionally, talk was realised through the communicate functions of the phone, as users

were able to speak to distant others. With the addition of Siri and voice recognition users also

talk to the device itself. The voice command is displayed as text on the screen and Siri

responds, both in text, and with a cool, comforting female voice. As such there is a

heightened semantic quality to interacting with an iPhone device that affirms its role as a

companion with whom reciprocal communication is possible.

Touch is also an important sensory experience with the introduction of touchscreen

capabilities. The iPhone is specifically created for use with the finger or fingers for multi-

touch sensing, and because the screen is a capacitive touchscreen, it depends on electrical

conductivity that can only be provided by bare skin. The iPhone screen can track the

movement of five fingers simultaneously; this means users must directly touch the screen

through a variety of tapping, pushing, pulling, swiping, and pinching motions in order to

engage with the phone and perform tasks. Richardson (2012) states: “thus, there is a certain

haptic intimacy that renders the iPhone an object of tactile and kinaesthetic familiarity, a

sensory knowingness of the fingers that correlates with what appears on the small screen”

(Richardson 2012, 144). The haptic intimacy afforded by touching one's device performs

relations of familiarity and companionship. Sadat, Hossain and Mahmud (2014) found that

the amount of pressure applied on the screen “varies with the user's emotion and substantially

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it increases when he [sic] is in excited or angry mood” (p2), illustrating how the micro-

percepts of touch become overlaid with emotion.

The wearability of modern devices evokes the cyborg metaphor even further by blurring the

physical boundaries between user and device. Fitness armbands quite literally connect the

device to one's body. Headphones deliver critical audio straight into ears. Apple Watches

extend device companionship without the necessity of touching the physical phone handset.

These devices are ‘lively technologies’: “inhabiting and accompanying us in our physical

spaces and residing on or with [. . .] our bodies.” (Lupton 2017, 1602).

5.6 Building connections: companionship through emotions and affects 15

Clearly then, particular software and hardware features of iPhones serve to position them as

companions and guide their users towards performances of companionship. But how do these

perceptions and performances evolve into relations of deep companionship? What intimate

emotions come forward in these moments? And what are the affective implications of co-

evolving alongside devices as companions? There is a particular set of emotions associated

with having an intimate companion: safety, comfort, trust, reassurance, and support. This is

reflected by (Vincent 2015, 105), who writes that for individuals: “the constant always on

15 We are sensitive to the fact that the relations between emotions and affects can be theorised in many different
ways, and articulating these relations remains a complex task. In this paper we have adopted Pile’s (2010)
approach which sees emotions as being characterised by individual, readily identifiable feelings and affects as
the intangible, inexpressible yet inarguably real ways emotions are externalised by bodies (human and non-
human) and press upon the world.

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connectivity afforded by these devices is enabling a communicable stream of consciousness

and emotions that are intertwined between the mobile phone, and their emotional self”.

Li, Rong and Thatcher (2009) explore the idea of technology ‘trust’, suggesting that the

perceived trustworthiness of technology has a significant influence on user behaviour. Their

empirical investigations revealed that users often personified their devices as a ‘virtual

advisor’ and measured their emotions towards technology using inter-personal attributes such

as ‘honesty’, treating them as social actors subject to social rules. Sadat, Hossain and

Mahmud (2014) examines human affection for smartphones, suggesting that user's behaviour

towards their smartphones is moderated by voice and body language to communicate

emotions such as joy, anger, pleasantness, dominance and so on. These studies are indicative

of a new wave of consumer-based research into emotion-based or emotion-aware interface

systems (example see Biundo, Holler and Schattenberg (2016) regarding ‘affective

computing’).

The implications of personifying mobile devices as a silent ‘friend’ or ‘companion’ and

prescribing them with human emotions and characteristics, is that users relate to them in

intimate ways, inviting them into one's social circle. According to Wegner and Ward (2013,

59): “inviting the iPhone's Siri into one's social group changes everything. Our work suggests

that we treat the Internet much like we would a human transactive memory partner. We

offload memories to “the cloud” just as readily as we would to a family member, friend or

lover”. Feelings of ‘trust’ and ‘honesty’ towards technological devices therefore become

bound up in our expectations of not only ourselves, but what our personified devices can

offer us as companions. Technologies define our capabilities, both expanding and restricting

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us (Spinney 2007), and having affects for our expectations of certainty, security and comfort

in our performances.

Spinney (2007) argues there is a broader ‘dance of encounter’ (Duarte & Parke 2014)

between the user and device here that cannot necessarily be captured by emotions alone.

Here, we refer to relational sensations and affects which emerge in moments of encounter

between both human and non-human affective bodies (Pile 2010). According to Pile (2010),

affect becomes salient in these encounters with significant shifts to a body's capacity to be

affected, or shifts in intensity. This is particularly useful for thinking about how humans and

devices co-evolve as companions, as particular moments of encounter bring relations of

companionship into sharp focus. At other times, these affective relations remain hidden from

view as they traverse the human/technology hybrid subject. Pile's (2010) insights are useful

in exploring how or why particular affects linger, carried with bodies long after a mobile

journey is completed. As such, the fieldwork stories in this paper attune themselves to

moments of encounter where companionship appeared to flourish and evolve, but also to

wane or dissipate.

Technical objects influence our capabilities in even more unconscious ways during this

‘dance of encounter’. Ash (2013, 2015) suggests that technical objects relate to each other,

and human beings, outside of human consciousness or intentionality. To illustrate this point,

he uses the example of the iPhone 4. When held with a particular grip, the hand of the user

can interfere with the strength of the signal the iPhone receives. This slows down the

availability of information for the user, leaving them with a particular experience of time and

space. The perturbations of the iPhone in this scenario have created an ambiguous situation in

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which the human being assessing the information is left with more than one possible outcome

(Ash 2013).

For this paper, our analysis focuses on the emotions described in my field diary, interpreted

as the emotions, emotional feeling (affects), and moods (Tait 2016) of the ongoing

relationship between myself and my iPhone 6+ drawing on Haraway's cyborg figuration.

Ash's (2013) insights helped draw out how my experiences of time and space were coloured

by the process of learning to use my new iPhone 6, and the strained relations of

companionship I felt with her. Therefore using this view of affect is an appropriate way for

this paper to come to grips with the complex relations between the technical objects,

emotions and performances of wayfinding. It is also a useful theoretical lens for exploring the

dynamism of technical objects more broadly, and the ways the life cycles of technical objects

become deeply entangled with human ones.

Overall, links between technology and companionship are not new to the literature. Just as

many psycho-geographical studies have debated how technology might be diminishing

spatial cognition, many studies have debated the ramifications of technology in providing

appropriate companionship for their users (Moskowitz 2013; Subbaraman 2013; Turkle

2012). What appears to underpin much of the fearful criticism is the inability for technology

to replicate human-to-human (or human-animal) companionship. But as Hine (2000)

describes, “rather than possessing inherent qualities, the technology text ‘makes available'

readings which user/readers interpret in context” (p34). Despite personal attachments to our

phones then, technology's dynamism lies in reorganising our field or awareness: our ‘horizon

of possibilities’ (Richardson 2012; Leszczynski 2014). I argue in this paper that users can be

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simultaneously emotionally invested in their devices, and aware of their limitations (as

indeed we can be with other types of human and animal companions). Rather than evaluating

companionship with devices in comparison to other types of relationships then, this paper

will explore what ‘horizons of possibilities’ open up for exploration by considering devices

as travel companions.

5.7 Wayfinding with my iPhone

My autoethnography involved the use of a new iPhone 6+ and a series of apps designed to

facilitate various forms of navigation. I integrated the use of the phone and apps into my

everyday mobilities across a six-month period from October 2016 to March 2017. I used the

phone and apps on roughly 6-8 journeys per week during this time, for a total of

approximately 168 journeys. During this time I kept a multimedia diary to record my

observations, which included my own written reflections, as well as device screenshots, and

audio clips.

For this paper I focus my analysis around three short excerpts from my field diaries which

illustrate moments of encounter where feelings of companionship and intimacy between

myself and my device came forward. Like the excerpt used to open this paper, my empirical

sections personify my device(s) and describe them in emotional and intimate ways. At times,

I make comparisons between my new project iPhone 6+, named ‘6’, and my own older

device - referred to as ‘5’ throughout the work.

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Using autoethnography as the dominant methodology has had important implications for my

fieldwork. Firstly, adopting a narrative approach allowed greater scope for drawing out and

communicating the intimate personal emotions, affects and embodied practices involved in

everyday wayfinding. As such, the contributions of this paper are grounded in my subjective

experiences, reinforcing the notion that wayfinding with technical objects is not a rational,

nor objective experience. Indeed, this is one of the key benefits of using autoethnography as a

methodology, as it “radically foregrounds the emotions and experiences of the researcher as a

way to acknowledge the inevitably subjective nature of knowledge, and in order to use

subjectivity deliberately as an epistemological resource.” (Butz & Besio 2009, 1662).

Secondly, using autoethnography holds potential for giving (some) voice to the objects

themselves. This is particularly important in the context of my paper where the iPhone itself

became personified as a key companion in my mobile performances. This follows from the

work of Haldrup (2017) who uses autoethnography to “direct attention to its potentials for

exploring our emotional and sensuous relations with the mutable objects themselves and the

affects and effects they generate” (p54). Autoethnography allowed my reflections to focus

intensely on the small, yet significant moments of encounter with my device, foregrounded

against the broader technological assemblage (Wilmott 2016).

5.7.1 Story 1: Learning to move together

We were on our annual coastal holiday, and I decided to go for a morning run. I looked out

from the balcony of our rental house and briefly considered a run along the beach - the area

I knew best - but I was already in my joggers and didn't feel like being covered in sand. I

picked up 6 and opened the Map My Run app.

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After scrolling through a few different possible running routes I settled on one which took me

away from the beach and into town; a 6km loop run by “Rob” some six months earlier. I

used two fingers to pinch and zoom in on the route map and orient myself according to the

suggested path. I connected my headphones and pressed ‘Start Workout’. The screen showed

a timer, measuring my distance, pace and cadence. I quickly took off. I ran along the road

towards the main road. Before long I was unsure where to go. I stopped and opened the app.

I had only run 450m! Peering and pinching at the map screen again I worked out where to go

next and resumed running. After 1km, a cool female voice spoke into my ear:

“Time 4 minutes and 54 seconds, Distance 1 km”.

I was appalled – I was running so slowly!! I would probably be running faster if I knew

where I was going!! After only a couple more minutes of running, I was unsure where to go

again. This was becoming stupid. I decided to give up on this new route and run along the

beach. Running along the beach was awful – it was much windier on the waterfront, and the

cold air whipped through my chest. The woman's voice continued in my ear with every

kilometre I ticked over. I felt agitated and guilty as she told my sluggish times, but then

again, SHE doesn't know how hard it is against this headwind!

After looping home and finishing my run I unlocked 6 ready to see my overall stats. To my

horror, I realised that at some point I must have bumped ‘End Workout’ and she had stopped

recording!! I seethed – this would have never happened with my personal 5 – it was small

enough tofit in my fitness armband when I ran. I felt like the morning had been a waste. I

walked back inside and quickly discarded 6 by throwing her angrily on my bed.

(Excerpt from my field diary 13/12/2016 – using Map My Run)

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Map My Run is a fitness app which uses GPS capabilities to plot the user's path on a map, as

well as providing real time statistics such as pace, distance, time and cadence, with the ability

to save workouts for later analysis. I am very familiar with the app, having used it many

times previously with my own personal 5.

This story is useful in demonstrating key ways in which I perceived and performed my

iPhone as a companion during this running journey. The initial product design of 6 and the

Map My Run app software encouraged me to connect to the device in intimate ways. Being

able to engage with familiar software in a new and somewhat unknown location, provided

with me a sense of certainty and comfort (Vincent 2015). Despite the newness of my

surroundings, my fingers moved knowingly across the screen and app interface to access

more information about my potential running path. I placed trust in my device to accompany

me on my running journey and present me with the spatial information I needed in order to be

able to meet my running expectations.

This sense of companionship is in part extended through sensory engagement between the

phone and my mobile body. Map My Run engaged my senses through the way I pushed and

pulled at the map screen with my fingers in order to try and orientate myself. As Richardson

(2012) suggested, there was a type of haptic intimacy which connected my fingers to what I

was seeing on the screen, to my position in space, helping me (somewhat clumsily) perform

my exploration of unfamiliar territory. My senses were also engaged through the audio

provided by the app as a female voice echoed through my headphones with every kilometre I

ran. The audio conjured immediate emotions in me as I was repeatedly horrified to hear how

slowly I was running. It also had direct affects for my mobile performances in-the-moment

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and I tried to adjust my pace to speed up. There is a wider literature around fitness

technologies and health geographies suggesting that engaging users during running can have

positive outcomes on motivation and performance. The “gamification of fitness” (Boulos &

Yang, 2013; Brauner et al 2013) is one way to tap into the emotions of the user and

manipulate them towards particular health outcomes.

The semantic quality of using Map My Run not only affected my emotions and performance

but was an integral part of the shifting relations of companionship I felt towards 6. The

further (and slower) I ran, the more the level, calm voice of the woman in my ear irritated me.

Feelings of guilt about my performance accumulated, and turned into defensiveness, as I

reflected that SHE didn't know about this headwind. The device therefore came to vibrate

against the stream of ‘emotional consciousness’ (Vincent 2015) I was feeling during the run

and heightened the intensity of these particular emotions.

Finally, this story illustrates how relations of companionship can be tested. The sound of the

voice had a cumulative impact during this running journey. As the feelings of dislike towards

the personified 6 increased throughout the run, they were ignited by the ultimate betrayal of

not recording my workout properly. In this moment, I compared the device to my older,

personal iPhone 5 who I had never had a problem with, and I felt ‘knew me better’. I

subjected 6 to social rules and expectations (Sadat, Hossain & Mahmud 2014; Wegner &

Ward 2013), which I felt she was failing.

There was an affective quality to having 6 as a companion on this journey that left me with a

sense of loss, as I thought of other, more successful running journeys I'd completed before

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with 5, reflecting Pile's (2010) suggestion that moments become perceptibly affective with

significant shifts in our capacities. This culminated in the final physical act of throwing 6

onto my bed in anger – a type of calculated kinaesthetic act which I used to create a sense of

disconnection between the device and myself. Clearly, as the literature suggests, there will

always be limits to how well 6 and I listen to each other. In this moment, I was happy to

reject 6 as a companion, and reduce my perception of her back to being nothing more than a

physical handset. In each moment, I imposed my own values onto the device, moving easily

back and forth between intimate companionship and basic utility. This has interesting

implications for thinking about Haraway's cyborg figuration, and the ways that the

human/technology hybrid can be brought into being with different intensities in moments of

encounter.

5.7.2 Story 2: Learning my routine

My second story involved the use of an app named ‘Watcher’. Watcher describes itself as an

app that ‘lets your family and friends virtually watch out for you’. I had been experimenting

with the app for a few weeks now, alongside my supervisor Kathy Mee. The app works by

logging a journey with the app, and nominating Kathy as my Watcher contact, who is able to

virtually watch over my journey on a real time map to ensure I arrive at my destination

safely. I largely used it when I was making long journeys, or journeys by myself late at night.

This particular evening, I left my house at 6pm to drive to a friend's house some 25 minutes

away. I had done this journey many times before and didn't even contemplate using the

Watcher app. A couple of minutes into the journey however, I heard an alert tone, and

received a message (Figure 3). I was amazed the phone seemed to have predicted my travels–

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alone, and late at night. I actually laughed at the phone and put it back in my bag. I thought

to myself – see, 6 does not know me at all, I do this trip all the time. MY phone would not bat

an eyelid!

(Excerpt from my field diary 31/1/2017 – using Watcher)

Figure 3: The message the Watcher app had sent me.

Users bring their devices into their intimate social circles, offloading memories and

experiences to them (Wegner & Ward 2013). At times this is done in intentional ways, such

as storing photographs, uploading statistics from a running journey, or in the case of the

Watcher app, participating in shared journeying between Kathy and myself. Just as digital

content produces place then, spatial media produces particular spatialities and notions of

identity (Hjorth 2012).

This particular moment prompted clear emotions in me - surprise, amusement and finally a

kind of derisive satisfaction. I again personified 6 as a companion, yet felt she was inadequate

compared to my own 5, whom was more firmly entrenched in my social circle and mobile

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habits. But there are more than immediate emotional responses going on. This moment is

affected by the shadows of my previous mobile encounters. My wavering sense of

companionship to the phone was pressed upon by previous experiences with 5. I was left with

a heightened awareness of the distance I usually travel to this friend's house, the frequency

with which I conduct this trip, and the broader networks of people and routes that are part of

my everyday wayfinding.

The emotions and affects described above are very much human-centred. As Ash (2015)

argues: “technical objects [...] have a series of unanticipated and unthinkable consequences

because they have a degree of homeostatic autonomy from the humans that made them.”

(Ash 2015, 86). In this story then, 6 herself carries lasting affects and memories from her own

mobilities - the journeys the physical handset before. The entangled history of the iPhone

affects the combinations of ‘technology text’ that the device produces in the future (Hine

2000). iPhones acts as a “site of translation, where affect is produced and translated into

different states and forms for different purposes” (Ash 2015, 87).

I am not suggesting here that I am able to speak on behalf 6. Literature bringing together

affect and technology assure us that many of the ‘perturbations of technology’, as Ash (2013)

calls them, will remain unintelligible to us. Rather, this paper shows that attuning ourselves to

these moments of affective encounter through autoethnography holds potential for at least

providing some voice to technical artefacts. This is a dynamic view of wayfinding

technologies which has utility for how we think about techno-companionship. Both the user,

and their device have their own life cycles, rhythms, perceptions and mobilities. In some

moments, humans bring a human-centred understanding of companionship into focus. In

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other moments, a different type of companionship exists that is harder for us to identify; lost

somewhere in the blurred lines of the human/technology subject. Thinking about

companionship in this way goes beyond the criticism of technical objects for their inability to

mimic human companionship, and instead sees the various and messy ways the life and

affects of the object collides with the life of the user. As such, this particular story has

highlighted not only the importance of emotions and affects in constructing wayfinding

experiences, but gives empirical weight to Haraway's notion that the device and user co-

evolve as companions over time.

5.7.3 Story 3: Learning to trust

The previous two stories are particularly overt examples of the way I personified my

iPhone during my wayfinding experiences. The final story I wish to share in this paper has

a slightly different tone. It articulates some of the most common, mundane, and everyday

uses of modern technologies when performing wayfinding. Most of the stories to reach

popular media about using these types of technologies are extreme, detailing examples of

where GPS devices have ‘gotten their users lost’, led them to dangerous situations (Milner

2016), or are simply just disconnecting us from the world around us (see examples Beall

2016; Weiss 2017). What remains hidden are the ways people use these technologies in

their everyday mobilities with a level of organicism (Spinney 2009). As such, this story is

able to illustrate some of the emotional, intimate, or haptic connections between

technology, space and self which might otherwise be thought of as unremarkable.

As we drove along the road, my friend in the driver's seat asked: “Do you know where we

need to turn off? It looks like there might be a right turn lane ahead, but in all this traffic I

can't see if it is right turn only or I go further”.

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 I instinctively grabbed 6 and opened the Apple Maps route we had pre-plotted. Sure

enough, at our location were fragmented red lines depicting heavy traffic. I pinched at the

screen and pulled outwards to enlarge the map. I could see the name of the street, and

replied: “Yeah according to this it's a right onto Military Road in about 800m”. He

responded: “Ahhh ok good, I'll just stay in this lane then”.

I felt increasingly nervous as we approached the spot, hoping that the advice of 6 was

accurate. I have visited this area infrequently before, so I lack confidence negotiating the

traffic – it's a big city and traffic conditions change quickly. Some moments later we had

reached the intersection and turned right onto Military Road. We could immediately see

our intended destination straight ahead of us. We both let out an audible sigh of relief, and

my friend said “Ahh there it is, finally. Hope we can get back out that way too later on – it

didn't seem too tricky”.

(Excerpt from my field diary 14/11/2016 – using Apple Maps)

Apple Maps is a free mapping application, which is provided with any Apple smartphone

device. Its basic function is to provide detailed directions between two locations input by

the user, providing a suggested movement path (moderated by the movement type of

walking, driving, or public transport). The app provides real time tracking of the user's

location along the path via a GPS. Using the Apple Maps in this story demonstrates the

personalisation of spatial knowledge in its most basic form. I was provided directions

based on my current location and destination needs. This view of the story certainly

uncovers the ways that personal, technical spatial information was delivered to me from 6.

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 However, this story helps uncover that spatial information is not purely technical. Part of

the way I learnt about this intersection came from the haptic relations and sensory

engagement with the phone, as it mediated the relations between myself and the space

around me. The ability to touch the screen and zoom in on the street name (only made

possible as I was the passenger not the driver) forms a kinaesthetic connection between

myself and the broader streetscape. As Laurier, Brown and McGregor (2016) remind us in

their work regarding mobile apps however, that mobilities have “always been mediated,

the arrival of smartphones with multiple apps has changed how we [move] and how we use

apps” (p117). This is important as the sensory relations afforded by smartphones are just

one part of a larger embodied mobile performance (Richardson 2012) and technical

assemblage. My wayfinding in this story is mediated and embodied by my smartphone, but

also by other haptic and visceral cues such as my glances at passing landmarks, the

scratchiness of my ill-tuned radio in a new location, sunlight bouncing off other cars in

heavy traffic, or the faint vibration of my car's motor in my feet on the floor.

So what does this story illustrate about companionship? Negotiating this particular

intersection also clearly involved emotion – comfort, uncertainty and relief. The way I had

pre-plotted the path from the beginning of our journey and instinctively reached for 6

reflects the sense of silent companionship and comfort I felt at having a 6 available. Having

my iPhone 6 as a travelling companion was also an important way I attempted to control

aspects of my mobility, and craft a comfortable and pleasing driving experience (Kent 2015;

Hughes, Mee & Tyndall 2016). Interestingly, despite the resources around me and attempts

to control my mobilities, feelings of uncertainty endured, and even accumulated as I

approached the intersection. My past experiences in the large city with its changing traffic

conditions had intense and lasting affects on how I felt about this place. For my friend the

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outcome was different, as the emotions of relief at reaching our destination materialised in a

perception that this place “didn't seem too tricky” to move around in.

The key contribution of this story is in recognising that different types of spatial knowledge

coalesce in the moment to teach us about our environment: personal, technical, haptic,

emotional. Various affects are bound to these knowledges. Literature which continues to

define these moments via axes of efficiency and reliability, therefore misses the multiple and

messy ways we connect to the world around us during wayfinding (Ingold 2000), with and

without technology. This story illustrates the emotional, haptic and intimate relations that

circulate even the most mundane wayfinding journeys.

5.8 Looking beyond my human/technology subject

My autoethnographic experiences have focused on three types of learning between myself

and my device: frustratingly learning to move together, humorously learning my routine, and

seamlessly learning to trust. It was in reflecting on these learnings that my experiences came

to resonate with Haraway's work, particularly for the ways my new device and I shared in the

experience of co-evolving as travel companions. The cumulative impact of the stories I have

included in this paper read as a linear narrative – a slow transition from distant strangers to

companions.

Where my stories have been useful in illustrating these aspects of human/technology

companionship however, they are of course, inherently selective and partial. My moving

body was particularly attuned to seeing these moments of companionship with my new

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device, largely due to the fact I had received a new iPhone specifically for this project – an

occurrence which is not necessarily typical of our everyday interactions with technology. If I

had not been able to make these comparisons with my own older phone, these moments of

learning and companionship might not have emerged so significantly in this paper. Given that

I used my new iPhone 6 on some 168 autoethnographic journeys, there are multiple other

stories which could be told. Schwartz and Halegoua (2015) remind me that my

experimentations with autoethnography are but one lens through which subjective and

socially constructed digital realities take form.

Furthermore, focusing intensely on these moments of encounter belies the realities,

temporalities, and complexities of navigating using technology. There is a much larger

assemblage of human/technology relations that coalesce in moments of wayfinding encounter

(Schwartz & Halegoua 2015). On the one hand the value in autoethnography is bringing these

moments forward. On the other hand, this also blinds me to other potential narratives,

particularly those in which users do not feel companionship towards their devices, or in fact

may only peripherally engage with such technologies. For example Willmott's (2016).

ethnographic accounts of participants using technology to wayfind in Sydney and Hong Kong

illustrate that big data can inevitably come undone, and narratives which imply technological

omniscience in our everyday lives can be problematic.

5.9 Conclusion

This paper has made three contributions to how we think about everyday mobilities in the

face of new technologies. Firstly, it has expanded our understanding of what technical

wayfinding objects can do by focusing on the ways they can be perceived and performed as

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companions. By experimenting with autoethnography, I was able to draw out stories of how I

came to personify 5 and 6 and prescribe them human emotions. These stories also highlight

the stream of emotional consciousness between 6 and myself that was called into focus with

intensity in particular affective moments. This intensity was heightened by the bodily

connections of talking, touching, and moving with the device. The experience of learning to

co-evolve with a new device had affective qualities which tied together my past experiences,

present mobilities, and thoughts of future movement.

Secondly, this paper has followed the work of Ash (2013, 2015) and others to empirically

investigate the dynamism of technical objects. These fieldwork stories have highlighted that

using technology during wayfinding has lasting affects for both the user and the device; the

human/technology cyborg subject. In some moments of encounter, the life cycles of both user

and object collide in intimate and emotional ways, whereas at other times the affective

connections remain outside our field of view. This has implications for how we think about

techno-companionship. Users prescribe their own understandings of companionship onto the

device by personifying them, but there remains an autonomy to the object outside of human

value. As such, this paper has tried to move away from focusing on the failings of technology

to mimic human-human companionship, and instead highlight three ways techno-

companionship takes form: through product design, sensory engagement and emotional and

affective connections.

Finally, this paper has illustrated that affects are important means through which people learn

about the spaces and places around them. The emotions which emerged in my moments of

encounter had affects for my mobile performances in the moment, as well as having lingering

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affects for how I felt about those places in the future. This sits against the dominant literature

assumptions which frame wayfinding as a rational process, and spatial knowledge as

cartographic and objective. Clearly, personal, technical, emotional, affective and haptic

knowledge(s) all coalesce in the moment to help us perform our wayfinding. The

contributions of this paper stem from own experimentation with autoethnography. This

signals the opportunity for further study of how relations between technology, space and self

might be felt differently for others, as well as finding appropriate methods for drawing out

such stories. Furthermore, these stories point to an emerging conversation about what can be

considered a travel companion, and what co-mobility means in the current technological

context. As Jensen et al (2015) suggest: “Togetherness itself is constructed through cultures

of mobility in which affect circulates through the rhythms and patterns of coming and going,

choosing routes, modes, and travel companions” (p379, emphasis added). These

contributions indicate that as new technologies rapidly evolve, scholars will need to be

increasingly committed to investigating how longstanding ideas about mobile companionship

are shifting.

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 Chapter 6 – Paper 3

Published as:

Hughes, A & Mee, K. 2019. ‘Co-mobility in the digital age: Changing

technologies, and the affects of presence in journeying ‘with’ others’, Applied

Mobilities, doi: 10.1080/23800127.2019.1607425.

6.1 Abstract

Co-presence, proximity, and moving with other people, have long been recognised as

important factors in our decision-making and performances of everyday wayfinding. Such

arguments have roots in the work of sociologist Erving Goffman, whose concept of the

“mobile with” has been widely used to articulate the fluid conglomerations of bodies who

come to move together. This paper pushes Goffman’s idea of the “mobile with” into the

digital age, opening our field of view to an expanded understanding of “co-mobility”.

Drawing on the autoethnographic accounts of one of our authors, we illustrate that with the

advent of new technologies, bodies are constantly and simultaneously connected to near and

distant others, and known and unknown travel companions. These complex techno-

communities take form in two key ways: via the sensory and haptic forms of communication

required in using technological devices, and the virtual presence afforded by the ability to

enact these communications across time and space. Using affect as a lens of analysis, this

paper illustrates that sharing co-mobile experiences with near and distant others evokes a

particular style of presencing. Importantly, the various affects of presence are called into

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focus in intense moments, with implications for how people perform their mobilities in the

moment, and the lingering emotions they carry in contemplating future mobilities.

6.2 Introduction

Simply being mobile with other people inspires new perspectives on a journey (Cook et al

2016). Co-presence is an important aspect of what motivates mobile behaviours, given that

individuals are constantly “slipping in and out of different ‘mobile withs”’ (Jensen 2010,

341) as they perform their everyday wayfinding in the city. These “mobile withs” include

being mobile with temporary conglomerations of passers-by, right through to deliberate trips

taken with friends or family. Literature on co-mobility has tended to focus on particular styles

of movement where bodies are co-present with others moving in the same physical setting.

Examples include walking (examples Ingold & Vergunst 2008), cycling (McIvenney 2015),

migration (Haug 2008), pilgrimage (Scriven 2014), holidaying (Hall & Holdsworth 2016),

auto-mobility (Farbar & Peaz 2009; Laurier et al. 2008) and commuting or passengering

experiences (Bissell 2010; Pike & Lubell 2016). Less attention has been given to mobile

experiences that might be co-produced with distant or unknown others. This is problematic

given that the rapid rise of smartphones and their software apps over the last decade has

meant that bodies on the move can connect to both known friends and family, and

communities of strangers in multiple and evolving ways. As these technologies outstrip their

traditionally communicative functions, the means by which we “share” our location and

“share” our mobility with others now includes both the sharing of a physical spaces, as well

as the multiple ways we can be located by others via the digital services we use in everyday

life.

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The purpose of this paper is therefore to examine what co-mobility means in the digital era.

This paper argues that physical and digital co-mobility cannot be thought of as divergent

experiences. Moving bodies can be simultaneously connected to both near and distant others.

In order to make this argument, this paper explores three key themes. Firstly, it considers who

comes together to participate in shared journeys. This section explores the ways new

technologies connect people to both near and distant others, known and unknown travel

companions, and how unconscious techno-communities form. Secondly, the paper explores

how new technologies are affording close relationships between these bodies during the

course of a journey. This section focuses on the ways that intimacy is facilitated through

haptic perception and the embodied process of using technological devices. This is a style of

mobile companionship which does not always require being in the same physical vicinity as

others. Finally, this paper examines the implications that new digital relations might have for

how we think about co-mobility, arguing that new relations of co-mobility are emerging,

bringing with them particular emotions, affects and styles of everyday journeying. As such

we must expand our understanding of what it is to be mobile with others and how spatial

knowledge and experiences come to be co-produced.

6.3 Rethinking co-mobility

Mobility in proximity to others has long been recognised as an important aspect of everyday

mobility. Many contemporary studies exploring co-mobility have theoretical roots in the

work of sociologist Erving Goffman. In particular, Goffman’s idea of the “mobile with”

(Goffman 1972 in Jensen 2010) has proved a useful tool for conceptualising how social

interaction occurs between bodies who are moving, passing, or stopping in a physical space

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with one another. The “evidential character” of being co-present with other bodies allows for

social interaction and communication as bodies “read” one another (Goffman 1972).

However, the ways in which bodies share space has changed since Goffman published his

influential work. Traditional divides between proximate and distant others have been blurred

by the rapid evolution of digital technologies. The methods by which mobile bodies “read”

each other using modern technologies have also changed, as bodies connect to one another

without the necessity of face-to-face (or body-to-body) interaction. There is now a digital

layer to being part of a “mobile with” (Jensen 2010). How then, do we account for new

relations of the “mobile with” in the digital age? In contemplating such questions, John Urry

(2002) contends that: “The kinds of travel and presencing involved will change the character

and experience of ‘co-presence’, since people can feel proximate while still distant” (Urry

2002, 267). We see this as an invitation to explore in more detail exactly what changes are

occurring to the “character and experience” of co-presence, in the digital age.

6.3.1 Temporality and the techno-community

Taking Goffman (and Jensen’s 2010) notion of the “mobile with” therefore prompts us to

briefly consider who is journeying together in the digital age. In 2009, JW Crampton

reframed these mobile technologies using the term “spatial media” as a way to encapsulate

the increasing convergence between communication devices, media, networks and location.

Today, spatial media gives individuals the capacity to extend their interactions with others

across time and space. This includes both the ability to connect to known family and friends,

but also to participate in virtual communities with unknown others, or “techno-communities”.

The relations of these techno-communities are important as according to Wilson (2006):

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“changing experiences of time, space, and the body as a result of technological possibilities,

impact on our ways of being-together altering individual subjectivity and intersubjective

relations” (emphasis added, 3). That is to say, being both physically and digitally mobile with

others has implications for how we relate to one another and the spaces around us.

There are countless examples of the ways that spatial media and their associated technologies

can connect us to known friends and family without the need for direct calls or texts. iPhones

allow users to send their current location on a map to known contacts through free software

applications such as Apple Maps and Find My Friends. Nearly all forms of social media have

locative capabilities, where users can “check in” at particular landmarks or attach locations to

posts or photographs to let others know where they are. For example, Snapchat recently

added a “Snapmap” function, which displays the real-time location of nearby friends as icons

on a map. Furthermore, there is an enormous suite of lifestyle apps which communicate

aspects of users’ locations in implicit ways through GPS capabilities; for example, fitness

apps like Map My Run track a user’s running route, and gaming apps like Pokemon Go track

location for gameplay. In each of these cases, the “mobile with” comes to encompass not just

other bodies in an individual’s immediate vicinity, but others who come to share in their

location or journey via digital means.

What is particularly important to unpack here however, is the temporal aspect to these

particular “mobile withs”. In some cases, such as Snapmap, the “mobile with” is largely

predictable. The user’s wider network takes form by adding or accepting other profiles as

“friends”, giving the user choice in whom they are initially connected with. Furthermore, the

Snapmap is only available if users choose to activate the feature via their location settings.

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This gives some control over both who can view your location, and when16. However, other

techno-communities are far more unpredictable. Take for example the recent phenomenon of

Pokemon Go: a mobile game app in which participants walk around their urban environment

and catch virtual Pokemon monsters. Whilst there is an obvious community of app users in

the larger sense, there were also times when using the app formed smaller, and more intense

communities of friends and strangers. During “raid battles”, many game users would

congregate in particular geo-located areas to capture a monster. There was a level of

exclusivity to these battles, as only up to 20 users could join a battle at a time, and the feature

was only available for 60 minutes. After working as a team to capture the monster for their

own individual inventories, the battle finishes and users move away from the space. In these

instances, particularly intense techno-communities of strangers form, sharing in both a

physical space in the urban environment, but also a virtual space in the game 17 (Birtchnell et

al 2020). The gamification of navigational capacities in this instance taps into the human

motivation to explore and report information back to the wider community (Zichermann &

Cunningham 2011). According to Zichermann and Cunningham (2011) whilst game

achievements in any given app are certainly important, most game players are principally

motivated by the social nature of the game community and are increasingly incentivised to

participate as a means of socialising with others.

16 There remains ongoing and extensive debate about how much control users really have over how their
locative information is shared whilst using these apps, as many companies can on-sell data they capture
(Carman 201 7). Implementation of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has also wrought
changes to such software: for example to comply, Snapchat is trialling new ways of determining parental
consent before storing locative information for users under 16 years of age (Lomas 2018).
17
Whilst outside the scope of this paper, it is interesting to note that whilst these users share the physical space,
their primary interaction with one another remains in the virtual world. News stories include photographs of
dozens of users all standing in the same location, looking only at their devices, and not communicating by any
traditional face-to-face means. See Muoio (2016) and Hayward (2017) for photographs and videos.

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This kind of social intensity can be found in other instances where unexpected techno-

communities take form in particular times and spaces. For example, Facebook now has

features allowing users to mark themselves as “safe” in their location during natural disaster

or terrorist events (Kastrenakes 2017). When engaging with this feature the user is

simultaneously sharing their location with known contacts in their Facebook network, but

also becomes part of a liminal techno-community of other users who have also marked

themselves as “safe” at the event or location. These examples illustrate that simply “signing

up” to a service does not define one’s involvement in that particular techno-community —

there are multiple, entangled moments where different clusters of people are drawn together.

As such, researchers have made a start at extending Goffman’s work to find new ways of

articulating how people come together and co-produce mobility in the digital age. The

excellent work by Southern (2012) for example, describes the ways in which bodies using

digital technologies can be affected by the “virtual co-presence” of distant others, suggesting

that being able to interact with these distant bodies adds a new layer of density to co-mobile

encounters. Southern (2012) pushes Goffman’s work into digital territory, but does so in a

way that focuses nearly entirely on the presence of virtual others. Sitting against mobilities

studies which focus on physical co-mobility/co-presence, there appears a gap in the literature

where the two styles of mobility have not been considered together. The intervention this

paper makes is therefore to illustrate how co-produced mobilities tie together both near and

distant others simultaneously, and often in unintentional or unexpected ways.

6.3.2 Relations between moving bodies: sensory communication

But how exactly do people in these liminal techno-communities connect to one another?

What performances allow our connections to span across time and space to distant others?

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Digital technologies facilitate connections between bodies through the haptic relations and

corporeal realities afforded by using a device. Talk, sight and touch are routinely engaged in

the day-to-day mechanisms of smartphone functioning, and are in essence the means by

which distant others come to communicate. We might think of this as the digital version of

Goffman’s “facework” (Goffman 1967/82; Urry 2004) - the verbal and nonverbal cues by

which one expresses themselves, and which mediate our social encounters.

Using a phone to call and talk to other people is perhaps the most obvious way that digital

technologies connect moving bodies to one another. With the popularisation of text

messaging as a dominant means of contact, sight is also particularly important. However, the

significance of harnessing sight as a means of digital communication reaches beyond simply

interpreting words. The types of “text” produced by spatial media, including emojis and

emoticons, hold social and cultural meaning (Crampton 2009). According to Stark and

Crawford (2015), emojis and emoticons perform some of the affective labour in lieu of

traditional body language indicators, suggesting that: “the utility of an emoji lies in the

indeterminacy of its pictographic versus iconographic legibility as a signifier of affect,

emotion, or sociality” (Stark & Crawford 2015, 5). That is to say, there are affective qualities

embedded in using these forms of visual languages which are important to better

understanding co-mobility in the digital age.

Touch is also an important sensory experience with the introduction of touchscreen

capabilities. The iPhone is specifically created for use with the finger or fingers for multi-

touch sensing, and because the screen is a capacitive touchscreen, it depends on electrical

conductivity that can only be provided by bare skin directly touch the screen through a

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variety of tapping, pushing, pulling, swiping, and pinching motions. Richardson (2012)

states: “thus, there is a certain haptic intimacy that renders the iPhone an object of tactile and

kinaesthetic familiarity, a sensory knowing-ness of the fingers that correlates with what

appears on the small screen.” (Richardson 2012, 144). Being able to touch an iPhone screen

is an important part of how we come to interpret meaning and perform alongside these

devices in our everyday mobilities.

6.3.3 Relations between moving bodies: emotions and affects

In this paper however we want to push past just simply identifying those types of sensory

“facework” (Goffman 1967/82; Urry 2004) that digital technologies utilise, and instead think

about how performing in this way might facilitate emotional exchange between moving

bodies. To do so we draw on the work of Rowan Wilken who argues that haptic perception is

important in constructing our encounters with others. Wilken (2010) suggests: “the

possibility of conceiving ‘touch’ not only in sensory terms, but as a philosophical imperative

- a reorienting force in exploring the possibilities permitted by mobile media technologies for

reaching out to and engaging with (‘touching’) others” (emphasis added, 450). Building from

Wilken’s work, this paper looks to the possibilities of haptic perception as a means to

communicate the ways that co-presence or co-mobility might be felt through the body

without the necessity of being in the same physical vicinity as others. For example, if we re-

consider the act of marking oneself as “safe” during a disaster or terrorist event on Facebook,

we could see that this act carries emotional weight for the people in one’s home network.

Understanding emotion and communication in this way rests on theories of affect - theories

which been used extensively in contemporary mobilities studies. Affects are the transpersonal

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capacities for a body to affect or be affected, and the way that individual emotions come to

press upon others (Pile 2010; Anderson 2015). Affect allows us to explore the ways the

mobility of one body relationally affects the mobility others (Bissell 2010; Hughes & Mee

2018). This paper is particularly interested in the affects of presence. Others have described

the kind of “virtual presence” (Licoppe 2004; Southern 2012) that digital technologies can

afford by connecting individuals to distant others. We see this as having important

implications for how we theorise the modern “mobile with”, as the affective quality of being

accompanied by distant others has affects for performances during the journey and for

subsequent journeys.

6.4 Autoethnography and blurring lines of participation

This paper draws on three short autoethnographic stories. These stories originate from a

larger research project examining the ways in which new wayfinding technologies and

practices influence the emotions and affects of everyday mobility. Autoethnography was

chosen as a methodological approach as it “radically foregrounds the emotions and

experiences of the researcher as a way to acknowledge the inevitably subjective nature of

knowledge, and in order to use subjectivity deliberately as an epistemological resource.”

(Butz & Besio 2009, 1662). Using autoethnography allowed us to deeply attune our

fieldwork to communicating the intimate personal emotions, affects and embodied practices

involved in everyday wayfinding.

During the fieldwork it was clear to us that the emotional responses and embodied

performances of the individual cannot be easily separated from the wider mobile assemblage

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of peoples and technologies. The diary reflections generated by this fieldwork consistently

focused on the ways other people are drawn into one’s mobile life. This prompted a

significant shift in our thinking, and the final stories that were selected for this paper were

chosen as they illustrate times when multiple people were drawn into Ainsley’s mobilities. At

times, the “mobile withs” Ainsley was a part of were deliberate, largely predictable, and

comprised mainly of known family and friends and Kathy. At other times however, Ainsley

felt she was participating in unexpected, temporal techno-communities, which included

relations with distant strangers.

Thinking through these unexpected relations illustrates the value of autoethnography to this

paper in two key ways. Firstly, the unpredictable evolution of this paper’s arguments

illustrate the potentials afforded by engaging with autoethnography as a methodology. There

is no singular set of logics or techniques, nor any linear way to “do” autoethnography, and

this open structure can allow for unexpected relations to flourish (Wall 2006) - something

reflected in our paper. Secondly, the ways Ainsley (and Kathy) came to participate in

unexpected communities illustrates how engaging with virtual forms of ethnography

continues to blur the boundaries between researcher/subject, human/technology, work/leisure

and spaces/temporalities (Driscoll & Greg 2010). Completing this autoethnography required

Ainsley to fully participate in the digital requirements of using the software: building a

profile, being represented on a map, uploading data (as Driscoll & Gregg 2010 also note).

The multiple layers of engagement in using these apps could not always be foreseen before

undertaking the fieldwork. Furthermore the constant connectivity afforded by digital devices

meant that many of Ainsley’s fieldwork encounters occurred at unexpected times of day, and

even on journeys where she wasn’t necessarily intending to be “doing” research. Such

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unexpected fieldwork outputs are one advantage of embracing autoethnography in the digital

age.

6.5 Methods

Ainsley completed the autoethnography in which she used a new iPhone 6+ and a series of

navigational and lifestyle apps in her everyday journeying from October 2016 to March 2017

on roughly 6 - 8 journeys per week, for a total of 168 journeys. This period of fieldwork

produced a multimedia reflective diary, which included written reflections, screenshots, audio

clips and videos.

Some of the apps selected for this fieldwork were chosen as common and widely used

examples of navigational software, illustrated by the fact that they were either provided free

on the iPhone already, or were included as part of Ainsley’s existing social media platforms.

However other apps used during this period of autoethnography were boutique navigational

tools which Ainsley had not used before. Apps were chosen which complimented Ainsley’s

existing mobile patterns, focusing around common activities she performed such as driving as

a means of transport, navigating a University campus, and running for fitness.

Table 4 is a brief breakdown of the apps used during autoethnography. As can be seen from

Table 4 (pages 161-163), using these apps requires users to perform and communicate in

different ways, and also allowed Ainsley to connect to others. We have included this table as

an indication of diversity of the ways different apps connect the user and their location to

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others. Given that apps were chosen which complimented Ainsley’s existing mobile patterns

these autoethnographic accounts coalesce to form just one set of examples of co-mobility in

the digital age.

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Application Basic purpose Performative elements Connections to others

Standard mapping Zoom and orientation can be changed

software provided by pushing/pulling the screen. Syncs with messages so users can seamlessly share current
free on Apple location or directions with others.
Apple
devices. Provides
Maps
navigational Turn by turn directions read aloud by
directions between female voice.
Audio features allow those nearby to follow directions.
locations.

Audio reports of run statistics delivered

Fitness tracker during run by female voice. Other Map My Run users can share runs they have
which records and previously completed – suggest routes to others in the
Vibrate alerts when passing a run community.
stores features of a
milestone or app error occurs.
Map My user’s run, including
Run GPS location,
Phone/app can be worn on arm during
distance, time,
run using fitness armband.
speed, elevation, Syncs with social media so users can share their run
cadence etc. statistics with people in their network.
Headphone inputs and syncs with music
preferences.

Nominates a known Zoom and orientation can be changed Sends user’s location information and map link to
contact to be your by pushing/pulling the screen. nominated known others such as friends/family.
“Watcher”, who is
able to follow your Settings can be customised so that the
Watcher
journey on a real “Watcher” is alerted automatically if the
Call emergency services through app with click of one
time map to ensure user stops for too long, starts running
button.
you arrive at your suddenly, or has the headphone pulled
destination safely suddenly from iPhone socket.

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 Mapping services for Zoom and orientation can be changed Reviews of university features submitted by other app
a choice of by pushing/pulling the screen. users.
University
campuses.
Lost on Directions to
Campus buildings provided, Anonymous chat feature allows users to quickly ask each
as well as extensive other questions.
lists of services with GPS provides directions between phone
location, features, and desired university feature (straight
and photographs. line only – does not account for paths, Lost on Campus administrators employ local students to
buildings etc). report, review, upgrade information about, and photograph
campus features.

Community based Other Waze community members are represented in real

traffic app which time on maps via icons.
communicates
changing traffic Zoom and orientation can be changed All information in the app provided by Waze members –
Waze
conditions (eg by pushing/pulling the screen. no external sources used.
roadwork, location
of police cars) and Participation in the Waze community via making posts is
other local features. rewarded with the ability to personalise your icon.

Use fingers to scroll through list

Review app for
options.
Urban restaurants/eateries
See reviews of other Urban Spoon users.
Spoon in the user’s
Zoom and orientation of map can be
immediate vicinity.
changed by pushing/pulling the screen.

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 Reports location of
petrol stations in
Zoom and orientation of map can be
Petrol Spy user’s vicinity, Petrol prices reported by other community users.
changed by pushing/pulling the screen.
including changing
petrol prices.

Government
provided traffic
application,
Live
providing real time Zoom and orientation of map can be
Traffic Click on traffic cameras for live feed images.
updates of heavy changed by pushing/pulling the screen.
NSW
traffic, roadworks,
major accidents,
weather events etc.

Use fingers to scroll through list

Build individual social networks.
Facebook, options.
Social media
Instagram,
applications. Map use.
Snapchat Snapchat – can see location of snapchat friends on the
Photo capture and geotagging.
“Snapmap”.

Table 4: Analysis of applications used during fieldwork.

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6.6 Story 1: Watcher

“Watcher” is our first example of co-mobility. The application works by logging a journey

with the app and nominating someone known to watch over your journey by following your

movements on their device on a map in real time. Ainsley had been experimenting with this

app alongside Kathy for a few weeks on a number of virtually shared journeys. One

particular day Ainsley was using the app to complete an hour and a half driving trip from her

home in Newcastle to the Central Coast. She describes using the app in her field diary:

I complete this drive a lot and am very familiar with the route, but I’m often travelling by

myself and worry about fatigue, so I feel a little comforted knowing someone is keeping an

eye on my journey. I was due to arrive at my destination at 9am, but after a slow morning

start I was running a little late. I finally arrived and parked my car, but looking down at the

Watcher app, I can see that I must not be near the exact GPS spot the mapping software

utilises. I’m running late! I don’t have time to be fiddling with this and running around trying

to find the GPS exact point. I decide to send Kathy a quick text through the app so she knows

I have indeed arrived safely.

For Kathy, the haptic gaze of being able to watch Ainsley’s progress on a real time map and

manipulate it with the fingers allowed her to participate in the driving journey without being

in the car, and her capacity to be mobile with Ainsley was extended further by the sensory

practices of manipulating the screen. This illustrates, as Wilken (2010) suggests then, the

possibility for these types of technologies in helping us “touch” across time and space.

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Beyond this however, this is a clear example of the ways that distant others can be felt as a

“virtual presence” (Southern 2012) during a journey. Ainsley’s reflections point to the fact

that she was provided with an immediate sense of safety and comfort in knowing that Kathy

was watching her travels. Beyond just providing Ainsley with a sense of comfort however,

Kathy’s presence had affective reach for her mobile behaviours. For Ainsley, it was

important to let Kathy know that she had arrived so she would not worry — illustrating that

Kathy’s lingering presence carried with it their personal history and relationship to one

another, and ultimately requiring a particular set of bodily performances at the end of the

journey. Ainsley engaged with new digital forms of “facework” (Goffman 1967/82; Urry

2004) to connect to Kathy by sending her a text to let her know she had arrived safely. This

form of co-mobile presence is distinctly different to completing a journey with another body

in the same physical vicinity.

In this story, Ainsley made a deliberate decision to bring Kathy into her mobile life, and

essentially “staged” (Jensen 2013) their co-mobile experience. On the surface, it might seem

as if the “mobile with” that Ainsley had crafted for herself was largely intentional and

predictable. However, Kathy was not the only person with whom Ainsley shared these

journeys. There were times when using the Watcher app where even more people from

Kathy’s network were drawn into our shared mobilities. During some trips, Kathy’s phone

would sound with an alert, and her family would enquire as to Ainsley’s location, or how far

she had to go. At times, her family members expressed satisfaction at the progress Ainsley

was making (“she’s making good time”) or concern that she hadn’t arrived yet, whereas other

family members found the ability to follow the journey intrusive. This illustrates the ways

that emotions and affective relations are shared between many perceptive and performing

bodies across mobile devices, and often in unexpected ways, as Kathy’s family also shared in

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Ainsley’s mobilities. As Southern (2012) suggests, using the Watcher app added new layers

of density to Ainsley’s mobile experiences, forming an intense, but fleeting group of bodies

who shared in the trip.

6.7 Story 2: Snapchat

The previous story follows existing accounts of digital co-mobility, which detail how the

mobility of the individual is affected by the virtual presence of others (Southern 2012).

Studies of digital relations have often been haunted by a series of conceptual dichotomies -

online vs offline, public vs private, social connectivity vs isolation - so we are conscious of

the danger in treating physical co-mobility and digital co-mobility as divergent experiences.

The next two stories illustrate how using digital technologies can produce particular styles of

mobility in which a body is simultaneously connected to both near and distant others. Story 2

describes an instance where Ainsley was unexpectedly connected to others in her wider social

network, sharing a journey with both someone in her immediate physical vicinity, and

another distant person. The excerpt from her field diary reads:

I was sitting at a picnic table at my local beach with a friend of mine, talking and sharing a

takeaway meal. We had both had extremely busy weekends and meeting up for a few hours on

a Sunday evening was the best we could coordinate. After having been there for a few hours,

my companion looked at his phone and noticed he had a text message from one of his friends.

The message included a screenshot, taken of the ‘Snapmap’ feature of Snapchat, clearly

showing my companion’s location at the beach, depicted as a cartoon character on a locality

map. The accompanying text message read: “What are you doing at the beach right now?”

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Snapchat’s “Snapmap” is a well-publicised feature of the social media application in which a

user can see the location of their friends on a map. Each friend is represented by a cartoon

character or avatar they have designed themselves, known as a “Bitmoji”. The Snapmap

feature is widely debated in terms of concerns about user security and privacy. Perhaps

echoing this, when this moment occurred, Ainsley’s companion reacted with immediate

anger that his friend was monitoring his movements so closely and was uncomfortable with

the way his mobility had been shared with others. The digital services that Ainsley’s

companion was subscribed to have essentially communicated his location to the wider world

through his depiction of a cartoon image on screen. Whether motivated by concern or

curiosity, as Wilken (2010) suggests, the use of the Snapmap feature intensified their

relations of friendship, allowing one to reach out to the other without the necessity of being in

the same place. Furthermore, the iconography of the Bitmoji feature also had significant

affective pull in amplifying this moment. Seeing the icon in this location, at this time of

night, fell outside of the everyday mobility patterns that were expected of Ainsley’s

companion, setting into motion a particular set of behaviours.

This example again illustrates the different types of “presencing” (Urry 2002) afforded by

using digital devices on the move. After receiving the text message both Ainsley and her

friend carried the feeling that their mobilities were being monitored. The atmosphere of the

evening shifted, with feelings of unease creeping over both of them. Having someone new

(and unseen) join them in this journey added a new layer of density to the meeting. This is

interesting for thinking about the increasing fluidity of the modern “mobile with”. There

could have been any number of people looking at Ainsley and her companion’s location on

the Snapmap over the course of those few hours. But it was only once one user made his

presence known that he was felt to be an active member in their co-mobile journey. This

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serves to illustrate that bodies are constantly and simultaneously connected to both near and

distant others on the move, but at times these networks are called into focus in intense ways.

In reflecting on this moment since, Ainsley’s companion has decided to turn off the Snapmap

feature so he is no longer depicted on the map, illustrating the lingering affects that this style

of presencing had on his future mobilities.

6.8 Story 3: Waze

These two stories show some of the ways that known family and friends can form “mobile

withs”. It is also important to consider the ways in which digital technologies allow us to be

co-mobile with communities of strangers in new ways. Just as sharing the sidewalk with

other pedestrians, or the bus with other passengers are important co-mobile practices, so too

is participating in online communities during everyday wayfinding. The final story included

in this paper details Ainsley’s use of a navigational app called “Waze”. Waze is a

community-run traffic navigation app, which provides users with navigational directions as

well as updates about changing traffic conditions. The following is from Ainsley’s field

diary:

My friends and I were in the car, part way through a three hour journey. I was sitting in the

back, fiddling with my phone when they asked me about the app I was looking at. I explained

that the app was called “Waze” and you were part of a community of users, who posted real

time traffic information to help each other out. I showed my friend: “See look at the map -

you can see other users around you. Look there’s another Waze user travelling toward us on

the other side of the road. Also apparently there’s a police car in about 20km.”

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In Figure 1, you can see the screen that was displayed with the position of the police car in

the middle, and the other Waze user over to the right.

Figure 4: The location of the police car as depicted by the Waze app

Following the map I said to my friends:“Keep going... They both should be about level with

us, passing us, right... NOW”. We all looked out the window - three cars streaked by, and a

highway patrol police car sat quietly on the side of the road.

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 “Wow”, my friend said, “it was actually right. I wonder which car the other Waze person

was in. Kindof creepy, hey? I wonder how accurate it is, if you could follow them and stuff...

How come that other person’s icon looks like a zombie though and yours is a baby?”

(Figure 5). I explained that I hadn’t used the app enough yet to ’unlock’ new icons to choose

from; I explained: “If I start to post more information to help other users, I’ll earn more

points, be more credible in the Waze world —and then I could be a zombie too if I wanted.”

Figure 5: Ainsley's scoreboard on Waze

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This story demonstrates a few key things. Obviously a sense of community and shared

journeying is clearly embedded into the workings of the Waze app, as fellow users edit the

maps, rather than a centralised source of information. This type of wayfinding is very much a

collaborative effort and signals the way spatial knowledge, like mobility, is co-produced.

But like the previous story, there are emotional, haptic and affective relations in this moment

that we can unpack more closely. For Ainsley’s friend, using the Waze app and connecting to

distant strangers through technology brought a sense of unease. In the moment described

above, there was no definitive way of telling which car that passed Ainsley belonged to the

fellow Waze user. But the haptic perception and affective weight of the person’s icon on the

screen, coupled with the accurate real time passing of the cars, left her friend feeling as if

they were intruding on this person’s mobility - privy to information that they did not need,

and perhaps, should not have access to. This was a type of “touching” (Wilken 2010)

Ainsley’s friend was not comfortable with. Whereas for Ainsley, this moment evoked a very

different set of immediate emotions. She suddenly felt she wasn’t a credible member of the

Waze techno-community as she couldn’t change her icon. She felt incentivised to participate

in the community for the possibility that she could “touch” other mobile bodies more

meaningfully, as they would find her more credible. Whilst somewhat outside the scope of

this paper, this also illustrates - as Zichermann and Cunningham suggest (2011) - that the

game features deployed by the Waze app played upon Ainsley’s motivations to socialise with

others with particular intensity; an intensity which might not have been felt had the option to

personalise her icon not been a critical app feature.

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This story also illustrates the ways emotions and affects are shared relationally between both

near and distant others in unpredictable ways. The more the journey continued, the more

Ainsley became hyper-aware of the other cars around her, and pondered her friend’s words –

“Kindof creepy, isn’t it?”. Was she one the voyeurs he was talking about? The longer these

ideas festered, her emotions changed and she gradually started to dislike the app and think

about the way it impinged upon privacy. This moment is therefore indicative of the multiple

networks of people, the “clusters of interacting agents” (Jensen, Sheller & Wind 2015, 366)

who become involved in producing a moment of co-mobility. Ainsley’s friend became an

affective actor in the Waze techno-community, even though he was not a Waze user himself.

The affective relations between Ainsley, her friend, the device and other Waze users had

implications for how she thought about being mobile with others in the moment, but also had

lingering affects for how she felt about co-mobility and surveillance more broadly.

Furthermore, the cumulative impact of completing this fieldwork, with reoccurring moments

of surprise and unease, made Ainsley more attuned to the vast and complex webs of people

who come to share in a journey. This was another fluid moment, in which Ainsley’s “mobile

with” continually shifted in intensity and scope, both with known friends in the physical

vicinity, but also strangers passing by in both physical and digital ways.

6.9 Conclusion

The ways in which we connect with other people has become a key point of interest for those

studying the digital revolution in the Western world. Many of these discussions have been

polarising. Where some argue that new technologies facilitate connections between people,

others have remained more fearful and critical, suggesting that new technologies are driving

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large social wedges between us. Critically, what underlies these two viewpoints is that new

digital technologies are transforming social relations in a myriad of ways.

These few stories provide just a small snapshot of the increasingly complex ways that digital

technologies connect us to other people whilst we are on the move. As Table 4 illustrated,

even just utilising a few digital apps in our everyday mobilities connects us to communities

of other people in unforeseen ways. It is difficult to comprehend the magnitude of

possibilities in how we might become even more digitally connected in the future. Goffman’s

“mobile with” has always stressed fluidity to be at the heart of co- mobility - this paper has

simply shed light on the new ways people come to share space in the digital era. The stories

in this paper have illustrated that bodies are connected to both near and distant others, known

and unknown travel companions, and often simultaneously. In particular moments, these

intense communities of people are called into sharp focus. Moreover, “facework” (Goffman

1967/82; Urry 2004) has also come to take digital form, engaging our senses in new ways to

communicate with one another, and extending our capabilities through haptic reach.

These new digital relations have important implications for our mobile lives. Firstly, being

constantly connected to others whilst on the move has inspired concern for the ways in which

we unknowingly share our location with others. Whilst these concerns run only implicitly

through Ainsley’s stories, broader recent controversies about sharing digital data to third

parties has heightened sensitivities around the meanings of privacy in our digital lives.

Secondly, it is clear from Ainsley’s fieldwork that sharing a journey with others involves

sharing emotions. The implications of sharing a journey in distinctly digital ways through

virtual “presencing” or even aspects of game play can be felt with fresh intensity or

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heaviness, bringing with them new cultures and rituals of communication across time and

space. Furthermore as in each of Ainsley’s stories, the affective weight of these moments can

linger and be carried by individual bodies to shape future mobile performances: exemplified

by Ainsley’s increasing apprehension at being a digital voyeur, or the lingering affects

Kathy’s virtual presence had on Ainsley’s communication. Finally, this paper also indicates

that future studies need to consider how using digital technologies during wayfinding might

intersect with issues of access and relations of power; questions for who gets to decide - and

how - individuals can or cannot participate in the contemporary “mobile with”. As Urry

(2002) predicted then, the felt “presence” of other people during a journey, without the

necessarily sharing a physical space, has diverse and lingering affects for our mobilities.

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 Chapter 7 – Paper 4

Under review as:

Hughes, A. 2021. ‘They Can’t Read Maps: Remaking the limits of navigational

capacity through gendered and ageing bodies’,

Gender, Place and Culture.

7.1 Abstract

Wayfinding – the everyday imagined and embodied performance of navigational tasks

(Milner 2016) - requires mobile problem-solving skills that test our bodily limits and

perceptions of ourselves. However, discourses about wayfinding capacities shape these

performances to inform our expectations of what bodies are capable of and how skillfully

they navigate. Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted in Newcastle, Australia, this

paper explores the body politics of everyday wayfinding through the lenses of gender and

age. The paper illustrates enduring perceptions participants held about the innate capacities

and limits of particular bodies based on aspects of their biology such as sex and age, and the

related gender roles and generational norms associated with bodies defined in these ways.

The paper shows that the impact of discourses on performances of everyday wayfinding, with

important affects for participant’s mobile capacities, specifically their confidence in jumping

into navigational tasks, and the dynamics of co-mobility when travelling with others (often

their partners). Critically however, interviews also revealed the ways older women are

pushing back to remake bodily limits by drawing on a variety of problem-solving skills

developed across their lifecourse. This paper therefore provides a critical intervention into

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discussions about the broader politics of mobile life in challenging underpinning assumptions

of how particular bodies come to know and move through space and place.

7.2 Introduction: Jane’s Story

Most of the stories Jane18 chose to share with me about her everyday wayfinding were

wrapped intimately in the details of the coordination of daily life – where she generally

travelled, why, who with, using what mode of transport, and for how long. However there

was one moment in particular that changed her everyday mobilities significantly: the death of

her husband. Jane, who had always occupied the role of passive passenger on their mobile

journeys together, suddenly found herself lacking the confidence and skills to journey too far

from home on her own. That was until she decided to purchase her first in-car GPS system:

“The GPS really helped me after Mike died… ‘cause he normally did the navigation.

So I got really good at that and then I was able to go out on my own again. It took me a while

to be confident because I’d never really had to do the navigation before and I wasn’t used to

going places without him.

It’s not that I couldn’t navigate or anything, it was just never really my job”

For Jane, developing confidence in using the GPS allowed her to travel to new places again,

and even began to change her role in her friendship group. Suddenly, she was the one driving

18 Pseudonyms have been used throughout this paper.

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her friends around – most of whom she says still lacked the confidence to navigate new

places or use GPS technologies:

“I used to do lots of trips down to Sydney actually, with a bunch of ladies. We kept trying out

for Wheel of Fortune. We would carpool and I was the only one who could drive. They didn’t

feel confident to drive because the traffic is really bad and they didn’t want to get lost. There

are a lot of them who still aren’t very confident going new places… and they can’t read

maps. Apparently that’s a woman thing!” (Jane laughs)

As her confidence continues to grow many years on, Jane has been able to experience new

places and connect with others in ways she previously could not have imagined. Other people

in her life including family and friends had not imagined the ways it would change her

mobilities either. As Jane observes:

“And now I do heaps of trips. Motorbike trips with the GPS and everything, which my son

thinks is pretty funny - the sight of little old me out there on my motorbike doing my own

thing with a bunch of big burly bikers. Not sure he likes me doing that. But I can go on

motorbike trips overseas with my son and his family now too, which has been good”

Whilst on the surface Jane’s story illustrates some of the positive influences that

technological advancements are having on mobile life, underlying her story are overlapping

assumptions about what particular bodies are (or should be) capable of during wayfinding. In

particular, the repeated assertion that ‘men are better navigators than women’ has long

haunted popular media articles, dinner party conversations and spousal arguments reported

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by my participants. The influence of these gendered discourses is immediately recognisable

in Jane’s story in her comments about the innate ability/inability of men and women to

navigate based on their sex (Apparently that’s a woman thing!) as well as longstanding

perceptions about the roles of men and women take on when navigating during everyday

mobilities (I’d never really had to do the navigation before and I wasn’t used to going places

without him). Moreover, Jane’s comments also intersect and overlap with discourses about

the declining capacities of ageing and vulnerable bodies to navigate unfamiliar settings, or

instead ‘keep up’ with technological advancements such as GPS devices (the sight of little

old me out there on my motorbike doing my own thing […] Not sure he [my son] likes me

doing that). During the fieldwork interviews conducted for this research – unprompted –

participants like Jane frequently called on such gendered and ageist discourses in framing

stories about negotiating their everyday mobilities.

How is it that these perceptions about the suitability of gendered and ageing bodies to

navigate have gained so much traction? And more importantly, how do these discourses

shape the lived realities for how particular bodies perform their everyday wayfinding? The

purpose of this paper is to address these critical questions. To do so, the opening section of

the paper will look more closely the origins of gendered and ageist discourses about bodily

limits and navigational capacity, specifically focusing on the influence of scientific studies in

the media, and how everyday wayfinding has been considered within the mobilities literature.

It will draw on performativity and intersectionality as key conceptual tools for unpacking

how and why particular expectations about participant’s bodies and capacities to navigate

arise. Furthermore, it will explore the potential of lifecourse as a key conceptual tool for

rethinking and remaking social discourses about bodily limits. The empirical sections of this

paper will draw on stories from fieldwork interviews to illustrate how discourses about

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gendered and ageing bodies are performed and remade during wayfinding. In particular, these

sections will focus on how bodily capacities are performed through the axes of navigational

confidence and the dynamics of co-mobility. Whilst some of these stories illustrate the ways

that older women perform embody limiting social discourses about age and gender, others –

like Jane’s story - illuminate the ways older women are pushing back to remake their own

navigational bodily limits in different ways.

7.3 Limits for wayfinding bodies

For the last three decades the ‘body’ has been a burgeoning area of interest for contemporary

social and cultural geography. Rather than being viewed as discrete and material, there has

been widespread recognition of the ways that the body is discursive and multiple (Moss &

Dyck 2002). One particular line of inquiry for considering how bodies intersect with relations

of power and subjectivity has been through exploring the spatial implications of limits placed

upon the body. The act of drawing limits is “neither ethically nor politically neutral” and

therefore “we must therefore be sensitive to the lived experiences of limits, which are never

merely abstract” (Cohen & Weiss 2003, 4). Wayfinding, specifically at the everyday scale, is

an underexplored aspect of mobility with significant spatial implications, yet it is so deeply

intertwined with body politics. Its practices and affects are not equally distributed across all

moving bodies, and questions such as: who is expected to navigate, who is allowed to

navigate, who has the resources to navigate, and how do bodies perform navigation, are

critical to developing an understanding of the body politics of wayfinding. As such, the

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following section provides an introduction to discourses19 about the suitability of gendered

and ageing bodies to perform wayfinding tasks. This section will focus on two key avenues

contributing to these discourses about bodily limits: scientific studies in the media, and how

everyday wayfinding has been considered within the mobilities literature.

7.3.1 Gendered Bodies

According to my participants, many of the most influential discourses around gender and

navigational capacity have their origins in scientific studies popularised by the media, with

these being particularly influential in the development of the idea that ‘men are better

navigators than women’. Critically, this style of study generally attributes women’s

comparatively poor navigational skills to innate differences between the sexes caused by

biology (Pease & Pease 2001), neurology (GMA NewsOnline 2013), evolution (Alleyne

2009), hormones (Kendall n.d) and even sexuality (Sydney Morning Herald 2007). For

example, in their widely popular book “Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read

Maps”, Pease and Pease (2001) suggest there are “thousands of documented scientific studies

that confirm male superiority in spatial skills while brain scans show that men have specific

areas of the brain (in the right side) dedicated to spatial ability. Women do not” (in Carpenter

2013). The danger here is the translation of these studies into popular discourse in ways

which suggest the inherent differences of sexed bodies make them objectively inferior or ill-

19 These discourses (and this paper) are of course themselves produced in very specific cultural contexts – ones
which privilege a small and particular set of identities, and with long and problematic histories of exclusion for
other voices, bodies and knowledges. This paper has been written from a Western, middle-class Anglo
Australian viewpoint. Similarly, nearly all the participants in fieldwork interviews shared this heritage. As such
this commentary of discourse is embedded within this heritage, and discussions about the social perceptions of
gendered and ageing bodies would be crucially different in other social and cultural contexts. In particular,
Indigenous ways of knowing place and styles of wayfinding are missing from this piece of research.

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suited to navigational tasks, with little to no recognition of the ways these bodily limits are

also socially constructed and performed 20.

Underlying assumptions around navigational capacity straddle both sides of the imaginary

sex vs gender divide21. Neither feminist nor mobilities literature have considered the specific

intersection between gender and the coordination of everyday wayfinding: who makes

decisions about the journeys and routes individual bodies and households take as they move

through space. Therefore whilst much feminist literature on gender roles suggests that women

are largely responsible for the labours of co-ordination in the home, this does not appear to

extend to instances of everyday wayfinding, despite the most everyday expressions of

navigation including the daily coordination of who in the family unit needs to go where,

when, why, for how long, and with what resources. Here, we start to see a glimpse of the

politics around what is even considered ‘navigation’ and who is – and isn’t - responsible for

those tasks. In addition, longstanding concerns about gender and safety in urban areas

(Valentine 1990, 1992; England & Simon 2010) have appeared in popular media, urban

geographical literature and tourism studies, which position unaccompanied female bodies on

the move as vulnerable to threat and reinforce notions that gendered (female) bodies are ill-

suited to navigating alone (examples Specia & Mzezewa 2019; Wilson & Little 2005). As

interview responses in this paper show, by suggesting women’s bodies are exceptionally

20 For an excellent commentary on the role of socialisation, gender abilities and ‘neurosexism’ see McKie
(2010).
21 In the introduction Jane employs the widely used categorisations of man/woman and young/old in her stories,
but as this section shows the discursive categories of sex vs gender and biological age vs generation are also
commonly used. In Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies that Matter (1993) Judith Butler highlights the
importance of unsettling these sorts of binary categories, arguing in particular that ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ are not
pre-given attributed or qualities that bodies possess, but come into being through the performance of social
norms. Engaging with these debates is outside the scope of this paper, however it is important to acknowledge
that social discourses around wayfinding capacity rely on these problematic categories.

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vulnerable to threat, there is an enduring perception that women should be accompanied by

human (often male) or technical counterparts in order to move skilfully and safely through

unfamiliar settings.

7.3.2 Ageing Bodies

Alongside the sexed/gendered politics of wayfinding, age emerged as an important aspect of

this research in discourses about bodily capacity. Bodies’ navigational capacities are often

discussed using the binary of biological age vs generational norms. For biological age, both

popular media articles and health focused literature focus on the temporal limits of bodily

capacities (Abrahmasson & Simpson 2011) in framing ageing bodies in terms of declining

capacities which deteriorate as bodies age. Issues of well-being and resource deployment are

central to these conversations, with navigational technologies being used extensively to

either: map everyday travel patterns of older persons to assist in determining appropriate

access to the urban resources (examples Oxley, Langford & Charlton 2010; Zeitler et al

2012), or exploring ways to harness GPS technologies to increase mobility for older persons

with health issues such as dementia, memory loss and wandering, blindness, and physical

disability (Sposaro, Danielson & Tyson 2010; Williams, Hurst & Kane 2013). By employing

language of disability (or ‘debility’ (Puar 2009)), these studies inadvertently reinforce some

of the same ableist discourses about mobility that have impacted the use of space of persons

living with a disability. Pain and Hopkins (2010, 81) reflect on these narrow discourses and

call for greater academic engagement with a wide variety of lived experiences in the lives of

older people thus:

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 “A raft of studies involved tacit, though not necessarily explicit, acceptance that

physiological, psychological or emotional limitations necessarily constrain the autonomy and

opportunities of the very old, or else create the need for younger and middle-aged adults to

control them. The effect has been that unequal patterns of life chances and conditions

between age groups are naturalised and not questioned in the same way geographers have

since criticised analyses of differences of gender, race and (dis)ability”

These academic studies sit alongside popular media texts which repeatedly describe older

persons as being unskilled in using modern wayfinding technologies. Here, the focus changes

from the declining capacities of biological age, to expected behaviour norms based on

socially constructed generational differences. Many of these discussions focus on the use of

GPS applications, suggesting that older people often fail to embrace these tools, or fail to use

them in a confident and skilful manner due to being part of ‘the generation tech forgot’

(Wakefield 2015). What is most problematic here, is that there is almost no literature, nor

popular media stories which embrace the possibility that older persons actually just use these

technological devices as a voluntary and even mundane aspect of their everyday travel and

navigation.

7.4 Conceptual tools for rethinking/remaking problematic discourses

Between gendered and ageist discourses popularised by the media, and a narrow focus within

mobilities and wellbeing literature on the roles and limits of female and older bodies,

navigation is framed as a typically techno-masculine pursuit. This means that only a small

suite of wayfinding experiences and skills are valued. In order to address how these

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problematic discourses influence the lived realities of my participant’s everyday wayfinding,

this paper draws on performativity, intersectionality and lifecourse as key conceptual tools to

ground its empirical analysis. The purpose of this section is to briefly consider how each of

these concepts help us unpack, and potentially remake discourses about bodily limits and

wayfinding capacities.

Like many empirical studies focusing on this style of lived politics, this paper draws its

conceptual origins from Judith Butler’s (1990, 1993) highly influential theorisation of

performativity. At its core, this conceptualisation suggests that “spatial practices acquire their

performative force, or the power to produce the ontological effect of bringing something into

being through the repetition of performative acts” (Glass & Rose-Redwood, 2014, 24).

Following Gregson and Rose’s (2000) example however, this paper seeks to ‘take Butler

elsewhere’ by focusing not only the social production of particular identities (via gender and

age), but also on the performativity of space more broadly in illustrating that wayfinding in

itself is socially produced through repeated performances.

Studies focusing on bodily limits have argued that “thinking the limits of the body demands

that we be attuned to the conflicts and tensions that enliven our body’s own borderlands”

(Cohen & Weiss 2003, 2). This paper grounds its empirical approach to exploring the lived

realities of discursive limits in intersectionality as a way to understand politics and power in

ways that foreground complexity. As Hill Collins and Bilge argue (2016, 2) “people’s lives

and the organisation of power in any given society are better understood as being shaped not

by a single axis of social division […] but by many axes that work together and influence

each other”. Intersectionality is therefore a way for this paper to recognise that identity

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categories such as ‘gender’ and ‘age’ are not predetermined categories, but culturally

constructed identities which emerge through systems of power (Valentine 2007). As such,

this paper draws on intersectionality in its empirical analysis as a critical tool for unpacking

how and why particular expectations about interviewee’s bodies were/are produced at

particular times in their lives. Rethinking Jane’s story using intersectionality helps bring to

light why categorisations such as gender and age are so critical to her stories as opposed to

other potential life circumstances and relationships she has embodied during these times –

grieving widow, adventurous friend and loving mother.

In this paper I also use intersectionality to include missing stories about identity and

empowerment. Many of the participants I interviewed were actively pushing back against

discursive limits which defined their bodies as lacking because of their gender or age, and in

many cases, were determined to remake these limits through their everyday practices. To

bring forward these stories the empirical sections in this paper will also draw on the concept

of lifecourse which focuses on relationality and life transitions across intersecting categories

of difference (see Pain & Hopkins 2010 and Hopkins & Pain 2007). For Hopkins and Pain

(2007, 291): “a lifecourse approach involves recognition that, rather than following fixed and

predictable life stages, we live dynamic and varied lifecourses which have, themselves,

different situated meanings”. This conceptual approach resonates with the stories offered by

participants in this paper for the ways their capacities developed or fluctuated across their

lifecourses: for example, in the ways Jane’s capacities were undone and remade as she

transitioned from being in a partnership to being alone.

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7.5 Methods

The interviews undertaken for this paper were part of a larger project looking at people’s

lifetime experiences of being lost and found and how changing technologies are influencing

wayfinding practices. 20 semi-structured interviews were completed with residents who

currently lived within the Newcastle area. Interviews were conducted with seventeen women

and three men. Fourteen participants were aged 50 years and older. Of these fourteen

participants, all were aged between 50 years old and 70 years old. These characteristics had

significant bearing on the issues which emerged in interview discussions.

All interview participants still lived within their homes22, some as couples with partners (who

were also largely autonomously mobile), some with families, and others who indicated they

lived alone – often after separation or the passing of a significant other. As such interview

discussions spanned different styles of household wayfinding, from the everyday movements

of the individual around their community, to the daily coordination of the full family unit.

The discussions we had therefore also drew on many different everyday experiences,

mobility modes and types of journeys across their lifecourse – car use, walking, cycling,

flying, and from navigating to a particular building, to everyday travels around the

neighbourhood, to commuting, to leisure activities and the occasional overseas holiday. The

stories in this paper also focus largely on the materialities of using an in-car GPS or

smartphone as these dominated stories in the interviews.

22As opposed to age care, assisted living, or in a situation where they lived with family for health and care
purposes. This is important in the context of older participants.

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It is important to acknowledge therefore that other groups of people would have very

different practices of wayfinding, bodies and identity politics depending on their own

lifecourse. For example, those with low mobility or living in care would have vastly different

experiences. Similarly, this set of interview participants were largely of Caucasian, middle-

class background, and including participants who identified as migrants or exploring

Indigenous ways of knowing place and Indigenous practices of wayfinding would bring

forward vastly different relations again. The responses included in this paper therefore

provide just one small snapshot of the many ways that moving bodies might be impacted by

the politics of everyday wayfinding. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to making

these everyday politics more transparent.

7.6 Rethinking/remaking bodily limits: stories of confidence and co-mobility

The subsequent sections of this paper shift to address a critical question identified at the

outset of this paper: how do discourses shape the lived experiences of how bodies perform

their everyday wayfinding? The stories focus on two key affective relations intertwined with

wayfinding practices: navigational confidence and the dynamics of co-mobility when

travelling with others.

These stories illustrate that the body remains a site of possibility. The literature has long

recognised that attempts to put limits around what bodies can do will ultimately fail, as those

bodies who have been defined as abject can refuse the limits opposed on them (Butler 1990,

1993; Cohen & Weiss 2003). This paper therefore also draws on geographies of affect, which

focus on capacities as the potentials of what a body can do. A body’s capacity cannot be

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predefined, and “how a body can affect or be affected continuously varies as encounters

happen and capacities emerge, change and are realised” (Anderson 2014, 80). Critically, this

means bodily capacities are always multiple and fluctuating (Abrahamsson & Simpson

2011). These concepts are useful in foregrounding the relationality of limits explored in the

empirical sections below which begin with an account of the role of confidence.

7.6.1 Confidence

Do you consider yourself a good navigator?

A question asked of my interview participants.

Navigational confidence emerged during fieldwork interviews as a critical aspect of

wayfinding, impacting decisions my interviewees made around where they journeyed, how

they executed a journey, and their capacities to cope with change and disorientation when

journeys didn’t quite go as planned. Discourses which position female and ageing bodies as

having inherently less navigational skill, become part of the embodied realities of how some

of the older women I interviewed performed their mobilities. In terms of confidence this

meant many of the women I spoke to quite literally came to embody these discourses in the

ways they described themselves. For example, of the seventeen women I spoke to only one of

them responded with conviction that yes – they thought they were a good navigator. Instead,

many women steered the conversation away from giving a yes/no answer and responded to

this question with statements about lacking confidence rather than skilfulness.

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Women connected their lack of confidence to previous navigational failings or particular

circumstances where navigating felt particularly tricky. Examples of these statements

typically included responses like: “I’m OK I guess... OK around here but if I have to go

somewhere bigger like Sydney I’m not very confident”. As interviews continued I was

shocked by the repetition of these sorts of responses. Many women felt particularly

vulnerable when faced with the possibility of having to navigate by themselves, and a lack of

confidence often prevented them from making particular types of trips. For example,

returning to Jane’s Story, we can see that a lack of confidence limited the bodily capacities of

many of her friends who felt too anxious to undertake driving trips from Newcastle to

Sydney23. Many women I interviewed directly expressed the kind of hesitancy that Jane

referred to in her story and frequently downplayed their navigational skills during our

conversations. This was in stark contrast to the some of the responses offered by male

participants, for example Ben, who emphatically told me: “Men don’t blame themselves for

being lost, it’s just how we are”.

Why was it that all but one of the women I interviewed answered in this way? Psychological

studies point to some answers, recognising that affective components such as self-confidence

are critically important to gender differences in performing spatial orientation tasks. For

example a study by Piccuci, Caffò and Bosco (2011) found that female participants

consistently self-reported as having less navigational confidence than men – irrespective of

how well they executed the navigational tasks they were given. Similar results were found in

23
This trip is roughly two and a half hours in duration consisting of mostly freeway driving. Many participants
indicated that it was specifically the traffic conditions in Sydney on the other side of the freeway which scared
them – compared to Newcastle there are more complicated turns, exits, signage and lanes, faster traffic speeds,
and a generally more aggressive style of driving due to these conditions.

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studies undertaken by scientists at University College London who ultimately suggest that

gendered differences have “more to do with discrimination and unequal opportunities than

any innate ability” (Gallagher 2018; Cotrout et al 2018). Clearly discourses about bodily

limits have affects for the lived realities of how women perceive themselves and their

capabilities. It is telling however that studies which focus on the socially and culturally

embedded nature of navigational capacities have not had the same widespread uptake in the

popular media as those focusing on biology and difference.

My husband assures me I’m not very good

Thinking about the ways self-confidence is performed and embodied allows us to recognise

that gendered expressions of wayfinding are a product of culture and everyday politics.

Rethinking these discourses through the lens of performativity attunes us to the ways limiting

discourses gain their power through repetition (Glass & Rose-Redwood 2014). While the

media is clearly one avenue that perpetuates limiting discourses, another key avenue is the

repetition of those messages by family and friends. When asked if they considered

themselves good navigators several interview participants responded using assessments of

competency given to them by other people in their social circles, using statements like: “My

husband assures me I’m not very good” and, “I’m average, not terrible... but my family

would definitely tell you otherwise. I usually have the map taken off me when I offer to be

the navigator, so I guess I must really be that bad”. These types of comments and actions by

family and friends repeat limiting discourses back to interviewees reinforcing underlying

assumptions about what female bodies are capable of during wayfinding. Reinforcing

feelings of low self-confidence has a myriad of affects for the decisions women make in

contemplating future wayfinding journeys.

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For some of my participants these types of comments clearly reinforced feelings of low self-

confidence, but for others there was a constant tension - an internal struggle – between their

own self confidence and lack of confidence from family and friends. Take for example

Alison, who likes to use her GPS to go on fitness walks around different neighbourhoods

when she’s travelling. Alison described to me that her family was often concerned she may

get lost or find herself in danger on these walking journeys, with: “Oh they don’t like me

doing it… walking off on my own like I do.. but I mean I have the GPS on my phone so I

don’t see the big deal I’ll be ok… but I think they worry about me and that I can’t do it or

something”. Furthermore, Alison went on to say that her family used previous navigational

failings to justify these opinions: “Just because I’ve gotten lost in the car once or twice (I

think) they think I’m really dotty and forgetful or something… but half the time they don’t

even realise I’m not even lost I’m just running late” (laughs). For Alison, our conversations

about confidence were continually marked by the remarks that others had made about her

navigational skills as she wrestled to articulate during the interview whether she really

thought she was a good navigator or not, changing her mind several times. Alison’s voicing

of her internal struggle is one example of the tensions that occur as bodies negotiate to

oppose the limits which have been placed on them (Butler 1990, 1993; Cohen & Weiss

2003).

Rethinking Alison’s stories about confidence through the lens of intersectionality provides

different insights about how discourses overlap to impact the lived realities of wayfinding

and visions of oneself. Alison’s family has fears about her travelling through unfamiliar

urban spaces on her own which tie to longstanding concerns about the unaccompanied female

body. However Alison’s comments about her family thinking she “can’t do it” or thinking

she’s “really dotty and forgetful or something” evoke the language of debility (Puar 2009)

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and declining capacities which has so often been used to describe the navigational capacities

of older persons. In this context, at the intersection of these overlapping discourses, Alison’s

vulnerability appears heightened resulting in concerns being held by her family. Alison

suggesting that her family often misreads her frequent lateness as additional evidence of poor

navigational abilities, only illustrates further that multiple axes of social division (like age

and gender) play into the everyday politics and spatial production of people’s lives (Hill

Collins & Bilge 2016).

I’m never stressed about it because I learnt to navigate before there was GPS

A final theme regarding confidence which emerged in interviews was that despite expressing

a lack of confidence in their general navigational abilities, many women I spoke to were

feeling empowered to move in new ways through the rapid development of wayfinding tools

and technologies. Devices such as in-car GPS and smartphone apps were often praised by

interviewees for giving them the confidence to travel through new spaces when they were by

themselves, expanding their usual mobility patterns. For example, when asked about the ways

that GPS might be changing the ways she moved around, Charli says: “It tells me to go

places that I would normally avoid. Normally I would take an alternate route to avoid those

situations where I would feel that sort of stress. But if the app tells me to do it.. I kind of just

think, no, this is the way. And I do it and think, oh that wasn’t so bad”. Here we are starting

to see a glimpse of the ways that the body can act as a site of experimentation and training

(Abrahamsson & Simpson 2011) and ultimately remake its limits. For Charli, as well as in

Jane’s introductory story, having the GPS with them for support brought the confidence to

experiment with their everyday mobilities and wayfind through new places they were not

previously familiar or comfortable with, not only remaking the limits of what their bodies are

capable of, but redefining the spatial production of their mobile lives. In ‘taking Butler

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elsewhere’ (Gregson & Rose 2000) we can recognise that the repetition of these sorts of

stories of new found confidence across my interview group are in themselves performative,

indicating that new technologies are a critical means through which older women can actively

remake their bodily limits and connections to place.

New wayfinding technologies can certainly be empowering for some, but interestingly, some

older women are pushing back against limiting discourses by drawing instead on experiences

garnered across their lifecourse. When asked how they felt in moments of disorientation (or

how they felt if the GPS failed them) many older interviewees repeatedly expressed to me

that these sorts of experiences did not cause them any stress or anxiety. Instead they felt long-

standing navigational skills developed in the pre-GPS era would be able to help them

problem solve their way out of these situations. These other navigational skills included

reading a paper map or street directory, using a compass, following the sun, looking for

landmarks, stopping and asking for directions, and quite simply following ‘gut feeling’.

Reversing the discourse of age and debility which haunts media accounts, they repeatedly

expressed concern for the spatial intelligence of younger generations whom they did not think

would be able to spatially problem solve as easily having grown up relying on GPS

technologies. This is reflected in the following two interview comments by Ben: “I’m

concerned that the GPS has actually lessened my skill as a navigator. And importantly it’s a

skill I’m not passing onto my children” and Grace [of younger generations and GPS]: “They

don’t know how to find their way out when they don’t have those resources available to

them”.

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These comments remind us that using technology is just one means by which wayfinding can

be performed and focusing too heavily on technical/rational spatial problem-solving devices

contributes to dangerous and uneven perceptions about how particular groups of people - in

this case older persons – move and navigate through urban environments. Drawing on

Hopkins and Pain’s (2007) lifecourse approach recognises that this style of navigational

confidence is actually only possible specifically because of the life stage of my participants.

This argument can be made twofold: first, those from older generations have markedly

different skill development histories than younger generations from having “learnt to

navigate before there was GPS”, and second, only those from older generations can draw on

mobile problem-solving skills gained across a whole lifetime of wayfinding experiences. As

such, using a lifecourse approach not only allows us to rethink problematic discourses of age

and declining capacities, but was actively called on by my participants in order to articulate,

push back and remake the limits of what ageing bodies are expected to be capable of.

In this section I therefore see three overall stories regarding confidence. Firstly, nearly all the

women I spoke to showed reluctance to label themselves as a confident navigator. This was

demonstrated in the way they spoke about themselves, with these views being either

confirmed by or in tension with popular media portrayals, as well as the opinions of family

and friends. Secondly, it was interesting that so many interviewees felt their mobility patterns

and levels of confidence were changing through using GPS devices, empowering them to

move in new ways and to new places. I do question however whether these new patterns of

technological accompaniment might just be reinforcing the same gendered discourses in new

ways. Grouping together the masculine and technical as primary custodians of navigational

skill reinforces that gendered and ageing bodies need to be accompanied by a human or

technical companion in order to wayfind skilfully and safely. These issues will be explored in

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more depth in the following sections on co-mobility. Thirdly, some older participants actually

evoked a lifecourse approach in the ways they reflected on their navigational capacities,

indicating that they drew confidence from a range of wayfinding skills which could only be

accumulated over a lifetime of wayfinding experiences. This final theme about confidence

exemplifies how bodily limits and wayfinding capacities can be actively remade through

gendered and ageing bodies.

7.6.2 Co-mobility

The following sections explore the dynamics of co-mobility; how people collaborate to move

together in their everyday lives. For nearly all of my interview participants, the details of who

they travelled with was vitally important to the stories they chose to share. These

conversations focused most on the dynamics between couples in trying to wayfind together

through unfamiliar places driving in the car. For interviewees these stories were heavy with

emotion, recalling times when navigating in the car with their partner was stressful,

dangerous, heated, funny or surprising.

It’s not that I couldn’t navigate or anything, it was just never really my job

Whilst there is already extensive mobilities literature on co-mobility (Jensen 2010; Urry

2002; Hughes & Mee 2019b), as well as transport-based literature about gendered patterns of

car use, work and household life (see Schiener & Holz-Rau 2012), little attention has been

given to the gender roles that men and women perform when navigating unfamiliar places

together. Following Waitt, Harada and Duffy (2017), this section therefore speaks to the

“lack of attention to gender in the field of mobility studies, despite gender being

acknowledged as a key axis of inequality and differential mobility” (p325). The women I

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interviewed frequently framed their wayfinding experiences using a problematic gender

binary, where men (in this case usually a partner, husband, or occasionally a father) assumed

the chief responsibility of driving and navigating, and women took on the role of passenger.

This constructed binary of: man is to navigator/as woman is to passenger, produced rigid

household dynamics and interactions with place through co-mobile journeys.

In a really clear example of these active and passive assigned gender roles, David, an avid

cyclist and self-confessed lover of maps, spoke to me about the various navigational tools he

uses when he and his wife take overseas trips together: multiple forms of GPS, offline

mapping software, a personal odometer, maps, and even a compass. When asked if his wife

ever performed the navigation for them, he laughed and remarked: “Oh no, that’s not her

thing, she would have no idea”, and dismissed the question. In David’s household, this

particular style of navigation is firmly his responsibility, with his wife apparently having ‘no

idea’ how to use technical tools and simply not trusted with the responsibility. Similar stories

were repeated by women I interviewed, with many expressing that they occupied the role of

passive passenger during most car journeys with their partners. As Jane reflected in the

opening story: “It’s not that I couldn’t navigate or anything, it was just never really my job”.

Across the entire group of interviewees, only one expressed views which directly disrupted

these stereotypical gender roles. Maddy said: “It really pisses me off that old school gender

thing that females can’t read maps […]. It really annoys me. It’s not that I’m saying he can’t

read maps… just in our particular household I am the chief navigator”. Perhaps

unsurprisingly, Maddy was also the lone interviewee to respond that yes – she considers

herself a good navigator.

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The politics of gender are critical here for the lived realities of wayfinding in a couple of

ways. Firstly, for those women from my interview group who frequently embodied more

passive roles during co-mobile journeys, there was little opportunity for them to experiment

and test the limits of their navigational capacities. Often, rigid gender roles spanned the

length of a coupled relationship. It was only when life circumstances changed significantly

(see Jane’s story as an example) that women took up more active navigational roles, this time

with other people. Secondly, David’s comments are insightful for thinking through the

gendered politics of what is considered navigation. David was quick to claim responsibility

as navigator in extraordinary wayfinding contexts, particularly being overseas for holidays

and the ways he has been able to navigate foreign cities, transport systems and done so

successfully despite the added pressure of being in non-English speaking countries. Ben’s

stories also focused on similar styles of journeys. By contrast, the types of wayfinding

journeys that female interviewees focused on were more mundane such as navigating tricky

suburbs, getting their children to appointments or hobbies in new locations, and meeting up

with friends. This illustrates that there are underlying gendered assumptions not only about

how male/female bodies are expected to perform wayfinding mobilities, but that only specific

styles of journeys and mobile responsibilities are even counted as navigation.

At this point I wish to take space to acknowledge that the ongoing construction I have

animated through the stories in this paper which translates man/woman into

navigator/passenger carry particularly heteronormative assumptions about coupling and

mobile companionship which warrants further attention. There is extensive feminist and

queer critique of the problematic rigidity and power relations tied to these identity categories,

yet nonetheless I have maintained the uneasy use of them throughout this paper partly

because they are so central to gendered popular media discourses about navigational capacity,

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but also partly as a reflection of the co-mobile stories offered by my interview participants,

all of whom were either single or in heterosexual couples. This signals a need for more

extensive research on a wider range of fluid identities, couples and communities regarding

both the politics and performances of wayfinding.

He doesn’t even ask me to navigate anymore now he’s got Siri

At times the active and passive roles my interviewees took on during co-mobile journeys

were a little less clear-cut, however men were still positioned as the primary navigators when

faced with unknown situations. It was a common scenario for the women I spoke with to take

on the role of map-reader/navigator as their partner drove the vehicle. However, the stories

interviewees chose to share with me focused on how quickly this responsibility was given

and taken away again. Stories of male travelling companions not trusting the directions being

provided by female passengers were common, often pulling over the car to take hold of the

map or GPS and assess the situation for themselves. This often resulted in moments of

tension on a journey in the difficult arguments of ‘who was right’. One interviewee Ebony

expressed to me that in some ways the adoption of GPS had helped alleviate tensions in her

household as: “One good thing about GPS it’s fixed the problem of all the men being too

proud to stop for directions”. These stories reflect an interesting slipping of the gender roles

in response to different levels of comfort during a journey. When times were good my female

interviewees became map-readers and their partners took on a more passive role, driving

where guided. But when times were bad and the stress of being lost crept into the co-mobile

journeys, women often returned to being passengers, with men reclaiming chief navigational

responsibility. Drawing on Anderson (2014) these co-mobile dynamics are therefore

illustrative of the ways that navigational capacities can fluctuate in specific encounters, with

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the capacities of both men and women temporally shifting as they were affected by new

compositions of travel, partner, and (dis)comfort.

These stories also illustrate however that the adoption of GPS devices can further reinforce

stereotypical gender roles in some households. Some women expressed that their partners

place sole trust in artificial companions to help them navigate on a journey. Comments such

as “He trusts the GPS more than he trusts me” were common, and Candice said in one

interview: “He doesn’t even ask me to navigate anymore now he’s got Siri”. What’s

particularly interesting about Siri is that she is actually programmed with a default female

persona, including female speaking voice. Why is that Siri is perceived to be more

trustworthy than a human female travelling companion? The answer lies partly in broader

discourses about which styles of locative information are valued and trusted. Trust in Siri

emerges as technological devices are often problematically assumed to communicate rational

and objective spatial information which users can interpret (Hughes & Mee 2018), freeing

navigators from some of the uncomfortable emotions and acute responsibilities of trying to

make the right decisions in tricky situations – emotions which my interviewees suggested

could quickly escalate and become heated when trying to navigate with a life partner. Whilst

having a seemingly detached and objective travel companion might alleviate tensions and

bring comfort to male navigators, it was often at the emotional cost of reinforcing messaging

that their female counterpart has limited navigational capacity, giving more performative

power to problematic discourses around gender and navigation.

Technology therefore has a messy relationship with bodily limits during wayfinding. For

some women technology has been an empowering means for remaking their bodily limits, yet

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for others the influence of wayfinding technologies has been to further reinforce expectations

of the roles men and women take on during journeys with their households. In Candice’s

view, the adoption of GPS devices in her household has simply provided an extra tool to help

her partner execute the responsibilities of wayfinding without her collaborative assistance.

The case of Siri, by having a default female persona, complicates these dynamics further,

illustrating that problematic discourses which sees technology as ‘objective’ sources of

spatial information also intersect with co-mobile wayfinding journeys.

I’m a worse navigator when I’m travelling with him

This final section of the paper briefly considers the interplay between the two key themes of

confidence and co-mobility, and how they can potentially mutually reinforce each other.

Confidence is clearly critically affected by the perceptions of others, which are partly

communicated through how partners relate to one another during co-mobile journeys. And

vice versa, the roles men and women embody when wayfinding together are inflected by the

levels of confidence that each person has accumulated over a long personal history of mobile

encounters. This was perfectly articulated by one of my interviewees. Ashley works part time

and given her shorter work hours (compared to her husband who does rotating shift work) she

has typically been responsible for the daily coordination of her household including driving

their three children to school and various leisure activities. Most of the journeys Ashley takes

are around familiar neighborhoods in the Newcastle area, but occasionally she will need to

venture to new places such a different sporting fields, medical appointments, her children’s

friend’s houses and so forth. Ashley has spent years negotiating the household coordination

and feels she has a “pretty good grasp” on most places in Newcastle by now, so really only

uses her GPS when wayfinding to one of these new places for the first time. However,

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Ashley notes that the way she performs her wayfinding drastically changes when she travels

with her husband. She says:

“Well, usually if we have to go somewhere a bit further out of Newcastle or we’ve got like a

really important deadline to make and he’s home, then he gets in the car and does the driving

and navigating. If we really need directions then I’m usually in the passenger seat doing the

navigating with the phone. But I’m a worse navigator when I’m travelling with him. It’s

crazy, he must make me nervous deep down because I like regress… I start second guessing

myself and giving directions too late and I just feel the pressure. Maybe it’s because we have

totally different styles. Like he follows the main roads and is always looking for the most

efficient way whereas I’m more like, I’ll just drive this way and find it eventually. It’s funny

though. He must really wonder how I pull off all the day-to-day running around with the kids

by myself… but I never ever have a problem with that”.

Ashley’s confidence in navigating clearly changes between travelling on her own and during

her co-mobile journeys with her partner, specifically stating that his presence maker her

nervous and prompts her to second guess her decision-making, something she would never

do if she was on her own. Furthermore, despite having chief responsibility over the more

mundane daily wayfinding tasks for the household, she takes on a (more) passive role when

completing extraordinary wayfinding journeys during which her husband assumes driving

and navigational responsibility. In Ashley’s case there is a clear mutually reinforcing

relationship between confidence and co-mobility.

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But this interplay between confidence and co-mobility can also occur in more complicated

ways. Here I will return to Jane’s Story from the introduction of this paper one final time.

Jane reflects that for much of the relationship with her husband she took on a passive role

during their co-mobile journeys. As such, having limited opportunities to experiment and

train her navigational capacities meant that after his passing she initially lacked confidence in

navigating which limited the places she was travelled to on her own. Over time, new

wayfinding technologies have proved empowering for Jane in remaking her mobilities,

encouraging her to take on new active roles within her friendship group and new leisure

activities such as motorbike riding. This new-found confidence however remains in tension

with the confidence-in-her held by some family members who continue to reflect problematic

discourses about age and gender: “Not sure he likes me doing that [in reference to] the sight

of little old me out there on my motorbike doing my own thing with a bunch of big burly

bikers”. But perhaps the most interesting point here is that despite Jane’s determination to

push back against gendered and ageist discourses in her own mobilities, the way she speaks

about her older female friends reinforces these very same discourses – that they lack

confidence, are anxious about being lost to the point of limiting their mobilities, and that they

can’t read maps. Apparently it’s a woman thing. Where this paper has focused largely on the

dynamics of co-mobility between driving couples, the paradox in Jane’s Story illustrates to

me that future research into different types of co-mobile relationships is vitally important for

unpacking the complexities around how, even despite personal experience, gendered and

ageist discourses around the bodily limits of navigational capacity retain so much

performative power.

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7.7. Conclusion

The purpose of this paper has been to address the everyday politics of wayfinding through

gendered and ageing bodies. The paper has drawn on interview responses to provide

empirical examples of the ways that social discourses around bodily limits critically affect the

lived realities of wayfinding, focusing on two key affective aspects of navigational capacity:

confidence and co-mobility. As such, this paper has offered three key contributions in

rethinking and remaking the everyday politics of wayfinding.

Firstly, social discourses around navigational capacity rely heavily on problematic identity

categories. The binaries of man/woman and old/young are often broken down into further

categorisations such as sex/gender and biological age/generation, with each of these different

categories having particular expectations assigned to how bodies are expected to perform

during wayfinding. Scientific stories popularised by the media as well as narrow

engagements by some areas of the literature are key avenues through which these categories

glean their performative power. This paper has shown that these categories can be reinforced

further during wayfinding performances in the ways family, friends and partners describe

each other, the roles they take on during co-mobile journeys, and at times through the use of

wayfinding technologies. Furthermore, in different contexts the discourses of gender and age

can intersect and overlap, resulting in a heightened sense of vulnerability being inscribed on

my interviewee’s bodies. Rethinking these stories using Hopkins and Pain’s (2007) lifecourse

approach however repositions these conversations to recognise that we occupy a range of

different roles and capabilities across our lifetimes, and that bodily limits are always

fluctuating and multiple, shifting temporally as they enter into new affective compositions.

Rethinking navigational capacity through critical life events rather than identity categories is

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small step towards unsettling problematic assumptions about bodily limits. However much

work still needs to be done in exploring a wider range of wayfinding performances and body

politics, particularly considering different co-mobile relationships (and the unsettling of

heteronormative assumptions about how partners travel together) and different cultural

contexts.

Secondly, this paper illustrates that there are political dimensions to what is considered

‘navigation’, and the types of navigational knowledge and skills that are valued in Western

urban contexts. Navigation at the everyday scale – particularly in the daily coordination of

home life which as typically performed by women – is largely unrecognised as wayfinding

despite it calling on a wide variety of spatial problem-solving skills, practices and emotional

responsibilities. Instead, navigation is generally narrowly perceived as wayfinding in

extraordinary and unfamiliar contexts, with the responsibilities for navigating these journeys

typically associated with masculine/younger/abled bodies. Furthermore, the widespread

uptake of wayfinding technologies over the last decade has contributed to the notion that

some types of geographical knowledge and skill are valued as more legitimate than others. In

particular, being able to skilfully navigate is consistently connected with being able to

proficiently use GPS enabled or other technological devices to move between locations as

efficiently as possible. This simplistic depiction, which the mobilities paradigm has worked

hard to move on from, belies the complexity of everyday wayfinding, and particularly

underplays some of the more fleeting, ephemeral and embodied aspects of movement

(Hughes & Mee 2018). These techno-rational conversations offer little room for other more

intuitive types of wayfinding that women or older persons might typically engage with, for

example: following one’s gut feeling, following less linear paths during a journey, or

performing wayfinding primarily within familiar settings. The older women who I

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interviewed for this paper actively evoked the language of a lifecourse approach to highlight

the importance of recognising this wider range of spatial skills which can be gained through a

lifetime of experience. For these women, this was an important way to push back and remake

the limits of navigational capacity. The rise of digital technologies are assumed to exclude

some groups (such as older people) from particular ways of understanding place, yet the

comments offered by interview participants illustrate that those entrenched in the younger

‘digital generation’ may in fact be the ones missing out on some of these other more intuitive

ways of understanding place and the development of a wider range of navigational problem-

solving skills.

Finally, social preferences for masculine and technical types of spatial information have

important outcomes for how space is produced, an area of enquiry which should be taken

seriously by future mobilities research. As women often embody more passive roles during

co-mobile journeys, they experience less opportunities to experiment with navigational

performance. As the comments in this paper have shown this can limit their mobilities in

terms of the range of places they are comfortable travelling in and through. Alongside this,

GPS mapping tools and technologies provide an overlay to the physical environment, and

there are important political dimensions to what is represented and what cannot – especially

given that this is often based on paid advertising and service subscription. For example

studies have already begun to document the underrepresentation of women’s facilities such as

hospitals, childcare services, toilets, domestic violence shelters and women’s health clinics

(Bliss 2018; Moloney & Reuters 2020) by popular mapping services. There is room here to

‘take Butler elsewhere’ (Gregson & Rose 2000) in thinking about how identity categories

such as gender influence the performativity and production of space and place, and refocus

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conversations about navigational capacity from ‘why can’t women navigate’ to ‘how might

women navigate differently’.

7.8 Postscript

This paper is currently under review with Gender, Place and Culture. The first round of

reviewer comments has been received, with comments focusing on three key areas of

improvement: (1) reshaping the theoretical framing of the paper to highlight its critical

interventions by speaking to feminist geography debates on navigation, public presence and

ageing bodies, (2) streamlining the empirical material and connecting it more thoroughly to

an improved literature framing via discussion, and (3) clarifying points around research

methodology and participant characteristics.

The version of this paper that appears in this thesis has already addressed the methodological

comments offered by reviewers (comment 3). Addressing comments (1) and (2) however will

require a more substantial reworking of the literature sections of this paper which is to be

completed after thesis submission. Moving forward, I intend to reshape this paper with

greater emphasis on how it contributes to ongoing engagements with a politics of mobility,

particularly at the everyday scale via the lived experience of wayfinding and household

coordination. Specifically, the paper will argue that current mobilities literature offers little

engagement with the body politics of wayfinding at this scale, meaning pseudo-scientific

discourses dominate the popular media imagination and problematically position navigational

skill as an inherent characteristic that particular (male and abled) bodies possess, while other

bodies (female and ageing) do not. By drawing on a feminist geography of performativity,

lifecourse and intersectionality, the paper will reposition navigational skill as a ‘mobile

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capacity’ which constantly changes across people’s lives as they embody different

discourses, gender roles and household responsibilities. By the discussion and conclusion

section of the paper, I intend to argue that the empirical stories in this paper illustrate that

everyday (household) wayfinding is a key site in which the body politics of navigation play

out. For some, this means the private sphere reinforces the messaging of problematic

discourses to limit the opportunities gendered and aged bodies have to experiment with space

and perform navigational tasks. For others, wayfinding at the scale of the household or

individual – particularly when utilising contemporary technologies - is an activity through

which the limits of problematic discourses can be contested. Ultimately, the conclusions of

this paper point to the relationality of the private and public spheres in shaping the politics of

mobility for gendered and ageing bodies.

Making these reviewer changes will likely mean that the theme of unpredictability does not

resonate as strongly in subsequent versions of this paper as it does here, however they will

undoubtedly strengthen this paper’s theoretical contribution to feminist geographies and a

politics of mobility. A draft abstract for the revised paper has been included below.

7.8.1 Working Abstract for Revised Paper

One of the central contributions of the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ has been thoughtful re-

engagement with a politics of mobility. However, wayfinding – the imagined and embodied

performance of navigational tasks – is a style of mobile performance which has been

theoretically and empirically neglected in these investigations, particularly at the everyday

scale of household mobilities. What endures are pseudo-scientific discourses which attribute

an individual’s capacity for navigation to inherent bodily characteristics such as sex, age,

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neurology and so forth. These discourses problematically position ‘mobility as a

characteristic’ which lies within particular bodies and activated through performance. Such

discourses need to be troubled for two reasons. Firstly, the stereotypes they naturalise are

performative, resulting in limits and exclusions for how particular bodies move through

space. Secondly, their narrow focus ignores the lived realities of how navigation and skill-

building at the everyday scale actually unfolds. To address these literature issues, this paper

draws on a feminist geography to conceptually rethink the politics of wayfinding through

‘mobility as capacity’. It critically uses a lifecourse approach and intersectionality to illustrate

how social discourses intersect with household roles and responsibilities to produce the

navigational capacities of bodies. Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted in

Newcastle, Australia, this paper specifically explores these everyday politics through the

lenses of gender and age. The paper illustrates that the private sphere of household navigation

is a key site in which the gendered and ageist politics of wayfinding are both reinforced and

contested, with critical affects for access to public space, mobility and opportunities to

experiment with the limits of navigational skill.

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 Chapter 8 – Paper 5

Published as:

Hughes, A. 2020. ‘Being lost: encounters with strange places’, Mobilities, doi:

10.1080/17450101.2020.1830587.

8.1 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.

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8.2 Introduction

Much mobile decision-making at the everyday scale focuses on making mobile life easier;

more predictable, comfortable, efficient and enjoyable. Unforeseen changes to our intended

daily journeys are typically understood through a language of ‘disruption’. Disruptions at this

everyday scale still have important consequences for our mobilities, ranging from mild

inconveniences right through to threats to personal safety. Critically, disruptions are all too

often “problematically understood as a departure from normality” (Doughty & Murray 2017,

80) in the mobilities literature, and for moving bodies “viewed pejoratively” (Bissell &

Gorman-Murray 2019, 708).

One particular style of everyday disruption which has been scarcely considered in the

mobilities literature is ‘being lost’ — the literal disorientation that comes with a loss of

locational knowledge and finding oneself in an unfamiliar geographical place 24. The minor

(and often implicit) discussions afforded to experiences of being lost in the literature tend to

frame it as an unwelcome event of ‘disruption’ to be quickly overcome. Overwhelmingly

however being lost is not mentioned as a key empirical experience at all. This oversight is

fundamentally problematic as it oversimplifies the countless ways that journeys are unsettled,

adjusted, and remade during mobile performances and therefore reinforces unrealistic

expectations that mobility paths are (or at the least, should be) relatively knowable or

predictable. Such expectations of predictability are further reinforced through popular media,

24 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 & 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.

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with the rapid integration of GPS technologies into our everyday lives altering ideas about

what constitutes disruption. Straying from the desired mobility path and becoming lost is

increasingly viewed as some sort of personal or technical failure given the omnipresence of

online cartographic information. Most popular media stories, therefore, cluster around either

the catastrophic (and potentially fatal) outcomes of being lost, or visions of a techno-universe

where it: “seems likely that folks in the future will never have to worry about being lost

again” (Mann 2014).

Provoked by these interventions this paper reframes the discussion to ask: what is the

meaning of ‘being lost’ for contemporary mobile life? Unpredictability is an enduring reality

of daily life and an important dimension of mobility for how we learn about the world around

us (Sennett 1977): an experience which can inspire joy as well as anxiety. This paper

conceptualises being lost as a mobile encounter with strangeness. I demonstrate that there are

different styles to being lost, which are characterised by different types of encounter, affects,

temporalities, bodily capacities and relationships to place25 — and this multiplicity warrants

significant attention from mobilities scholars.

The paper is structured into four sections. The first section begins by briefly exploring the

utility of encounter as a conceptual framework to understand being lost. Framing being lost

as an encounter with strangeness offers an expanded understanding of encounters: one that

25
This paper draws on Cresswell’s (2008) definition of places as ’locations with meaning’ (p134). 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.

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looks beyond encounters with ‘strangeness’ as-figure or as-body, to encounters with

strangeness as and through place. The second section uses encounter to consider the ways

that our bodily capacities are both enabled and constrained in multiple ways during

experiences of being lost. Focusing on the dual aspects of performance highlights that

encounters with strange places - and being lost in general - are not inherently negative

experiences. The third section uses encounter to illustrate the significance of being lost for

everyday mobilities by drawing out the lasting affects encounters with strange places can

have on people’s visions of mobile life and relations with particular places. The final section

draws together insights from across the paper to identify four different styles of being lost

that emerged during fieldwork: fearful lost, inadequate lost, skilful lost and lively lost.

Theoretical discussions throughout the paper will be integrated with empirical material drawn

from fieldwork conducted in Newcastle, Australia, which included 20 semi-structured

interviews with Newcastle residents (aged 18 years and older). Most of the recruitment for

the project was achieved via a local newspaper advertisement and subsequent word of mouth.

The recruitment criteria were intentionally designed to be broad, with the only limiting

conditions on recruitment being adults from the local area who currently and/or previously

owned and used a GPS/smartphone device in their travels. The final interview participants

were comprised 17 women and 3 men, and 14 interviewees were 50+ years of age 26. The

types of journeys that participants discussed drew from a wide range of mobility modes

including car use, walking, cycling and flying, and multiple types of life events such as

26 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 are currently being
explored in another paper.

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navigating to a particular building, everyday travels around the neighbourhood, commuting,

travelling leisure activities and occasional overseas holidays.

8.3 Strange Places: rethinking encounter and strangeness through the context
of being lost

Modern urban life is marked by encounters with ‘strangers’ (Ahmed 2000; Amin 2012;

Wilson 2017). The ‘stranger’ has been widely employed as a figurative model, typically

characterised by unknown- ness (Jackson, Harris & Valentine 2017) or estrangement

(Fincher & Iveson 2008). The unpredictability of the stranger has reduced them to an identity

of ‘otherness’, unknowing, and fear (Jackson, Harris & Valentine 2017). Where the ‘stranger’

appears in mobilities literature, studies are dominated by a focus on intercultural encounters

on the move or encounters with anonymous moving bodies — proximate strangers — in

public spaces or on public modes of transport (see examples Koefoed, Christensen &

Simonsen 2017; Schuermans 2017; Wilken 2010; Wilson 2011). Recent scholarship has

questioned this narrow focus on the stranger-as-figure. Jackson, Harris and Valentine (2017)

have called for a broader discussion of not only ‘who’ is strange, but what, where, and how

strangeness occurs, inviting us to “open the conversation to think through strange-ness as

conviviality, as curiosity, as memory, as emotion rather than simply as figure or identity”

(p9). Similar concerns have been expressed by Ramsden (2016) who examines the strange in

the mundane. Ramsden (2016) suggests that we need think beyond the stranger-as-figure as a

pre-formed construction, and instead see the strange(r) as a process of becoming (and

unbecoming) (Ramsden 2016), highlighting an important temporal dimension to ‘what,

where and how’ strangeness occurs. This paper, therefore, takes up this invitation to think

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beyond the stranger-as-figure and embrace where strange places might be found in the

mundane experience of being lost in our everyday mobilities.

Encountering strange places is characterised by an encounter with some form of unknown.

How then does being lost constitute an encounter with strangeness? According to Seamon

(1979), an encounter is “any situation of attentive contact between the person and the world

at hand” (p99). In being lost, our bodies are placed in a situation of attentive contact with

strange places: places that are unknown, disorientating and foreign. Experiencing physical

dislocation from the places we know triggers emotions, sensations and relationships to place

that are critically different to those we experience in more familiar settings. The relationship

between physical dislocation and psychological or emotional dislocation has been described

in a wide variety of places, academic and beyond: from Rebecca Solnit’s (2006)

contemplative essays which see being lost as the boundary of human knowledge where “the

world has become larger than our knowledge of it” (p23), to Jon Anderson’s (2015) work on

jetlag and liminality as the “holistic consequences of leaving one set of socio-spatial relations

and moving to another” (p6). In the mobile experience of being lost then, strangeness

manifests in the unknown that comes with being in unfamiliar places. This is possible even in

the context of more mundane, everyday journeys: the strangeness of feeling out-of-place-in-

place. Encountering strange places is therefore illustrative of the ways that normative

geographies of place are produced through – yet simultaneously transgressed by – moving

bodies (Cresswell 1996).

Two key ideas are particularly useful to illustrate where and how strange places emerge and

how we might consider being lost as an encounter with strange places. Firstly, particular

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emotions are typically associated with being in strange places. Jansson and Lagerkvist (2009)

suggest that strangeness can be found in “those bewildering and sometimes unspeakably

bizarre spaces where disruption or disarray leave social subjects estranged and out of place [.

. .] the emotional and mediated geographies of uncertainty and in-betweenness; of cognitive

displacement, loss, fear or exhilaration” (p2). Much like the stranger-as-figure then, strange

places are characterised by estrangement, and these sensations are frequently conceptually

‘othered’ to be associated with largely negative feelings such as confusion and fear.

Secondly, Jansson and Lagerkvist (2009) highlight the temporality of strange places with

“strange spaces are produced by and producing moments when we are faced with a

transformed state of affairs: either by dazzling light, a sudden flash, or by gradual unfolding

of moments foreboding something unknown or new” (p2). Drawing on this, encounters with

strange places are moments defined by processes of change when the conscious registers a

form of difference. These notions resonate with ideas about the body and experiences of

liminality, as strangeness is found in the transition moment, where one becomes temporarily

dislocated from familiar geographies, perceptions of time, knowledges, performances, and

even visions of ourselves (Anderson 2015; Hughes & Mee 2018).

This reading of the strange helps us begin to understand why the experience of lost might feel

so disarming. However, part of the purpose of this paper is to trouble readings of being lost

(largely popularised by the media) which portray these strange encounters as purely negative

experiences triggering negative emotions. Whilst mobilities scholars have done important

work illustrating that many types of mobilities can be marked by unanticipated positive

encounters (see empirical examples Gatrell (2013) on therapeutic walking, Hjorth (2011) on

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urban gaming, and Edensor (2011) on commuting), being lost is a particular style of mobile

experience which remains conceptually othered in the literature as an unwelcome disruption.

One way to address this narrow representation of being lost is to therefore engage with

broader literature on productive encounters and apply it to this empirical context. For

example, Jansson and Lagerkvist (2009) have illustrated that a broader conceptual reading of

strangeness actually focuses on the strange as a ‘transformed state of affairs’: a reading which

can also include more positive transformations in emotion towards joy, excitement, curiosity

and fun. In the context of urban planning, Fincher and Iveson (2008) argue that encounters

between strangers can be productive and creative; critical moments where the disorder of

urban life opens up bodies to connect and identify with forms of difference. In fact, Fincher

and Iveson (2008) specifically see encounters with strangers as “working towards a kind of

conviviality in urban life” (p154).

Fincher and Iveson’s (2008) understanding of encounter is particularly useful for this paper

as it focuses on how encounters can transform a body’s capacities in both positive and

negative ways. They argue: “city life can both constrain and enable our capacity to explore

different sides of ourselves and to craft new identifications through encounters with others as

strangers” (p145). In this paper, I extend Fincher and Iveson’s (2008) understanding of

productive encounters to the context of being lost, illustrating how encounters with strange

places also hold potential for both negative and positive transformations through difference.

As the empirical stories that follow show, my interviewee’s bodily capacities were enabled

and constrained in different ways through the multiple affects which came from the

strangeness of being lost. This is important in contributing to an ongoing understanding of

strange encounters as productive and refusing problematic assumptions about being lost,

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which position disorientation and disruption as inherently negative and undesirable

experiences (Bissell & Gorman-Murray 2019).

Finally, given the multiple ways that locative media have impacted mobile life over the last

decade, it is also critical to consider how technological changes to mobile practices27 might

be complicating encounters with strange places. Licoppe (2016) animates the stranger-as-

figure construction to describe the ways that locative media multiply the opportunity for

encountering strangers on the move — both physically and digitally, describing these

interactions as being with ‘pseudonymous strangers’. He defines these as a person “under two

different guises, as the anonymous stranger we might glance at, and as a digital persona

accessible through the proximity-aware locative mobile app” (p101). For Licoppe (2016),

negotiating encounters with pseudonymous strangers requires people to engage with the

processes of real-life identification and matching as they must discern whether the person

they see in their physical vicinity corresponds with their online persona.

In this paper, I draw from Licoppe’s (2016) work to think about how the characteristics of the

stranger relate to place through the possibilities of encountering pseudonymous places. As we

navigate we encounter unfamiliar places in the physical world sensed through the body.

When using navigational tools such as a GPS we can also simultaneously access a digital

imprint or online impression of these same places in the 2D depictions given on an in-car

27 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.

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GPS or handheld smart- phone device. Human geographers have long recognised that any

map depictions are highly subjective and inherently partial renderings of place (Crampton

2009; Caquard 2015). This means that navigators are simultaneously interacting with

multiple versions of place at once. Navigating involves the same processes of real-life

identification and matching — being able to reconcile these versions of hybrid place (Frith

2012) in order to locate ourselves (be found) in a given spatial context. Licoppe’s (2016)

work is particularly influential for this paper in arguing that being lost can involve

encountering strange pseudonymous places.

Moving forward then, this paper frames the experience of being lost as a mobile encounter

with strange places. The following sections draw on interview responses to demonstrate how

the strangeness of being lost impacts how our everyday mobilities are performed by focusing

bodily capacities, memories and intensities which produce different styles of being lost.

8.4 Negotiating bodily capacities through encounter: enablement and constraint

This section highlights the duality of being lost as both potentially productive and

constraining encounters with strange places illustrating that being lost is not an inherently

negative or disruptive experience. This section draws on an understanding of bodily

capacities based on affect. Bodily capacities encompass not only what a body physically does

during mobile performances, but the relational potential of what it can possibly do: it’s

capacity to affect and to be affected (Pile 2010; Anderson 2014). Furthermore, this paper

draws on the language of intensity, “the qualitative experiential dimension of affect as

diminished or heightened” (Bissell 2009, 911), to describe how a body’s capacity to affect

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and be affected might shift in acute or barely discernible ways when encountering strange

places. This is important as the stories in this section reflect times when bodies were literally

lost, but also how bodies reacted to, or prepared for the potential to be lost.

Following Cass and Faulconbridge (2015), unpacking these performances means looking at

materials (the tools used for wayfinding such as smartphones and in-car GPS), meanings

(how performances tie to wider social ideas/expectations) and competencies (participants

ability to execute skills and feel satisfied). According to Peters, Kloppenburg, and Wyatt

(2010) wayfinding practices involve negotiating the labour of co-ordination. In this sense,

“mobility therefore is more than just travelling from one place to another; it is also about

arriving at the right place, on time, with the necessary things, often at the same time as

relevant others” (p349). Therefore, the stories of bodily capacities are discussed in the

context of the daily co-ordination in trying to avoid, negotiate, plan for, or embrace the

strangeness of unforeseen circumstances.

8.4.1 Preparing for strangeness: planning ahead or diving right in

An interesting mix of approaches to anticipating strange encounters emerged in the

interviews. Approximately half of my interviewees described engaging in pre-planning,

where they checked their desired route using their smartphone GPS or desktop computer the

night before a journey. Peters, Kloppenburg, and Wyatt (2010) describe this type of prior co-

ordination as “pre-travelling: the organisation of a predictable heterogeneous order by

creating connections between different elements” (p355). This is reflected in an interview

comment by Ben, about using his GPS: “It’s a pre-planning tool. Without it, it would be very

difficult to do the trip we are doing”.

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As Ben’s interview continued it became apparent that checking the on-screen route the night

before was not the only pre-planning practice that he performed before a journey. He also

used Google Maps on his home PC to plot his intended route and print out turn-by-turn map

directions - a practice used by several other interview participants. Ben explained his

reasoning for doing this:

“I do that as a backup as we’ve had issues in the past where the GPS doesn’t work. But

actually there’s so many maps I need now, I’m not printing them out anymore, I’m saving

them as notes on an iPad. I’m being really clever.”

People draw on multiple wayfinding tools simultaneously to help plan for an encounter with

strangeness. For Ben, employing pre-travelling practices was how he gave a potential journey

order to make it more comfortable. As suggested by his comment ‘I’m being really clever’,

pre-planning rituals bring a sense of satisfaction to his mobile performances and enhanced his

readiness to tackle strange places. In accumulating multiple wayfinding tools and developing

a sense of skilfulness with them, Ben felt his capacity to co-ordinate in the face of

strangeness was enhanced. This idea is expressed particularly well by Peters, Kloppenburg,

and Wyatt (2010) with:

“we argue that people know that their planned passages and projects will differ from situated

practices. They know that unexpected situations may arise when they are on the move and

that they will have to make decisions in that specific situation. What is important about

people knowing this is that they act upon this knowledge in advance. They make space to

deal with contingencies in the planning phase. In other words, they include room for

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manoeuvre in their projects and passages, or the possibility to create alternative orders in real

time by making use of certain resources.” (p362).

Pre-travelling rituals were particularly important for some respondents in enabling their

potential capacity to be mobile. For others, new wayfinding tools reshaped the temporalities

of their labour of co-ordination in a different way. The remaining half of my interviewees

suggested that the instantaneous access of GPS and smartphone devices meant they could

more easily make decisions on the move and remake their journeys as required. As Helen

says: “I don’t have to prepare now ... or worry about where I’m going. I just get in and put it

into the GPS”. For these interviewees the ability to change and re-plan one’s route during

mobile performances in response to strangeness brought comfort to their journeying. These

interviewees were more willing to hand over navigational agency to their technological

companions and open themselves up to the lively possibilities afforded by (re)creating their

journeys in the moment.

New tools and practices are changing the temporalities and character of how we co-ordinate

our mobile lives. Critically, for my interview respondents who liked to pre-plan for

strangeness, it is actually the potential of an encounter-with-strangeness-to-come that

provides them with the opportunity to explore their own wayfinding capacities. For others

who like to rely on the GPS to remake their movement paths in real time, technological tools

enabled them to move in and through strange places with comfort and ease.

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 8.4.2 Fearing strangeness: the threat of navigational failure

The decisions individuals make during their mobile performances are of course intertwined

with the broader sociality of wayfinding. Willis (2009) suggests that “our wayfinding

activities are motivated, influenced and affected by our interactions in the social world; we

travel to and from places to visit people, to work and for pleasure” (p21). For my

interviewees social values and perceptions deeply influenced wayfinding performances.

Specifically, experiences of being lost were viewed unfavourably in social settings and

ultimately internalised by individuals as a personal navigational failure.

When asked to reflect on how their mobility practices had changed with the introduction of

GPS, two key responses emerged: respondents felt more empowered as individuals to travel

on their own and respondents no longer needed to stop and ask people for directions when

they got lost. What ties these two responses together is that the responsibility of wayfinding

is increasingly internalised. There is an expectation that individual bodies use the resources

(including technologies) at hand and self-co-ordinate to ensure they arrive at the right place at

the right time. For example in one interview Kim stated: “Yeah I mean, how do people get

lost now? Like, do they? Or do they just not know how to use the technology?”. Kim’s

remarks suggest that a person being lost in the contemporary context is perceived as a lack of

skilfulness. Kim was comfortable using navigational technologies and found it difficult to

account for different skill levels in others. For less confident interviewees, this expectation

emerged as anxieties around being lost. For example, Helen says:

“I’d like to say I get lost less. You know there’s not as many excuses now. If I’m late for a

meeting I can’t say “I didn’t know where I was going”, because we do have that technology.

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 And often the person or persons who are organising a meeting or a function, sometimes it

comes with a map! They send a map with the agenda! So there is no excuse.”

The idea that there is ‘no excuse’ to get lost anymore illustrates that encountering strangeness

in this context is perceived as a personal failure and that lost bodies have limited capacity to

move in skilful ways. Being lost, framed through the emotional registers of anxiety and

failure, is a negative encounter, an interaction with ‘othered’ places that needs to be avoided

(Jansson & Lagerkvist 2009). This example is therefore illustrative of the perception of

strange encounters which dominates the literature, and an example of the ways bodily

capacities can be constrained by the threat or fear of the unknown. What is particularly

interesting, however, is that this style of being lost is centred on the threat of personal failure

rather than threats to personal (bodily) safety (which are more commonly associated with

being geographically lost). This has problematic ramifications for how people carry out their

wayfinding performances, where assumptions about how a body can or has performed being

placed onto other individuals (as in Kim’s comments) or internalised by individuals

themselves (Helen).

8.4.3 Coping with strangeness: instincts, agency, and negotiating pseudonymous

places

While some interviewees felt empowered to access new spaces and improvise their routes as

a result of GPS, others felt increased levels of anxiety and frustration during the process of

learning to be skilful with new resources. Tangled up in these performances are our

constantly changing capacities to cope with strangeness and adapt to unforeseen

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circumstances. In this section, I argue that such performances influence navigational instincts

and visions of oneself.

Recent discussions around what bodies are capable of have drawn on affect to theorise the

ways bodily capacities “are always fluctuating and multiple” (Abrahamsson & Simpson

2011, 335), evolving, decomposing and being remade with new intensities. Recent attempts

to think about technology and bodily capacities through a post-human lens examine the ways

technology might be extending the limits of what a body can do (Wilson 2009). Many

interview respondents reflected on how their own capacities waxed and waned across

different wayfinding performances with technology. At times they directly expressed that

their GPS devices extended their capacity to be mobile and empowered them to explore

strange places. This is reflected in comments by Charli:

“It tells me to go places that I would normally avoid. Normally I would take an alternate

route to avoid those situations where I would feel that sort of stress. But if the app tells me to

do it. I kind of just think, no, this is the way. And I do it and think, oh that wasn’t so bad. So

it’s weird you give away some of your agency, but at the same time it’s also enabling it.”

Using her GPS device encouraged Charli to move in and through spaces, she would normally

avoid. Her comments illustrate that the GPS is a source of reassurance, allowing her to work

through the feelings of stress and anxiety she normally felt when encountering strange places.

The GPS becomes a critical travel companion which takes on some of the ‘responsibility’ of

mobile decision-making, releasing Charli from some of the emotional weight of tackling

strangeness alone. Ash (2013) suggests that during encounters technical objects express

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particular qualities outside of human consciousness, and these qualities can guide our

behaviour by restructuring atmospheres and possibilities. This is certainly evident in Charli’s

case, where using her GPS device enabled Charli’s capacity to be mobile through new places.

For many other interview respondents, however, using GPS made them question their own

navigational instincts. This was an ongoing struggle and is illustrative of the way that bodily

capacities can be remade in response to new resources. For example, one interviewee,

Maddy, was asked if she considered herself a good navigator. Without hesitation, she

remarked that she was very confident in her abilities. However as the interview progressed

she reflected on her changing wayfinding practices, commenting:

“Because it’s there, what I’ve noticed I’ve started doing is second guessing my intuition. Like

I’m halfway there, and I know I’m going the right way, but there’s this tiny little thing inside

me that says: ‘Maybe you’re not!’. So I end up pulling the car over and double checking

again - and I’m never wrong, I‘m just not listening to my inner self, and that‘s been pissing

me off lately.”

Maddy felt that her own capacity to negotiate with strangeness was diminishing as she

became reliant on her GPS. Maddy’s comments illustrate that our capacities do not always

follow a linear progression of increasing skilfulness and confidence. Bodily capacities

fluctuate and can even diminish (Abrahamsson & Simpson 2011). Capacities are deeply

temporal, shifting during performances, and in this case, even changing in response to the

self-reflection prompted by the interview.

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But these remarks are also about the nature and character of strange places. As Jensen (2009)

writes: “there is more to urban travel than increased knowledge mastering. The mobility

practices are part of the daily identity construction of the mobile urbanites as well as there are

aesthetic experiences and emotive attachments to be made” (p152). This is where drawing on

Licoppe (2016) to think about how getting lost can be conceptualised as an encounter with

pseudonymous place is most useful. As Maddy feels indecision and pulls over to check her

GPS, she is actively performing the process of trying to reconcile the version of place she

moves through in the physical world, and the one she sees on screen 28. If we reflect on more

traditional wayfinding practices, similar processes of negotiation are required when trying to

match the physical world with the location depicted on a map or indicated through road

signage. Strange places are not-predefined, but rather emerge through a process of becoming

strange. Furthermore, just as places become strange, they can also unbecome strange. This

brings being (or feeling) ‘found’ into the discussion29 as places appear less strange as

individuals become more familiar with them.

28 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; Thrik 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.
29
Here ‘lost’ and ‘found’ are binary opposites. This is a problematic coupling which has been discussed
elsewhere (Hughes & 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.

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8.5 The affective significance of strange encounters for everyday mobilities

This section of the paper shifts focus to illustrate that being lost is an encounter with place

that has important affects for people’s mobilities past, present and future. According to Pile

(2010), affect becomes salient in encounters as significant shifts to a body’s capacity to be

affected. This emphasis on bodily capacities is also echoed by Anderson (2014, 10) who

suggests: “affects pertain to capacities rather than existing properties of the body. Affects are

about what a body may be able to do in any given situation, in addition to what it is currently

doing and has done”. This interpretation is useful for thinking through the lingering affects of

encounters with strange places, as it ties what a body ‘has done’ (or where it ‘has been’) to its

capacity for future movement. The stories included in this section therefore illustrate that

being lost has lingering affects for the way people contemplate future journeys in strange

places. The following sections focus on two particular axes of affect which interviewees

consistently described as critical to how to their wayfinding journeys: affects as memory and

affects as intensity.

8.5.1 Affect/memory

Jones (2011) suggests: “we are conglomerations of past everyday experiences, including their

spatial textures and affective registers. Memory should not be seen as a burden of the past,

rather it is fundamental to becoming, and a key wellspring of agency, practice/habit,

creativity and imagination, and thus of the potential of the performative moment that so

interests non-representational geography” (p875/876). Following Jones (2011) this section

explores how a body’s capacity for (future) movement is affected by the lingering memories

of previous encounters with strange places.

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Interviewees consistently described that past encounters with being lost in strange places

lingered as affects for their future mobile performances, predominantly by prompting them to

engage with even more practices of co-ordination to ensure unwelcome experiences were not

repeated. Emotional memories of being lost, as affects, were significant for my interviewees

in being able to (attempt to) articulate the sensations they felt when reflecting on encounters

they have had with strange places. Many interviewees described that past experiences with

some styles of being lost that made them feel anxious, confused, stressed or fearful, and it

was precisely these emotions they were trying to avoid in the future. For some, the need to

avoid these emotions was so intense that they described it as an integral part of their

personality or navigational style (for example: “I don’t know, I just always need to know

where I’m going, I’m pretty organised like that. I try to ensure that I don’t get lost” - Maddy).

For other respondents, negative emotional memories affected their ongoing perception of

being lost as a problem which needs to be solved, illustrating the ways being lost is

continually ‘othered’ as a mobile practice. Charli, for example, described this explicitly with:

“I think it [previously being lost] makes me want to figure it out beforehand so I don’t have

do it on the fly ... like it makes places feel a little less accessible to me ... I kind of factor that

in as a potential problem that I am going to encounter”.

From Charli’s comments, we can see that memories of being lost in which she felt stressed

and anxious have reshaped her capacity to be mobile in a number of ways. Firstly, these

memories as affects shape the pre-planning practices she performs, as she tries to figure out

her route ahead of time. Secondly, and more importantly, these memories as affects linger in

how she feels about the character of these places. Charli elaborated on these comments to

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suggest that if she has been lost in a particular place before, she tends to think of those places

as ‘difficult’, ‘tricky’, ‘complicated’ which makes them a ‘little less accessible’. This

motivates her to allow extra time to navigate during a journey to that particular place, but also

colours how she describes that place to other people. Finally, these comments illustrate that

the memory of being lost before hangs as a constant threat over future everyday travel. For

Charli getting lost is a ‘potential problem’ she might have to encounter on a journey, a

lingering affect for how she views the experience of being lost more broadly: an undesirable

(othered) encounter with strange places.

Not all emotional memories of being lost are inherently negative. In fact, some interviewees

suggested that the ability to successfully navigate a strange place (to find their way again)

resulted in feelings of accomplishment, pride, joy — even making them laugh. For these

interviewees, the emotional memory of encountering strange places impacted their capacities

in different ways, for example by giving them the confidence to make spontaneous

navigational decisions or simply by providing them with a fun experience where they

explored new places. This is nicely illustrated by an interview with Jane, who spent quite a

deal of time taking me through anecdotes of different times she had gotten lost. When I asked

why she thought she remembered these stories more than others, she said: “I think these

times stick out in my mind because they’re funny more than anything!”. A similar sentiment

was repeated by many of my interview participants. Following Sennett (1977), Jane’s story

highlights that it is actually through the processes of encountering the unknown that bodies

can find the possibility to move beyond the fear of ’strangehood’ and learn about the world

around them.

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 8.5.2 Affect/intensity

Our capacities to cope with strangeness do not follow linear patterns of growth or decline;

one negative encounter or one lasting memory will not necessarily irreversibly change a body

forever. Capacities still fluctuate in specific encounters, and this means we need to consider

the ways that encounters with strangeness might be felt in the body with different affective

intensities at different times. Sumartojo et al. (2016) suggest that “encounters are not only

physical but carry their own distinctive affective charges. Such affects, sets of intensities that

emerge from a sensing, perceiving body in material and immaterial environments, are

therefore central to how our surroundings feel as we encounter and move through them”

(added emphasis, p35). Drawing on this understanding of affective intensities gives space for

us to consider how the sometimes transitory, fleeting and liminal experiences of being lost

are in fact critical moments of affective encounter.

Alongside recounting stories of when they had been lost before, interviewees were often keen

to explain to me circumstances where getting lost was particularly stressful, illustrative of the

way intensity can be used to describe the ‘experiential quality’ (Bissell 2009) of affect as

acute/heightened/subtle/diminished and so forth. Often these stories described how the

emotional pressure and confusion of being (geographically) lost was amplified by other

pressures of a journey (and vice versa). These included the time pressures of running late to a

meeting/appointment, the cultural pressures of a language barrier, the safety pressures of

feeling alone in vulnerable circumstances, and the social pressures of not wanting to admit

that they were lost. In these instances, interviewees felt that being lost heightened the

intensity of some affects for their mobile performances, which at times greatly diminished

their capacities for coping with strange places or indeed any form of disorientation. This is

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captured perfectly by Kirsty who said during her interview: “When I don‘t know where I am

all those other pressures just feel heavier”.

Kirsty’s comments touch on a key idea: that affects are sensed through the body as mounting

intensities during specific encounters. For Kirsty, being (geographically) lost has an affective

intensity which feels as if it amplifies the affects of other precarious relations between her

body and time/space/place. Alongside this, moving with wayfinding technologies can

heighten intensities to encounters with strange places too. Recent digital geographies

literature has illustrated how these intensities might emerge as layers of accumulating

sensation. Sumartojo et al. (2016) argue that using self-tracking technologies such as GPS

watches, adds a layer of intensity to cycling commutes as participants negotiate the messy

assemblage of ‘datafied space’. Southern (2012) describes the ways in which bodies using

digital technologies can be affected by the ‘virtual co-presence’ of distant others, bringing

layers of density/intensity to co-mobile encounters. And, returning to Licoppe (2016),

negotiating the hybrid identities of pseudonymous people or places also requires particularly

intense relations of negotiation. Following much of this work, my own interviewees

described how navigating with technology brought a new layer of affective intensity which

could accumulate alongside other pressures to make being lost particularly strange. This

cumulative impact is summed up nicely by Heidi who says:

“You know, Google Maps always seems to stop working right when I’m lost ... when I need

it most!! I swear I’m worse then too... like my fingers fumble, or I can‘t read it right, and all

of a sudden it’s like I‘ve never used a phone before. And by that point I‘m already so

overwhelmed with not knowing where I am and running late to wherever I’m going... that the

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phone just about tips me over the edge! That‘s when I‘m most stressed - when all those things

happen at once.”

Thinking about getting lost as an affective encounter with strange places has illustrated two

things. Firstly, encountering strangeness (being lost) affects our everyday performances of

coordination and broader patterns of mobility. This paper has only considered affect through

the lenses of memory and intensity, but there are of course numerous other affective relations

which we could attune ourselves to in these moments. And secondly, that context is vitally

important. Whilst all bodies carry the emotional memories of the times they have been lost

before, in particular encounters, these memories can be felt with a fresh or even extreme

intensity. Clearly then, a myriad of other contextual factors can exacerbate or dilute the

experiential quality of affects as memories. So many of the fieldwork stories I collected are

wrapped intimately in the details of their daily coordination - where people were going, who

they travelled with, using what mode of transport, at what time of day, why they were going

there, and, most often, how late they were running. These contextual factors were all

instrumental in shaping whether being lost was felt as stressful and scary, or pleasant and

simply funny. This had a significant bearing on the capacity to cope with strangeness. This is

captured perfectly by Maddy, who said:

“I mean, I’m happy to get lost on foot, on holiday in another country or something like that,

and cruise around. But that’s different. Holiday lost is different to everyday-I-need-to-be-

places-and-be-at-work-and-be-at-home-responsibilites-lost.”

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As Maddy suggests, there are not only different intensities but different styles to getting lost,

which I consider further in the next section.

8.6 Four different styles of being lost

What cuts across the stories in this paper is that in some contexts being lost is an encounter

with strange places that is stressful, feared and actively avoided as much as possible through

people’s performances. At other times, however, people are quite happy to hand themselves

over to the possibilities of what being lost might offer their mobile lives, such as the

opportunity to encounter some kind of new place, skill, or feeling. In these moments, being

lost is welcomed, embraced or just does not really seem to matter at all. This range of

responses is evident in the stories offered by my interviewees. This multiplicity is important

given that experiences of being lost are given little attention in the mobilities literature.

In part, the range of responses to being lost is inextricably tied to underlying expectations that

mobile journeys should be predictable and comfortable. Being lost challenges the visions

people have of how their journey will unfold, and it is in this juxtaposition that so many

different emotions can be aroused. This is particularly true of the more ordinary, everyday

and mundane journeys people take, indicating that scale is just as important to consider as

context. People expect to be able to exercise a higher level of control over everyday journeys

as they are usually shorter both in time and distance, people have access to familiar

technologies and infrastructures, and are generally already familiar with some parts of the

geographical area. Under these circumstances, being lost is particularly unexpected and

unwelcome, expressed as a form of stressful inconvenience or - as shown in this paper - a

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personal failure. On the other hand, under the more extraordinary circumstances of being lost

in an unfamiliar place, such as travelling in a foreign country, the expectation is actually that

our mobilities will be far harder to predict and control. Here, getting lost is more readily

accepted as an expected part of mobile life, the outcome of being dislocated from familiar

times, geographies, tools and infrastructures. This might help explain why Maddy is far

happier getting lost on holiday than she is at home.

The range of responses here is also illustrative of the ongoing difficulty in articulating what

being lost really means. Not only is the commonly used binary of lost/found reductive and

problematic, but what being lost means is ultimately based on subjective experience and will

be different for each person, changing drastically over one’s life course or even shifting

quickly in response to different affects. As Ben reiterated to me in his interview: “Well it

really depends what you mean by being lost”. Therefore in an effort to bring words to the

multiplicity of these experiences, this final section offers a reading of four different styles of

being lost - fearful lost, inadequate lost, skilful lost and lively lost - that emerged out of this

particular set of fieldwork interviews (see Figure 6). Each of these is characterised by a

different type of encounter, a different interaction with strangeness, and has different affects

for mobile life. Undoubtedly the four styles of being lost I describe here are just one possible

reading of the illusively complex encounters and affects that circulate in moments of being

lost. Therefore, speaking with different groups of people about their everyday mobilities

would shed further light on the multiplicity of what we mean by ‘being lost’.

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 Figure 6: Four styles of being lost which emerged during fieldwork

8.6.1 Fearful Lost

In its most basic navigational sense, the definition of being lost is when a person is unable to

find their way or finds oneself in an unfamiliar location; the ever-present threat of dislocation

that underlays all mobile practice and performance. This style of being lost dominates the

popular media imagination about what being lost means. Popular media stories consistently

focus on ‘death by GPS’ type stories where being lost has led people into life-threatening

circumstances such as driving off cliffs, into bodies of water, stranded in deserts or taken

hours away from one’s intended destination - the most extraordinary outcomes that come

from being in an unfamiliar setting.

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But what exactly is being encountered here? This style of being lost is characterised by an

encounter with some sort of threat to a body’s safety. Strangeness is found in the

unknowingness of being geographically dislocated from one’s surroundings, which has

ultimately resulted in the body being left in a vulnerable position: the potential dangers of

unknown places. This can include the physical threat of extreme isolation and its associated

health risks, but also imagined threats, such as the potential for others to take advantage of

the body’s vulnerability and cause harm (for example, the threat of physical violence by

others, being robbed etc). This type of strangeness is therefore feared, aligning with much of

the existing literature which conceptually others strangeness as a potentially threatening form

of difference.

Given this fear, the affects of this style of being lost are about primarily focused on

avoidance. So many of the pre-planning practices described in this paper are motivated by the

need to avoid this style of being lost to maintain safety from these sorts of physical and

imagined threats. Whilst the immediate temporalities of this style of being lost can be

fleeting, the affective memories and intensities of facing bodily threats as trauma can be

extremely significant, with lasting implications for a body’s future mobilities. This style of

being lost is also highly politically charged, with interviews suggesting that some of the

widespread concerns held about women and wayfinding are rooted in ideas about the

vulnerability of female and ageing bodies to threat - something which will be explored in

more depth elsewhere.

What is particularly interesting is that despite this style of being lost remaining so dominant

in the popular media imagination, it was actually mentioned extremely infrequently by my

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interview participants. Ben mentions this: “You know, that type of lost where you really have

no idea where you are, and you’re like, wow, yep, I’m in trouble here.. I think I may have

only experienced that once or twice in my whole life”. This style of being lost is actually

characterised by a quite specific form of encounter with threat and difference which does not

necessarily capture the range of affects that my interview participants were so keen to

discuss. I see this as evidence of the underappreciated multiplicity in being lost and seek to

open up new readings of being lost outside this commonly employed construction.

8.6.2 Inadequate Lost

There were many instances described by interviewees where being lost was very stressful, yet

the origins of this stress were not necessarily some sort of bodily threat. These stories

typically described the more everyday instances of being lost in failing to navigate to a new

suburb, a street, or sometimes even just within a particular building. These stories were heavy

with detail about the daily labours of coordination: who my interviewees had arranged to

meet with, where, when and why.

This style of being lost is a markedly different style of encounter to fearful lost. Inadequate

lost is characterised by an encounter with yourself and your limitations. These limitations

manifest in one’s inability to successfully navigate in what should be a familiar setting: the

feeling of being out-of- place-in-place (Cresswell 1996). The strangeness comes from the

confusion, disbelief and sometimes grief that the actual journey has not been executed in line

with one’s expectations. In this style of being lost, you have generally failed to meet some

sort of responsibility to yourself or others, and interviewees described feeling incompetent -

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either in using technological devices such as the GPS, or a more general sense of lack of

navigational skill.

The affects connected to these types of encounters are therefore about failure: failure to

execute the journey as planned. The temporalities of encounters with inadequate lost can be

long-lasting, with ongoing implications for how we choose to move in the future as well as

visions of our own capacities as a navigator. Repeated performances of inadequate lost can be

highly influential for the places people contemplate travelling to, the modes of transport they

take, and how they collaborate with others when navigating.

8.6.3 Skilful Lost

According to my fieldwork interviews, both fearful lost and inadequate lost typically brought

out stressful emotions for people (see Figure 6). As I have argued throughout this paper

however, this is a particularly narrow reading of being lost - and mobile disruption more

generally - which views these experiences as inherently negative. There were many

experiences that my interviewees shared with me in which being lost was a much more

pleasurable or productive experience.

Many of these stories focused on the satisfaction that interviewees gained from being able to

successfully navigate a tricky situation and how this developed their overall navigational

confidence. Drawn from the work of Licoppe (2016), I argue that skilful lost is therefore

characterised by encounters with pseudonymous places. During these encounters, individuals

generally have partial knowledge of where they are, but a few final details remain out of

reach (for example, the exact street number they need, or maybe the local knowledge that a

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final turn might, in reality, be different to what is shown on the map or GPS). Here,

individuals experience strangeness through engaging with the process of matching the

versions of place they are moving through in the physical world, and the constructed version

of place held in their mind (sourced from maps, GPS devices, instructions provided by others,

or simply the one they have developed through their own navigational instincts or prior

experiences). It is in successfully completing this matching process and finding one’s

destination that interviewees felt a sense of satisfaction in their mobile performances, and the

temporal shifts of places unbecoming strange start to be felt. Ben was a prime example of

this, where past experiences in being skilfully lost brought him self-satisfaction and prompted

him to continue his extensive pre-planning rituals (which also help minimised his chances of

being fearfully lost or inadequately lost).

The affects of this type of being lost are about resilience: building personal skills and

building navigational capacity. Interviewees described experiencing this style of being lost in

both everyday and extraordinary contexts, each of which developed their navigational skills

in slightly nuanced ways. Performing skilful lost in everyday settings allowed them to

develop their place-based knowledge and widen the geographical reach of areas they felt

familiar and comfortable with in their community. Performing skilful lost in extraordinary

settings, however brought more affective intensity to their sense of satisfaction. These were

somewhat less expected performances of skill, and therefore indicated a greater

demonstration of problem-solving capacities which had significant outcomes for navigational

confidence. The temporalities of skilful lost are also long-lasting, with impacts for how

people coped with strange situations in the future. In particular, repeated performances of

skilful lost had a cumulative affective impact, for example, several older interviewees

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described an inward confidence in their navigational abilities which had built up over a

lifetime of skilful mobile encounters.

8.6.4 Lively Lost

This final style of being lost - termed lively lost - captures another style of productive

encounter that can serve to open up new possibilities for how we think about strangeness as

something other than a distinctly negative experience. Lively lost describes a variety of

encounters with being lost in which interviewees embraced the possibilities of what they

could discover or learn (for example, Charli’s story in which following her GPS directions

empowered to move through spaces she would other- wise avoid) or reflected on these

encounters with positive emotions (for example, Jane’s comments about her most memorable

stories being those that she thought were funny). Inspired by the work of Fincher and Iveson

(2008), being lively lost is a positive encounter with some sort of difference, in which you are

experiencing something new. Like Fincher and Iveson (2008), this reading of being lost

embraces the possibilities of productive encounter as conviviality, inspiring emotions such as

joy and curiosity through interactions with different. Lively lost might be fleeting, but the

happy or funny memories associated with these experiences can form vital life experiences or

attachments to specific places.

The affects of this type of being lost are about surrender. Individuals surrender themselves to

the possibilities of the unknown and what the journey may become (both good and bad).

During lively lost strangeness lies equally in the potential wonders of places as it does in their

potential dangers. In contemporary contexts this style of encounter can be facilitated by

modern navigational technologies, which are often given the responsibility of some of the

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mobile decision-making, allowing people to surrender even more control to external forces

during a journey. In the mobilities literature traits such as ‘control’ and ‘comfort’ are often

framed as the hallmarks of what makes a journey desirable, so thinking through lively lost

and the affects of surrender opens up new readings of what motivates mobile behaviour. In

fact, lively lost captures the spirit of adventure, exploration and curiosity that motivates

intrepid travellers and tourists, urban flâneurs, and even geographers. Therefore whilst this

style of being lost can manifest in both everyday and extraordinary contexts, Maddy’s

comments about being ’holiday-lost’ indicate that there is something about being free from

everyday responsibilities that lends itself to a greater possibility for lively lost encounters.

8.7 Conclusion

Marrying together a conceptual focus on encounter with an empirical focus on being lost, this

paper has offered two key contributions to the literature. Firstly, the paper has contributed to

an expanded theoretical understanding of encounter in the urban context. Specifically, it has

looked beyond the stranger-as-figure construction which has dominated the literature to

demonstrate that strange encounters can also be experienced as and through place. The stories

in this paper have illustrated that the characteristic which actually lies at the heart of

strangeness - ‘unknown-ness’ (Jackson, Harris & Valentine 2017) - can inspire the full gamut

of human emotions and conflating strangeness with negative emotions is a narrow

interpretation of encounter. My interviewees reflected on experiences of being lost with equal

parts joy and anxiety. This discussion, therefore, follows the important work of Fincher and

Iveson (2008) in illustrating that encounters with difference can be lively, convivial, and most

importantly, a productive part of urban life.

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Secondly, this paper has contributed to the mobilities literature in illustrating that being lost is

an extremely significant encounter for mobile life which warrants further attention. Its

neglect in the literature speaks to the tendency for current mobilities studies to frame

journeys as predictable or easily knowable, setting in motion illusions that humans can

master the conditions of mobility through practices of control. Remaining attentive to

strangeness and disorientation in a mobile world where striving for control eclipses so much

of our daily decision-making is a challenge. By choosing to focus on the empirical experience

of being lost this paper is an intervention into broader issues of how mobilities scholars deal

with unpredictability in their work. Encounter has shown to be a useful building block for

drawing out such instances of unpredictability, as illustrated by the unexpected multiplicity of

being lost that emerged during this set of fieldwork interviews: fearful lost, inadequate lost,

skilful lost and lively lost. In particular, thinking through the affects of surrender associated

with lively encounters opens up new possibilities for understanding the sorts of mobile

experiences people seek to cultivate in their lives.

Finally, alongside these contributions to the literature, this paper has also identified critical

areas which require further research. In particular, stories which emerged during my

fieldwork around age and gender provide a snapshot of how different bodies are assumed to

hold different capacities in dealing with strangeness, merely scratching the surface of a much

broader politics of everyday wayfinding - something which warrants further attention

elsewhere. This is critical given the performative nature of these types of discourses where

social assumptions about one’s bodily capacities have affects for the lived realities of

wayfinding, access to urban spaces and how people approach mobile journeys. The

strangeness of mobile encounters is therefore experienced differently not only through the

axes of style and the situatedness of place, but also in uneven ways via the politics of

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differentiated bodies. It is important that mobilities scholars continue to shed light on these

underappreciated aspects of everyday wayfinding as, despite what rapid technological

developments might have us believe, mobility and dislocation will remain two sides of the

same coin.

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 Chapter 9 – The Fickle Fortunes of Everyday Journeys

“All human plans [are] subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one
preferred to call the powers behind the Universe.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 1982 in ‘2010: Odyssey Two’

9.1 Introduction

Our mobilities are, without a shadow of a doubt, unpredictable. From the outset, this thesis

has argued for the enduring presence of unpredictability and its affects in our everyday

journeys. The key contributions of this thesis lie in its reimagining of current understandings

of the quality of unpredictability, and illustration of the multiplicity of ways it is spatially and

empirically lived. This final thesis chapter constitutes the culmination of this thinking. The

chapter begins by providing a brief overview of the project and outlining how it has

addressed the aims and objectives set out in Chapter 1. The chapter will then move to discuss

the key conceptual, empirical and methodological contributions this thesis has made to the

mobilities literature in reimagining unpredictability. It will then propose two lines of inquiry

for future research which have been inspired by this thesis. Building on key insights about

affect and multiplicity this chapter speculates on the utility of the quality of journeys as

‘fickle’ – rather than unpredictable – as a way to articulate the agency of journeys themselves

and reject human ideas of control and predictability as mere illusions. By its conclusion, this

chapter will argue that reimagining the quality of unpredictability is the first step towards a

more-than-human reading of everyday journeys.

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9.2 Project Overview

As Chapter 1 illustrated, narrow visions of unpredictability as an inherently negative quality

for life are increasingly embedded in the practices and structures of Western urban mobilities,

or, to put it differently: our mobilities are designed to be as predictable as possible. Mobile

tracking technologies such as smartphones and GPS devices are becoming increasingly

personal, affordable and overwhelmingly ubiquitous parts of contemporary mobile life, not

only changing the character and time-spaces of how we journey but contributing to

unrealistic and problematic expectations that “travel will be quick and trouble free” (Pooley

2013, 38). The physical and virtual infrastructures of urban mobility systems 30 continue to

change to compliment the functions of personal mobility devices and further reinforce human

expectations of predictability - cars, trains, taxis, ferries, planes, parcels, and food deliveries

can all be live tracked for the customer’s comfort and pleasure. We expect to know how our

journeys will unfold, and experiencing unpredictability is increasingly internalised as a

technical or personal failure (Hughes 2020).

These contemporary changes exist in tandem with an ongoing problematic framing of

unpredictability within the mobilities literature, both empirically and conceptually.

Empirically, stories which discuss lived expressions of unpredictability as a spatial and

temporal phenomenon – such as everyday wayfinding and being lost and found – are limited

in scope, with unpredictability either: 1) used to describe static events or obstacles that need

to be overcome in order to return to ‘normal’ or ‘comfortable’ mobility patterns, or 2) simply

30
In the context of COVID-19 human mobility in Australia is being tracked through GPS enabled COVID-
SAFE apps and QR code check ins. We live in a critical context where mobile unpredictability actually
threatens public safety: a context which only serves to heighten existing public perceptions about the nature of
unpredictability as an inherently negative quality.

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not considered at all. This is particularly true in the context of everyday mobilities where

familiarity generally means moving bodies expect to be able to control many aspects of the

mobile assemblage (Hughes 2020). In these contexts, unpredictability is more easily

“absorbed into the fracas of daily life” (Doughty & Murray 2017, 81; Graham & Thrift 2007)

and thus is given far less attention by mobilities scholars than those catastrophic events borne

from unpredictability. Conceptually, Chapter 1 illustrated that unpredictability is often

conflated with existing discipline tropes such as ‘disruption’ or ‘immobility’, yet neither of

these devices fully engages with the generative potentials and multiple affects at the core of

unpredictable mobilities. It is these limitations that this thesis speaks to.

The purpose of this thesis was to open up new readings of the quality of unpredictability with

a twin focus on theorising its place in our everyday mobilities and shedding light on the

various ways it is lived – key areas which are both sorely lacking in contemporary mobilities

literature. Chapter 2 developed an affective geography of unpredictable mobilities in order to

widen scholars’ field of view beyond the themes of comfort, control and predictability, and

illuminate a more diverse range of affective socio-material force relations which circulate in

and through our everyday journeys as bodies move together in the “dance of encounter”

(Duarte & Park 2014, 260). It brought together a suite of affective concepts such as

capacities, intensities, temporalities and encounter in order to theorise the place and

significance of unpredictability in our mobile lives. Chapter 3 developed an appropriate

affective methodology of ‘sensitising devices’ (Anderson 2014) by unpacking these affective

concepts even further and using them to guide the design of fieldwork methods and inform

the direction of empirical analysis adopted by the thesis. The chapter outlined the qualitative

mixed method approach which was used to explore the affects of unpredictability as they are

lived through the specific empirical contexts of everyday wayfinding and lifetime

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experiences of being lost and found. Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 constitute the five papers

produced for this thesis, and each of these rendered visible different affective readings of

mobile unpredictability. The following section of this chapter will outline how the thesis has

addressed the aims and objectives stated at the outset of the project and place these five

papers within that framework.

9.3 Aims and Objectives

9.3.1 Aim 1: To explore how the quality of unpredictability is lived in the context of
everyday mobilities, focusing on the affects of unpredictability for moving bodies,
technologies, and places.

The first aim of this thesis is to explore how the quality of unpredictability is lived. This aim

is particularly critical in fulfilling the purpose of this thesis given the significant lack of

attention scholars have given everyday expressions of unpredictability in the mobilities

literature. In order to explore how unpredictability is lived, this project animated

unpredictability through the empirical experiences of everyday wayfinding and being lost and

found in its fieldwork investigations; a focus which was maintained across all five papers

produced for the thesis. To guide these investigations, Chapters 2 and 3 drew on theories of

affect to develop a suite of conceptual and practical devices for exploring how

unpredictability is lived across three key elements of the mobile assemblage: moving bodies,

technologies and places.

Firstly, the thesis explored the affects of unpredictability for a variety of different moving

human bodies. Building on the insights of Chapters 1 and 2, this meant primarily focusing on

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the emotions, bodily capacities and haptic sensations experienced by human bodies on the

move, specifically looking to elicit stories of those encounters in which these key elements of

the mobile assemblage came together in unpredictable ways. As outlined in Chapter 3, the

design of this project allowed me to explore these affects across a variety of different

contexts and for several styles of (human) bodily movement including: the publicly available

accounts of unpredictability offered by travellers in Western urban contexts as documented

by popular media texts, the embodied affects of unpredictability sensed by the researcher via

the method of autoethnography, and the affects of unpredictability experienced by Newcastle

residents who participated in semi-structured fieldwork interviews.

The critical affects of unpredictability for human bodies on the move are visible in all five

papers which were produced for this thesis. Paper 1 drew on the results of document analysis

to shed light on the multiplicity of ways that human bodies live with and through the

experiences of being lost and found, illuminating several ways that bodily capacities of

human bodies can shift during encounters with unpredictability, including: the potential for

pleasurable experiences, liminal feelings of dislocation (Anderson 2015), and the ways in

which these encounters shape bodily capacities when contemplating future journeys. Paper 2

illustrated the ways that relations of intimacy and companionship between users and their

technological devices, facilitated through haptic and embodied methods of communication,

serve to both enable and constrain the bodily capacities of human travellers. Paper 3 explored

how technological devices can facilitate new styles of bodily presencing which allows both

proximate and distant human bodies to be co-mobile during a journey. Paper 4 directly

addressed the body politics of everyday wayfinding through problematic social discourses of

bodies defined by age and gender. And Paper 5 illustrated how the diverse performances of

lost bodies, as well as the affective significance of bodily memories and the visceral

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intensities of these performances, serve to highlight the inherent multiplicity in being lost. As

such each of the five papers has addressed Aim 1 in the context of moving human bodies.

Secondly, the affects of unpredictability were explored in the context of non-human bodies,

which for this project, primarily took form through wayfinding technologies such as GPS and

smartphone devices. Chapter 1 argued for the ways virtual/technological wayfinding devices

have become integral to performances of everyday wayfinding and mobility and highlighted

the problematic emphasis social discourse places on techno-rational knowledge as an

indicator of navigational skill. Chapters 2 and 3 drew extensively on Ash’s (2013)

conceptualisation of ‘perturbations’ as a theoretical and practical device for ‘sensitising’ my

research to the ways technologies function outside human illusions of comfort, control and

predictability, with their own agency and autonomous life cycles. Methodologically, Chapter

3 also highlighted the generative research potentials afforded by viewing these types of

wayfinding technologies as living, interactive ‘documents’; a notion which critically

informed all fieldwork methods, but specifically my use of autoethnography – the primary

means through which I was able to attempt to give ‘voice’ to the affects of technical objects

in the papers that followed.

In pursuing these lines of inquiry the papers of this thesis have contributed to the literature by

‘opening the black box’ (Ash 2013) so that wayfinding technologies are not merely defined

by the discrete outputs they provide their users. Papers 1, 4 and 5 offered extensive empirical

evidence of the various ways technical wayfinding objects are drawn into the mobile

assemblage to influence the time-spaces and performances of human bodies dealing with

unpredictability, with the ability to both enable and constrain human capacities for

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movement. This included their integration into daily practice as both pre-planning tools and

critical resources which are drawn on during encounters with unpredictability. Papers 2 and 3

of this thesis however, offer nuanced and engaged consideration of the affects of technical

objects - and do so in ways which specifically foreground their agency outside human

intentionality. Paper 2 discussed how the autonomous life cycle of my iPhone 6+ intersected

with my own bodily mobility patterns during critical moments of affective encounter. Whilst,

for my body, the ongoing relationality of learning to move together was felt during these

encounters through the emotional registers of frustration, intimacy and companionship, there

were also critical fieldwork moments which highlighted the divergent mobile paths our

human and non-human bodies continue to take; and an overall acknowledgment that tracing

the path of my device will always remain outside my field of view. Paper 3, on the other

hand, illustrated that technical wayfinding devices are changing the nature of co-mobility

through the ability to simultaneously bring into proximity near and distant (virtual) others

during a journey. Critically, the affective relations shared between techno-communities and

across these technical devices operate well outside immediate human intent as evidenced by

the way multiple presences from both my own social circle and beyond were unpredictably

drawn together during a single journey. Furthermore, this paper also illustrated how the

affects of this style of technical mobility lingered with individual bodies long after a single

journey had ended and were carried into subsequent journeys even when those specific

technologies were not being intentionally used.

Finally, place is central to the exploration of how unpredictability is lived as the affects of

unpredictable mobilities are felt by bodies in place through moments of encounter. Chapter 2

discussed literature regarding affective atmospheres to articulate how affects can appear to

linger in particular places, and Chapter 3 drew on encounter as a ‘sensitising device’ to attune

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my fieldwork gaze to the critical place details embedded in the stories project participants

chose to share: the critical questions surrounding where participants were, how that place was

constructed and experienced, and how moments of encounter shaped their relationship to that

specific place in the future. Whilst these kinds of place-specific details have been implicitly

embedded into all the fieldwork stories which appear across all five papers, Paper 5

contributes to this thesis through a direct engagement with place as a key conceptual device.

Rather than focusing on atmosphere, Paper 5’s novel contribution is in illustrating the

multiplicity of ways bodies can experience the quality of strangeness through place: places as

dangerous, places as pseudonymous, places as wonder, and even the feeling of being out-of-

place-in-place. As such this paper argues that places are not the static nodes that denote the

‘end’ part of a journey (ie, where you transition from ‘lost’ to ‘found’) but are always in a

process of becoming, brought into being specifically through the affective force relations of

experiencing strangeness and/or the quality of unpredictability. Where other papers in this

thesis illustrated that human and non-human bodies act as the conduit for the temporal and

embodied affects of unpredictability, Paper 5 contributed to this aim by illustrating that it is

through place that unpredictability is spatially realised through the process of encounter.

9.3.2 Aim 2: To rethink narrow descriptions of unpredictability as an undesirable

quality by illustrating its possibilities, multiplicities and productivities for mobile life.

The second aim of this thesis focuses on expanding our understanding of the quality of

unpredictability beyond the narrow, negative depictions which haunt its treatment both within

the mobilities literature and in life (Chapter 1). This aim seeks to widen our field of view

beyond the human lenses of comfort, control and predictability and instead highlight how

unpredictability is equally alive with endless possibilities, multiplicities and productivities.

Chapter 2 drew on theories of affect to reimagine the quality of unpredictability through an

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ontology of affective and material force relations, rather than seeing it as an inherent set of

experiential characteristics. This reimagining was a critical move for this thesis in expanding

our understanding of unpredictability to consider affective forces which have previously been

underappreciated or hidden from view. In particular, this meant engaging with a wider set of

affects and not just simply undesirable emotions; for example, it meant considering

encounters where unpredictability might shift our performance and skills, visions of

ourselves, interactions with place, the bringing together of people and technologies in

unforeseen ways, the ways it can change the nature, character and time-spaces of our

journeys, and even the ways urban mobilities are structured and mediated. Thus, this move

embedded the many possibilities of unpredictability into the ontological framework of this

project, illustrating that when viewed outside the registers of human emotion, unpredictability

is actually alive with the potential to always-be-otherwise. This move reinforces the central

argument of this thesis: that an expanded set of affective force relations and socio-material

elements of the mobile assemblage should be considered when scholars think and talk about

the quality of unpredictability.

It is precisely through a commitment to the many possibilities afforded by unpredictable

mobilities that a multiplicity of lived experiences was able to emerge during the fieldwork

phases of this thesis. As discussed in Chapter 2, affect provided this thesis with a theoretical

toolkit to “bear(s) witness to the complexity and multidimensionality of sociality and

materiality” (Woodward & Lea 2010, 157). This conceptual framing was carried through to

Chapter 3, which drew on the radical openness of affective methodologies to attune my

fieldwork gaze to a multiplicity of experiences during encounters with unpredictability.

However, as Chapter 3 also indicated, attuning myself to multiplicity in this thesis was made

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easier through the affects of collaborating with others during the research process, as this

drew out new readings of empirical data that I may not have otherwise been attentive to.

The theme of multiplicity is evident across all five papers produced for publication in this

thesis, first and foremost, in the diversity of experiences and stories gathered through

fieldwork. Paper 1 of this thesis illustrated both that multiple conceptual tools could

potentially be drawn on to theorise the place of being lost and found in everyday life, and that

being lost and found is currently experienced in diverse ways in Western urban contexts.

Paper 2 illustrated the multiple rhythms and life cycles of human bodies and technological

objects which circulate through our everyday encounters with unpredictability. Paper 3

illustrated how multiple presences could be drawn together during a journey with and across

technological devices. Paper 4 explored how embodied performances of everyday wayfinding

are multiple in themselves, experienced differently for different bodies via the lived politics

of age and gender. And finally, Paper 5 directly addressed the theme of multiplicity by

illustrating that being lost is a diverse experience constituting multiple styles of encounter,

attachments to place, performances, and experiences of strangeness. From just one set of

fieldwork interviews alone, Paper 5 was able to identify four different styles to being lost:

fearful, skillful, inadequate and lively. The repeated emergence of multiplicity as a core

conceptual theme across all aspects of this thesis has been instrumental in shedding light on

the more-than-human nature of everyday journeys (see section 9.5).

Finally, an essential aspect of this aim was to shed light on the ways unpredictability can also

be incredibly productive for mobile life. This aim is partly realised through the commitment

of this thesis to foregrounding possibility and multiplicity, as doing so provides a theoretical

context in which productive, pleasurable and positive experiences of unpredictability can be

made visible. As discussed in Chapter 2, by imagining unpredictability through a geography

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of affective force relations, rather than a set of inherent qualities, this thesis has been able to

engage with the ways that the capacities of bodies, technologies and places to affect and be

affected shift in productive ways during mobile encounters: ie the ways these elements of the

mobile assemblage could be enabled through unpredictability. This is evident in the

fieldwork stories shared across all five papers, in the stories in which unpredictability was felt

through pleasurable emotions like joy or happiness (Papers 1 and 5), empowered travellers to

experience new places or travel via new modes (Papers 1, 2, 4, 5), established connections

across distance (Papers 2, 3, 5), built skills and resilience (Papers 2, 3, 4, 5) or was a quality

actively sought by travellers in the spirit of curiosity or adventure (Paper 5).

To give this line of inquiry a stronger conceptual backing however, Chapter 2 also drew on

Fincher and Iveson’s (2008) construction of ‘productive encounters’, with particular

emphasis on the ways encountering strangers (and in the context of this thesis, strangeness or

unpredictability) can both enable and constrain the capacities of individuals in urban

environments. Paper 5 applied Fincher and Iveson’s (2008) argument to the empirical context

of being lost and shed light on the ways that being lost is an encounter with place that can be

productive of our wayfinding skills, visions of ourselves, problem-solving resilience, and also

experienced as conviviality through the pleasurable emotions of joy, humour and adventure.

Thus, Fincher and Iveson’s (2008) work was instrumental in the formation of the four styles

of being lost identified in the conclusions of Paper 5, and therefore ultimately contributes to

this thesis aim by illustrating the ways strangeness and unpredictability are both productive

and multiple in nature.

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 9.3.3 Objective 1: To explore the utility of concepts such as friction, liminality and
affect for theorising how and where unpredictability emerges in mobile life.

In Chapter 1, this thesis stated four key objectives which needed to be met in order to fully

address the overall thesis aims. Each of these four objectives focuses on different sets of

relations and/or elements of the mobile assemblage, ensuring that this project pursues an

expanded understanding of unpredictability. This first objective focused on testing a range of

conceptual tools for theorising the place of unpredictability in mobile life. This objective was

critical for this thesis in the early formation of its theoretical direction. Paper 1 was

specifically used to test the utility of three key concepts for theorising the experiences of

being lost and found: friction, liminality and affect. Paper 1 indicated that friction is useful as

a relational device for highlighting the duality (and therefore multiplicity) of being lost, in

that the frictions that come with being dislocated from one’s surroundings can be both

generative and constraining of our everyday mobilities (Cresswell 2010; Solnit 2006).

However, Paper 1 also argued that friction only provides scholars with limited means by

which to think through the embodied performances and emotions that come with being lost

and found. Thus, Paper 1 turned to the concept of liminality as a tool for exploring the liminal

and disoriented ‘state’ (Anderson 2015) bodies enter into during encounters with being lost

and found, as individuals are dislocated from familiar geographies, temporalities,

performances and visions of themselves. Where liminality proved useful for thinking through

the shifting embodied performances of human bodies on the move however, it still only

provided a limited framework with which to explore a more diverse range of affects for both

human and non-human bodies.

As such, the conclusions of Paper 1 pointed towards affect as the most useful conceptual

device for theorising the place of unpredictability in our everyday mobilities. Paper 1 argued

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that its value lies in its ability to account for how particular emotional states, performances,

and encounters could all be relationally shared across several different elements of the mobile

assemblage, including both human bodies and technical wayfinding devices. Based on the

early investigations of this paper, affect was therefore adopted as a key theoretical anchor

point for this thesis. As such, Objective 1 was crucial for guiding the ontological and

epistemological development of this thesis with and through theories of affect (as outlined in

Chapters 2 and 3), as well as informing the direction of all subsequent papers for publication.

9.3.4 Objective 2: To examine the ways unpredictability intersects with contemporary

mobility practices to affect the character, temporalities, proximities and presencing of
everyday journeys

The second objective of this thesis focuses on the lived realities of mobile performances

during encounters with unpredictability, with particular interest in how contemporary

developments in wayfinding technologies might be influencing the nature of our practices

(Chapter 1). This objective was important to consider as it sheds light on the ways that

unpredictability is empirically lived (Aim 1) via the diverse range of practices people call on

to deal with/cope with/live with unpredictable mobilities. In turn, this diversity of practices

also contributes to illuminating the multiplicity of ways unpredictability is experienced (Aim

2). The shifting character of contemporary wayfinding is reflected across all empirical stories

included in this thesis. It is clear from these stories that the style of wayfinding tools called

upon during encounters with unpredictability has expanded over the last few decades in line

with rapid technological developments and the increasing portability and affordability of

location-enabled devices. Where paper maps, urban signage and gut instinct were previously

the key hallmarks of navigational skill and practice, Western contemporary wayfinding

practices have shifted, now dominated by internet-enabled technologies such as smartphones

and GPS devices, wearable technologies such as Apple watches and fitness trackers, and a

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wide variety of personal and community applications and services (Chapter 1 and all papers).

Moreover, urban environments are increasingly being designed in ways that complement the

ubiquity of these portable and personal services, such as the live tracking of public transport

via government apps.

By exploring recent societal changes in the tools and practices of everyday wayfinding, this

objective also empirically explored how living with unpredictability in contemporary urban

contexts is shifting the temporalities of everyday journeying. Whilst this appears implicitly

across all fieldwork stories, Paper 5 specifically tackles this theme by illustrating a

multiplicity of time scales through which participants made and remade their journeys. For

example, some participants were encouraged through the use of wayfinding technologies to

adopt additional pre-planning rituals, expanding the temporalities of their journey into the

virtual and imagined realms of mobile capacity which occur before a physical journey has

started. For others, the on-the-go decision making afforded by these wayfinding tools actually

brought greater temporal intensity and immediacy to their journeying, as they felt empowered

to adjust their path more spontaneously, reassured by the presence of their device as a mobile

companion. Thus, these insights act as further evidence of the ways that contemporary

wayfinding devices can rearrange the time-spaces experienced by moving human bodies

during a journey (Ash 2013; Hughes & Mee 2019a; 2019b).

Finally, this objective was also important for this thesis in exploring how contemporary

wayfinding technologies intersect with the ways bodies experience proximity and presence.

Commentators discussing the rise of spatial media have readily acknowledged that

contemporary wayfinding technologies can compress human experiences of space, place and

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sociality (Kitchin, Lauriault & Wilson 2017). Papers 2 and 3 addressed this objective by

illustrating that the always-on-availability of these devices, coupled with communication

styles focused on iconography and haptic sensation, mean that users can affect presence on a

journey without the necessity of physical proximity. In fact, many contemporary apps and

social media platforms specifically design their applications with the ability to share location

in mind (Paper 3) so that virtual geo-sharing and presencing is increasingly normalised.

Across Papers 2 and 3 these new forms of virtual presencing were in themselves received in a

multiplicity of ways by fieldwork participants, from providing comfort and reassurance

during a journey, right through to sparking ideas about voyeurism and breaches of privacy.

9.3.5 Objective 3: To examine the ways unpredictability affects the capacities of

different moving bodies and technologies as they collaborate and move together
during co-mobile journeys

The third objective focuses on the theme of co-mobility. Co-mobility was an important theme

to consider as our mobilities are inextricably linked with those of other moving bodies (Cook

et al 2016; Jensen 2010; Jensen, Sheller & Wind 2015), and as this thesis has illustrated, we

are constantly co-mobile with other moving bodies whether we intend to be or not. This

objective was pursued by this thesis in several key ways. Firstly, the fieldwork stories

gathered for this project show that wayfinding at the everyday scale often intersects with the

daily co-ordination of the family unit (Paper 4), as well as heavily intersecting with the

mobilities of close friends and colleagues (Papers 2, 3, 4 and 5). As Objective 2 illustrated,

the new styles of proximity and presencing afforded by wayfinding technologies increasingly

allow for these intersections to be enacted across distance (Paper 3). As such, living

with/dealing with unpredictable mobilities is often a collaborative process, yet one that does

not necessarily unfold in even ways. These themes were directly addressed by Paper 4, which

argued that different moving bodies are assumed to have different capacities when dealing

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with unpredictability, illustrating this argument via the politics of age and gender. It argued

that the ability of individuals to collaborate and move together is critically affected by the

level of navigational skill and confidence each brings to the process (Papers 4 and 5), by the

roles, responsibilities and emotional histories embedded within the relationships of co-mobile

individuals (Paper 4), and by problematic social discourses about identity and bodily capacity

(Paper 4). In turn, these co-mobile encounters with unpredictability can serve to either

reinforce or remake these imagined limits of navigational capacity for moving bodies.

Secondly, this thesis also illustrated that unpredictability has affects for relations of co-

mobility between human bodies and their technological devices (ie non-human bodies). Paper

2 specifically addressed this objective by illustrating the ways contemporary wayfinding

devices are often treated as critical travel companions by their users, with some users

surrendering their navigational agency to their device and trusting them to guide their

wayfinding performances. Through affective product design and haptic methods of

communication, relations of intimacy between the self and device can develop over the

lifecourse to inflect the ways human bodies cope with unpredictability. This paper drew on

Donna Harraway’s ‘cyborg’ figuration to articulate the ways that affects are shared

relationally across the human/technology hybrid subject to extend the affective capabilities of

mobile subjects. However, Paper 2 also clearly indicated that technological companions have

their own autonomous and mobile life cycles, and it is through the process of encounter that

relations of intimacy and co-mobile collaboration are brought into being.

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 9.3.6 Objective 4: To illustrate the inherent multiplicity of the quality of
unpredictability and its affects for encountering place.

Objective 4 is closely tied with Aim 2 of this thesis in expanding our understanding of the

quality of unpredictability by illustrating its inherent multiplicity. This objective was directly

addressed in the last paper of the thesis which considered the theme of multiplicity in the

context of place. As stated in the previous section, Paper 5 illustrated that being lost is the

sensation of experiencing strangeness through place: the cognitive disassociation that comes

with finding oneself in a place that is beyond our geographical knowledge. Critically, the

conclusions of this chapter pointed to at least four different styles of place encounter which

were brought into being through the affects of unpredictability: the dangers of unpredictable

places sensed through ‘fearful lost’, the wonders of unpredictable places sensed through

‘lively lost’, and the temporal transitions of places becoming unpredictable/predictable

sensed through encounters with ‘skilful lost’ and ‘inadequate lost’. Paper 5 argued that each

of these styles of place encounter also had diverse affects for mobile life, some of which felt

temporally and spatially tethered to particular places, and others which carried ongoing

significance for the future mobilities of human bodies. Whilst the theme of multiplicity

resonates strongly across all papers of this thesis, the conclusions of Paper 5 in pursuing this

objective have been formative for the overall contributions of this thesis to the literature and

have sparked several critical lines of inquiry for future research.

9.4 Thesis Contributions

This section of the chapter articulates the key conceptual, empirical and methodological

contributions that this thesis has made to the mobilities literature. As this section will

illustrate, the major contributions of this thesis lie in its twin pursuit to reimagine the quality

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of unpredictability and shed light on the ways it is lived in a variety of contexts. This

reimagining has been made possible by drawing on theories of affect to illuminate how

unpredictability is a quality alive with a multiplicity of social-material and affect force

relations, many of which operate outside the limits of human control. This section will also

illustrate however that the emergence of multiplicity as a core concept in this thesis inspires

an expanded vocabulary through which to understand everyday journeys.

9.4.1 Key contributions: Unpredictability, affect, multiplicity

As I reflect on the purpose of this thesis, I question how and why a trope like unpredictability

– full of unbridled possibility – has been reduced to such a narrow and limited set of human

characteristics. Outside the mobilities discipline, negative depictions of unpredictability as a

quality for life are embedded in many different social contexts: from being viewed as a

detrimental personality trait, right through to threatening livelihoods, wellbeing and safety.

Empirically, the stories which have been included in this thesis illustrate that the uncertainty

associated with unpredictability is perceived as negative as it disrupts our ability to lead

comfortable, habitual, routinised and ‘normal’ mobile lives. Importantly, in the specific

context of Western urban everyday mobilities, this often results in the inability of individuals

to fulfil personal, familial and financial responsibilities (Hughes 2020). Thus, unpredictability

and the precarity of our livelihoods become intertwined. The affects of this precarity resonate

particularly strongly in the emotional registers of human experience. The affective quality of

unpredictability makes us sharply aware that “not only is the present saturated with a sort of

restlessness, but also that the future is made uncertain and becomes difficult or impossible to

predict. And what precarity names, then, is one mode of disclosing and relating to the future

affectively” (Anderson 2014, 129). Human beings continue to try cocoon themselves in a

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world of tools and practices that seek to make predictable their mobilities, sheltering us from

precarity and ensuring we get from ‘A’ to ‘B’ whenever and wherever we need to.

It is critical we not let such fears about unpredictability seep into the ways everyday journeys

are conceptually and empirically dealt with in the mobilities literature. The key contribution

of this thesis is therefore an intervention into the ways that unpredictability is currently

understood, aiming to leave entrenched everyday fears behind and embrace possibility,

multiplicity and productivity. Conceptually, Chapter 1 illustrated that unpredictability is often

conflated with other negative discipline tropes such as ‘immobility’ and ‘disruption’ and

called for an expanded conceptual understanding of it as a quality of experience. To achieve

this expanded understanding, this thesis used affect as a means to “attend to the complexity

and multiplicity” (Anderson 2014, 12) of unpredictability, seeing it as a set of socio-material

force relations rather than a set of inherent characteristics. Thus, this thesis deterritorialises

static notions of unpredictability as a negative characteristic, and a quality confined to

discrete events of disruption. This thesis has illustrated that it is actually a temporal and

spatial quality brought into being for moving bodies, technologies and places through

particular affective relations. This thesis contributes to the literature by arguing for the

significance of unpredictability as an ever-present and universal reality of mobile life – not a

deviation from normality - as it will always emerge in the “temporary grouping of relations,

the ‘lines’ between things, as becomings, that is, always in process, changing” (Anderson

2014, 12).

The novel conceptual contribution of this thesis is in developing affective geography of

unpredictable mobilities (Chapter 2) which uses a multiplicity of socio-material and affective

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concepts to analyse unpredictability. This ultimately moves our conceptual focus beyond the

axes of comfort, control and predictability which have thus far dominated the literature. The

affective geography of unpredictability I have developed brings together a suite of affective

concepts such as capacities, emotions, perturbations and encounter as ‘sensitising devices’

(Anderson 2014) for practically illuminating the many diverse elements of the mobile

assemblage which affect, and are affected by, unpredictability. In terms of future research,

the affective ontology, vocabulary, and methodology used by this thesis could therefore

feasibly be applied to a range of other mobile empirical contexts in which unpredictability

might be felt (such as migration studies, tourism studies, leisure activities, wayfinding at

different scales and for different bodies/identities/groups) as well as to other styles and

definitions of unpredictability and strangeness (perhaps such as emotional or spiritual

interpretations of feeling ‘lost’).

Empirically, the overall contribution of this thesis has been to illuminate stories of the diverse

ways unpredictability is lived. It has done so with specific reference to mobilities at the

everyday scale and animated an empirical focus on wayfinding and lifetime experiences of

being lost and found. Through this empirical focus, this thesis has gathered stories from a

variety of bodily and mobility contexts to demonstrate the diverse elements of the mobile

assemblage that come together in our journeying, and how the relations between these

elements are beyond negative emotions, beyond human control, and therefore often outside

our field of view. Table 5 provides a snapshot of the different themes which are addressed in

the five papers, highlighting the sheer diversity of experiences considered by this thesis.

Given the overall lack of previous engagement with unpredictability by the mobilities

literature (Chapter 1), this diversity of empirical expressions is a timely and critical

intervention.

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Unpredictability: wayfinding and lifetime experiences of lost/found

Theme Empirical Expressions included in Papers

Emotions Fear, confusion, grief, shame, guilt, frustration, anxiety, hurt,

disbelief, relief, joy, curiosity, empowerment, satisfaction, pride,
happiness, wonder, indifference, care, intimacy, reassurance

Bodies Human bodies (gendered, ageing, physical, virtual, icons)

Non-human bodies (GPS, smartphones, Siri, fitness trackers,

signage, landmarks)

Practices and contexts Journey pre-planning

Route-changing

Household coordination

Personal responsibility

Health and fitness

Tourism/travel

Career responsibilities

Leisure

Care-giving

Knowledges Technical (GPS, turn-by-turn directions, mapping software)

Embodied (gut feeling, confidence, memory, history)

Collaborative (co-mobility – both with other humans and

technical counterparts)

Intensities Qualities (intense, subtle, fluid, sharp, significant, unimportant)

Temporalities (anchored, lingering, encounter)

Places As characteristic (tricky, scary, difficult to navigate, amazing,

pleasant)

As quality (unpredictable, strange, intense, temporal, fluid)

As political (exclusionary for particular bodies)

Table 5: Empirical themes considered in this thesis

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The conceptual and empirical contributions of this thesis regarding unpredictability therefore

cluster around using affect to reimagine unpredictability, specifically by recognising

multiplicity to allow possibility and productivity to be seen and appreciated. The findings of

this thesis therefore signal a return to longstanding ideas in human geography about the

multiplicity of space (see Massey 2005) but have focused this return through the experiential

dimensions of unpredictability as an unexplored mobilities trope. Critically, the multiplicity

of unpredictability reifies that space is the “gathering together of multiple open-ended,

interconnected, trajectories” (Anderson 2008, 25) – some of which might be human, some of

which might be of technical objects, and some of which might be otherwise. Thinking

through this multiplicity of mobile trajectories in the way spaces are produced therefore

inspires further contemplation of how to decentre the trajectories of human subjects to argue

for the agency, paths and trajectories of journeys themselves (section 9.5).

9.4.2 Methodological contributions, limitations and future directions

Whilst the primary contributions of this thesis have been in reimagining the quality of

unpredictability, the emergence of multiplicity through affect is also apparent in the design

and execution of fieldwork methods in this thesis. Chapter 3 discussed the ways that the

affects of working with the theme of unpredictability transgressed several methodological

boundaries, with the potential to generative methodological inquiry. Firstly, working with

interactive forms of technology ‘text’ via wayfinding applications blurred the boundaries

between traditional document analysis and autoethnography, and required multiple layers of

embodied participation well outside of the intended research plan. Secondly, the affects of

collaborating with multiple presences (academic, participants, and unintended others) were

significant in shaping the papers in the thesis: on the one hand, the affects of collaboration

enriched and empowered my ability to see multiplicity in my own work, but on the other

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hand, prompted critical questions about the ongoing affects of collaboration for academic

authorship and ethical considerations for non-participant collaborators. As discussed in

Chapter 3, each of these areas signals potential for future methodological inquiry, and thus

serves to reinforce the productivities made possible when working with the theme of

unpredictability – conceptually, empirically, and now methodologically.

Amidst these conceptual, empirical and methodological contributions however, the

limitations of this thesis also need to be acknowledged, particularly with respect to the

authorial and empirical context in which this thesis is situated. As indicated in Chapter 1, this

thesis is written from a middle-class Western, urban capitalist social context in which both

myself as author and the participants in this project are largely free to craft comfort and

control during our everyday mobilities and participate in the ongoing quest to avoid

unpredictability. We are afforded the luxury and privilege of autonomy, the freedom to

imagine how our mobilities will unfold, and the means to which enact those mobilities

through a variety of private and public travel modes. Chapter 1 illustrated that thinking

through unpredictability is a relational exercise, and as a settler, middle-class Australian I

experience a certain level of predictability in my everyday life - and it is precisely this

privilege of predictability that actually gives unpredictability its affective potency for my

mobilities. In many other social and cultural contexts however, unpredictability is an

unwelcome and often dangerous reality for people’s everyday lives: for example in the

unpredictable and potentially harrowing journeys of refugees and asylum seekers, war-torn

and poverty-stricken communities, militant political contexts which enforce mobility

sanctions, and even for marginalised groups experiencing oppression in Western societies. In

these contexts the relative experiences of predictability and unpredictability are undoubtedly

far removed from the sorts of fieldwork stories this thesis has been able to share, and it is

269
critical to acknowledge that working from this academic context continues to silence many

already marginalised voices and experiences. Thus, my own positionality indicates to me that

interrogating the power dynamics and politics of the privilege of predictability is something

that warrants further attention.

In a similar vein, there are limitations in this thesis in the sorts of bodies and knowledges that

have been considered even in the Australian, Western urban context. Whilst one of the

strengths of this thesis is the multiplicity of empirical experiences which emerged during the

fieldwork process, it merely scratches the surface in exposing countless others that remain

absent from the literature. This section of the chapter therefore identifies two key empirical

directions for future research. Firstly, Paper 4’s discussion of social discourse highlighted the

hidden everyday politics of wayfinding. In this paper multiplicity took form through societal

assumptions about the navigational capacities of bodies based on the inherent qualities

ascribed to the identity categories of age and gender. Several more lines of inquiry were

sparked just from this one set of fieldwork interviews (see conclusions in Paper 4). This

points to key gaps within the literature in that innumerable stories remain untold regarding

the everyday politics of wayfinding. These stories potentially include: how social discourse

and problematic identity categories intersect with lived experiences of mobility for a variety

of different bodies (problematically) defined by other categories such as race, ability,

sexuality and so forth; how the politics of wayfinding contribute to spatial exclusion (for

example, the women in Paper 4 had been afforded limited opportunity to practise long-

distance navigation); and how the politics of wayfinding is embedded in urban mobility

structures and place-making (for example, Paper 4 indicated that women’s services are

disproportionately underrepresented by contemporary mapping services). Furthermore, Paper

4 also highlighted that heteronormative assumptions about relationships are embedded in

270
social discourses about everyday wayfinding, and thus this thesis argues that a more diverse

consideration of the power geographies of the family unit is sorely needed in mobility

studies.

Secondly, the stories included in this thesis focus heavily on the use of contemporary

technologies such as GPS devices and smartphones to assist navigation. Papers 1 and 4 have

already discussed that this focus conceals a broader array of wayfinding skills that are called

on during navigational performances, with Paper 4 providing empirical evidence of this in

discussing the lifetime skills and resilience of older persons to navigate. To address this

limitation, this thesis (like many others) drew early inspiration from Tim Ingold’s

construction of ‘wayfinding’ in order to articulate the broader embodied process of

navigation – the ‘inhabitant knowledge’ individuals glean as they move through space and

place (Ingold 2000). However, Ingold’s construction has itself been criticised as taking a

distinctly colonial view of wayfinding. It relies on a Western framework of ‘knowledge’ and

‘embodiment’ that translates wayfinding from the historical contexts of wayfaring by white

colonial travellers and seafarers and which fails to acknowledge “wayfinding from a

perspective much more clearly grounded in longstanding expert indigenous knowledges,

practices and histories” (Iosefo, Jones & Harris 2020, 16). This conceptual limitation is

coupled with a lack of empirical engagement by this thesis with Indigenous Australian

persons, communities, and Indigenous-led principles and practices of wayfinding. Whilst

beyond the immediate scope of this thesis, future research into wayfinding and mobile

unpredictability more broadly therefore needs to significantly and deeply engage with, and

foreground, indigenous voices and experiences to meaningfully commit to the ongoing

decolonisation of geographic knowledges.

271
Given the lack of engagement in the mobilities literature regarding unpredictability as an

experience, it is unsurprising that the contributions of this thesis therefore provoke more

questions than answers and offer a slew of potential directions of empirical engagement.

Acknowledging both its contributions and limitations, this thesis therefore situates itself as a

call to mobilities scholars to engage more deeply and thoughtfully with unpredictability and

has offered a series of conceptual and empirical prompts to do so. In the following section,

this chapter will therefore offer two more conceptual discussions which have been inspired

by the work in this thesis in order to spark critical thinking about the place of unpredictability

within mobile life more broadly. As a starting point, this thesis experiments by reimagining

everyday journeys as ‘fickle’ in order to move past some of the problematic conceptual

binaries which continue to haunt the mobilities discipline and contribute to the ongoing

deterritorialisation of mobilities within the literature by foregrounding the agency of journeys

themselves.

9.5 Future Directions: Fickle mobilities and the more-than-human agency of journeys

fickle (adjective)
1. likely to change, especially due to caprice, irresolution, or instability; casually
changeable
2. not constant or loyal in affections

Definitions from Dictionary.com (2020)

The previous section has illustrated the ways in which this thesis contributes to the

conceptual and empirical reimagining of the quality of unpredictability. However, as

indicated in Paper 1, the difficulty in working with themes like unpredictability lies not only

in the way we conceptualise these experiences, but also in the way they are articulated. In the

272
context of Paper 1, this thesis problematised the lost/found coupling, however a number of

problematic binary concepts can be identified across the mobilities discipline: lost/found,

mobile/immobile, fast/slow, virtual/digital, control/chaos, desirable/undesirable and now:

predictable/unpredictable. Whilst there is something to be said for the power of dualisms to

express relational categories of experience (see Chapter 1), this simplistic coupling belies the

complexity and diverse lived realities of mobile life and reifies the human subject as central

to studies of mobility – limitations which the new mobilities paradigm and this thesis have

worked hard to dismantle.

The centrality of the human subject is implied in the most basic definitions of predictability

and unpredictability. The quality of being predictable is defined as able to be foretold in

advance, expected, especially on the basis of previous or known behaviour (Dictionary.com

2020); a judgement of order which can only be qualified through the gaze of the human

subject. By contrast, to be unpredictable is simply defined as not predictable and not to be

foreseen or foretold (Dictionary.com 2020). In part then, the problematic negative

assumptions that become embedded within the term unpredictability lie in the troublesome

‘un’ prefix. Whilst seemingly minor, the prefix has the semantic affect of implying deviation

from normality, making unpredictability the feared ‘other’ to human order. This is also true

of many other synonyms currently used to describe unpredictability, such as uncertain,

unknown, unreliable, unforeseeable, erratic and irregular.

Do these semantics matter? Absolutely. Scholars writing from a non-representational

ontology often shy away from explorations of language and vocabulary for fear of falling into

the ironic pitfalls of mere representation (Sullivan 2016); for the “leanness of descriptive

language comes up short of the manifold affective events and textures it seeks to speak up

273
for” (Lorimer 2008, 557). However, Lorimer’s (2008) message is ultimately an encouraging

one, as the pursuit of new concepts, language and vocabularies is productive for original

geographic literature. He says (2008): “rather than glorying in the ringing refrain, often I am

left keening for more varied words to express and explain geography being done otherwise”

(p557). Psychologists, linguists and geographers alike have long argued for the affective and

semantic power of language, vocabulary and commentary as performative for social life,

space and place (Italiano 2016; Dirksmeier & Helbrecht 2008; Bissell 2015a). Thus, this

thesis argues that finding ways to decentre the human experience and embed more-than-

human agency into how unpredictable journeys are talked about – particularly given their

prolific place in the public imagination – is a first step in deterritorialising the journey as a

static, finite, and assumedly predictable phenomenon.

The theme of ‘multiplicity’ which has repeatedly emerged in this thesis provides us with an

introductory intervention into these difficulties as it at least assigns equal value to a wide

suite of affective forces and experiences. However, in an attempt to decentre the human

subject from unpredictability even further, this final thesis chapter experiments by

reimagining the nature of mobilities through the quality of being ‘fickle’. Fickleness

articulates the idea that change is likely. Change is expected. Change is casual, even

unremarkable. Furthermore, fickleness fundamentally foregrounds the internal agency of the

phenomena it is describing; not constant or loyal in affections (Dictionary.com 2020). It is

therefore unsurprising that the quality of being fickle is already used to describe other more-

than-human-phenomenon, such as the weather. Reimagining our mobilities through the

quality of fickleness therefore requires us to conceptually surrender our agency to those

things the nature of which is totally unknown to us – and in the context of this thesis, fickle

mobilities contributes to the literature by making room for an expanded set of affective

274
qualities and expressions, including the underappreciated affects of surrender and liveliness

which resonated so strongly in Paper 5.

The utility of reimagining our mobilities as fickle has the dual impact of not only accounting

for the agency of the journey itself, but also dismissing human ideas of control as an illusion.

Dismantling problematic expectations about the nature of journeys as comfortable and

controllable was a key concern for this thesis (Chapters 1 and 2). As the papers in this thesis

have demonstrated, our journeys unfold in particular ways regardless of our best laid plans.

Some days, the visions we have of our mobilities will seem like they align with reality, the

mobile assemblage will feel ordered and transparent, and our journeys will feel comfortable.

But at other times our journeys will not bend to our desires and the relations and affects of

the mobile assemblage will remain frustratingly out of reach. Irrespective of which of these

‘experiential dimensions’ of affective intensity (Bissell 2009) inflect our journeys, the fickle

nature of our mobilities means that even those experiences that feel stable or permanent are

“provisional achievements that have to be constantly made and remade (even if this process

of making and remaking is hidden or taken-for-granted)” (Anderson 2008, 228, referencing

the work of Doreen Massey 2005). Thus, fickle mobilities also does the semantic and

conceptual work of decentring the human subject and communicating that perceived control

over our mobilities is, and always will be, an illusion.

Broadly, this thesis has been inspired by the ongoing work of scholars to deterritorialise

mobilities. In particular, in the context of everyday journeying this thesis takes up the

argument of (Hannam, Sheller & Urry 2006; 13) to critically rethink “existing linear

assumptions about temporality and timing, which often assume that actors are able to do only

one thing at a time, and that events follow each other in a linear order”. These types of linear

275
assumptions are evident in the human quest for predictability, in that journeys should unfold

in a certain way via a series of discrete actions and events. Furthermore, in the context of

wayfinding and being lost and found, journeys are perceived to finitely ‘end’ when an

intended destination is reached, framing space as place as the static node points on a journey.

Thus, the call to deterritorialise mobilities is embedded in this thesis’ reimagining of

unpredictability through the “destabilisation or ‘undoing’ of territories […] escap[ing] the

codes of a system (systems of power, systems of organisation)” (Nibbelink 2015, 24). The

affective geography of unpredictability developed in this thesis reinforces the temporal and

spatial emergence of fickle journeys through relationality and encounter, rather than through

an inherent set of events and characteristics.

By highlighting multiplicity and rearticulating mobilities as ‘fickle’, we open a small window

into how we might begin to deterritorialise mobilities and rethink the nature of journeys

across multiple paths and elements rather than in linear form. Tim Ingold’s (1993; 2010a;

2010b; 2011; 2016; Mazzullo & Ingold 2008) work on ‘paths’ is widely cited in the

mobilities literature as it goes some way in acknowledging that “along daily mobility

practices, different trajectories coexist, allowing multiple and simultaneous existences and

spatialities that are not fragmented or isolated for each individual” (Jiron & Iturra 2014, 172).

For Ingold (1993) paths are not mere static representation, but the material manifestation of

trajectory in space, imprints left by mobility. He says: “there are human becomings, animal

becomings, plant becomings, and so on. As they move together through time and encounter

one another, these paths interweave to form an immense and continually evolving tapestry”

(Ingold 2011, 9). Where Ingold’s work has been translated into current mobilities literature,

these imprints generally take form through the material journeys of human and non-human

bodies through space.

276
This section of the chapter however, seeks to push Ingold’s (1993) work further by

decentring the individual (Humphrey 2008) and embodied subject in this work and engage

with the potential of a more-than-human geography of journeys. Building on the conceptual

and empirical insights of this thesis, and idea of ‘fickle mobilities’ as foregrounding the

agency of journeys, this thesis considers the autonomy of journeys themselves as mobility

paths that leave imprints through time and space (imprints such as the affects of

unpredictability for human bodies). Like time, like the weather, and like technical objects,

journeys fundamentally rearrange the time-spaces and fields of view experienced by human

subjects on the move. A more-than-human-geography of mobility then, acknowledges that

journeys are animated - not created by - affective engagement. This line of argument is

inspired by non-representational theorists’ recent critique of “human’s affectual capacities to

sense and engage with the world around them” (Greenhough 2014, 96; Thrift 2008). Thus,

whilst the human body might be our key instrument for sensing these affective relations, the

combination of elements that come together on journeys are pre-individual and beyond the

individual; an idea which resonates with the insights of this thesis regarding affective

geographies of unpredictability. Just as this thesis has illuminated the more-than-human

agency of technical objects then, it argues that the affects of journeys operate outside human

intentionality to co-produce experiences of mobility.

However, like other more-than-human geographies, a more-than-human reading of everyday

journeys still requires conceptual and semantic tools to help scholars contend with their place

in mobile life: the paradox of representation. The affective geography developed by this

thesis, and the quality of fickleness, constitute some of these potential tools. Furthermore,

inspired by this thesis and its consideration of ‘perturbations’ (Ash 2013), I suggest that the

concept of ‘affective encounter’ also holds potential for articulating how the affects of more-

277
than-human journeys intersect with human mobilities. Inspired by Thrift (2008), I position

encounters as the temporal coming-into-relation of the journey and the human subject: those

moments in time when the affects of mobile journeys become salient and touch down on

human mobilities. Encounter therefore crystallises “certain […] multiplicities inherent to

human life and thus creates subjects, if only for a time”, prioritizing particular affective

moments in a slew of multiple realities (Humphrey, 2008, 374-375). Therefore, whilst in their

infancy in this thesis, ideas about the more-than-human nature of journeys at a variety of

scales are a viable line of inquiry for scholars in the ongoing deterritorialisation of the

mobilities literature.

278
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 Appendix 1

Newcastle Interviews Indicative Questions

Approved by University of Newcastle Human Ethics Committee H-2016-0316

1. Can you start by telling me a little bit about your weekly movements? (ie what places
do you commonly travel to in an ‘everyday’ week – modes of transport etc)
2. What kinds of technologies do you commonly use to get around? (ie GPS device,
smartphone etc)
3. How do you use these technologies?
4. How often do you use these?
5. What types of places do you use these to navigate?
6. Are there any circumstances which change the way you use them (ie when travelling
alone/accompanied/long distance/at night/when driving etc)
7. Do you use any software/iphone apps to help make decisions about how you move
around? (Ie give examples such as MapMyRun, NSW Incident Alerts, Lost on
Campus etc)
8. What kinds of navigational information are important to you? (Ie maps with GPS
where you ‘follow the blue line’, other types of additional information eg local
services etc)
9. Why is that important to you?
10. Do you consider yourself a good navigator?
11. Does using these technologies change that opinion of yourself?
12. How confident are you using these technologies?
13. What features do you like/dislike about them? Why?
14. What kind of impact do you think these technologies have on your everyday life?
15. Do you think these types of technologies are important?
16. Can you tell me a story which sticks out in your mind about using these technologies?
17. What happens if these technologies don’t work as planned? What other methods do
you call on?
18. Do you have stories about being lost? a. Follow up questions depending on details:
What happened? How did you find your way again? How did you feel about the
experience? Have you been back to that place since? How did you feel about
returning there? Were you able to remember how to get around that place next time?
19. How does using these technologies make you feel?
20. Do you ever feel at ease, or comforted by having access to these types of navigational
technologies? (Prompt for specific story)
21. Do you ever feel stressed or anxious using them? (Prompt for specific story)
22. In what circumstances do you feel that (emotion)?
23. Do these experiences put you off using them/encourage you to use them?
24. How do you think these types of modern technologies are changing how people move
around?
25. Has the amount of times you get lost changed after using these technologies?

*Additional questions may arise naturally during the interview

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