Being surprised and surprising ourselves: A geography of personal and social change

Abstract

Surprises are refuted expectations and therefore an inevitable concomitant of errors of anticipating the future. This paper argues that the timing is just right for a spatial account of surprise, or rather, for a geography of personal and social change that deploys the trope of surprise to help explain how and why change happens. Whether we are surprised by what transpires in our surroundings or we are surprising ourselves by leaping forward in impetuous deeds of reinventing who we are, the common denominator of these processes of becoming is that they produce geographical space and are produced by it.

Revisiting positionality and the thesis of situated knowledge

“…The act of remembering now an event that happened some time ago is constituted as a relation between two subject positions: the present me and the past me that witnessed the event. This self-referential positionality is integral to philosophical debates about the metaphysics of personhood (Parfit, 1984; Simandan, 2017, 2018c): is a person a spatiotemporally stretched entity or are we different persons at different slices in time? It is also integral to epistemological debates about the possibility of personal knowledge (Hirsch, 2002) and to research on the politics of oral histories and in-depth interviews (Dowling et al, 2016; Gardner, 2001).…”

Towards Local Forms of Sprawl: A Brief Reflection on Mediterranean Urbanization

“…Peri-urbanization becomes one of the processes investigated as part of a more general framework exploring logic and effects of the territorial reorganization of cities. Accordingly, peri-urbanization is not defined as the space resulting from such transformations, but the process itself, whose interpretation should consider together socio-demographic, economic, and territorial dimensions of change [16,73,74]. In this ambit, an "economistic" vision of the relationship between cities and the surrounding territory was developed, and this became a distinctive point of view of the sprawl literature in Europe [75][76][77].…”

Answers to questions on uncertainty in geography: Old lessons and new scenario tools

“…For example, Simandan (2018a) searches for geographical scholarship on surprise, returning a small handful of papers, but one that stretches back four decades (Deutsche, 1995;Lee, 1976;Mackenzie, 2007;Mills, 2013). Moreover, the tendency for the subject to be discussed under other rubrics is evidenced in that a similar search using terms such as 'encounter' (Adams, 2017;Kallio, 2017), 'event' (Dilkes-Frayne and Duff, 2017; Shaw, 2012), 'unpredictability and uncertainty' (Simandan, 2010b;Simandan, 2019), 'estrangement' and 'extraordinary' (Ash and Simpson, 2016;Larsen and Johnson, 2012), 'risk' (Neisser and Runkel, 2017), 'hazard' (Nobert and Pelling, 2017) and 'disaster' (Hu, 2018), returns a more extensive set of literature (Simandan, 2018a). Simandan (2018a) highlights the role of ontological uncertainty in producing geographic space over time, as evident in the waves of economic transformation to inner-city Vancouver traced by Barnes and Hutton (2009).…”

“…Moreover, the tendency for the subject to be discussed under other rubrics is evidenced in that a similar search using terms such as 'encounter' (Adams, 2017;Kallio, 2017), 'event' (Dilkes-Frayne and Duff, 2017; Shaw, 2012), 'unpredictability and uncertainty' (Simandan, 2010b;Simandan, 2019), 'estrangement' and 'extraordinary' (Ash and Simpson, 2016;Larsen and Johnson, 2012), 'risk' (Neisser and Runkel, 2017), 'hazard' (Nobert and Pelling, 2017) and 'disaster' (Hu, 2018), returns a more extensive set of literature (Simandan, 2018a). Simandan (2018a) highlights the role of ontological uncertainty in producing geographic space over time, as evident in the waves of economic transformation to inner-city Vancouver traced by Barnes and Hutton (2009). Barnes and Hutton (2009) show how macro-level economic factors are always moderated in their effect on a particular context by local level contingencies, but that the latter are frequently overlooked or downplayed in our quest for overarching and universal theories linking clearly identifiable causes to necessary outcomes.…”