- Title
- The affects of unpredictability for everyday wayfinding and being lost and found
- Creator
- Hughes, Ainsley
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2021
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- 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-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 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.
- Subject
- mobilities; wayfinding; lost; found; affect; digital echnologies; human geography; thesis by publication
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1507234
- Identifier
- uon:55991
- Rights
- Copyright 2021 Ainsley Hughes
- Language
- eng
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