Geographies of Disorientation

Friedberg, Marcella Schmidt di

doi:10.4324/9781315584683

Cited by 14 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…In this light, letting go of survey knowledge can be conceived as a form of resistance – a resistance ‘to the uniformization of landscapes, to abandonment of the daily ritual of getting to know, producing and organizing places.’ (di Friedberg, 2017, p. 9). In the Evenki way of walking, we discern a way of relinquishing this daily ritual and of embracing instead the heterogeneity of space.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mental maps, practical mastery and environmental experience: an analysis of the wayfinding culture of Evenki reindeer herders and hunters

Fernández Velasco,

Gleizer

2023

J. Navigation

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The present work explores the link between navigational processes and the experience of place by considering the case of Evenki reindeer herders and hunters. Our analysis shows how the idiosyncratic wayfinding methods of the Evenki result in a unique experience of place – a case that elucidates the important question of the impact of navigational processes on environmental experience, and that advances the debate between mental map theory and practical mastery theory in anthropology. We defend that their wayfinding methods – involving a particular gait, path networks, and vast hydrological and toponymical knowledge – allow the Evenki to navigate without a need for integrating egocentric and allocentric frames of reference. As a result, the Evenki experience themselves as free individuals moving through an environment that is alive and rife with possibility. This analysis reveals the ways in which wayfinding processes relying predominantly on route knowledge – as opposed to survey knowledge – affect environmental experience. Alternative methods of wayfinding can be seen as a form of resistance to the uniformisation of landscapes, and as a way of embracing the heterogeneity of space.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mental maps, practical mastery and environmental experience: an analysis of the wayfinding culture of Evenki reindeer herders and hunters

Fernández Velasco,

Gleizer

2023

J. Navigation

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Section: Content Analysis 14mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The pandemic has led to spatial and temporal disruptions and fractures across all socio‐geographical scales, from global to the most local, and across all domains of urban life; framing the pandemic as an event of global weirding, some scholars use the notion of cultural, social, spatial, and cognitive disorientation to describe it (Fernández Velasco et al, 2021, 2022; Schmidt di Friedberg, 2021). According to social and cultural geographers, being in a state of spatial disorientation means experiencing the loss or absence of familiar points of reference, getting lost, or feeling out of place (Clerc, 2019; Schmidt di Friedberg, 2018). It entails confusion, insecurity, and incomprehension (Bissell & Gorman‐Murray, 2019) as a result of inhabiting a radically changed environment or a space that is no longer familiar; disorientation can even entail disruption in one’s sense of place and sense of belonging as the world around us appears out‐of‐joint (Simonsen, 2013; Turnbull et al, 2022).…”

Section: (Dis/re)orientation Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Spatial disorientation becomes even more heightened when public spaces are suddenly left empty, the typical pre‐pandemic urban hypermobility is reduced to strictly controlled (im)mobility, and when non‐human animals start to walk on the streets as city dwellers stay locked at home (Schmidt di Friedberg, 2021). The common bodily experience of pandemic disorientation can be framed as the fulfilment of “two antithetical terrors [that] inform the age we live in: that of ‘losing the world’ and that of ‘being lost in the world’” (De Martino in Schmidt di Friedberg, 2018, p. 5), as it entails both feeling lost in hitherto familiar cities and losing the cityscapes as we have grown to know them (Fernández Velasco et al, 2021).…”

Section: (Dis/re)orientation Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although experiences of shorter or longer disorientation are usually deemed unwelcome, in some circumstances, being lost by chance or deliberately could be associated with positive values of discovery or liberation (Clerc, 2019; Fernández Velasco et al, 2022; Luckhurst, 2017; Schmidt di Friedberg, 2018). Simonsen (2013, p. 20) suggests that “moments of disorientation, then, can be seen as destabilising and undermining, but they can also be seen as productive moments leading to new hopes and new directions.” Namely, collective disorientation is also the first step towards collective reorientation as the effect of “the undoing of connections and relations, which simultaneously affords opportunities for forging new ones and building new, more socially and ecologically just worlds” (Turnbull et al, 2022, p. 1215).…”

Section: (Dis/re)orientation Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Pandemic disorientations and reorientations as legacies: Scoping review of COVID‐19 impacts on European cities

Działek,

Smagacz‐Poziemska,

Krzemińska

et al. 2023

Geographical Research

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The COVID‐19 pandemic has disrupted modern urban ecosystems on an unprecedented scale. Many urban scholars have undertaken the challenge of documenting and analysing how this global health crisis has been experienced and coped with, resulting in a surge of studies on its impact on various cityscapes and domains of urban life. In this paper, we present findings from a scoping review of 138 articles on this subject published between the outbreak of the pandemic and the end of June 2022. Our review showcases scholarly accounts of cascading shifts that have occurred within urban ecosystems and provides a better understanding of conceptual and methodological alterations in research approaches. Because both the investigated impacts and the research strategies deal primarily with the consequences of losing the pre‐pandemic spatial, temporal, social, cultural, and political frames of reference, we adopt transdisciplinary disorientation theories as the review’s interpretive framework. This step proves to be fruitful in mapping and interpreting crises and breakdowns and also in revealing how an unexpected planetary ordeal has reoriented pre‐pandemic trends in urban development and transformed cities and urban life alike. We suggest that the disorienting pandemic experience can serve as a potent legacy for urban futures. However, the scale and distribution of post‐pandemic reorientations across European cities and their residents cannot yet be fully comprehended.

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Disorientation and self-consciousness: a phenomenological inquiry

Velasco

2020

Phenom Cogn Sci

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The present paper explores the phenomenology of disorientation and its relationship with self-consciousness. Section 1 discusses previous literature on the links between self-location and self-consciousness and proposes a distinction between minimal selflocation (which requires only an ego-centric frame of reference) and integrated selflocation (which requires the integration of egocentric and allocentric frames of reference). The double aim of the paper is to use this distinction to deepen our understanding of spatial disorientation, and to use the phenomenology of disorientation to elucidate the role that integrated self-location plays in shaping self-consciousness. Section 2 starts by looking at the experience of being "turned around", which is a common experience of disorientation. This analysis leads to the conclusion that integrated selflocation is transmodal and depends on all three egocentric axes, and that disorientation destabilizes this integrated self-location. Section 3 explores a corpus of reports of disorientation episodes and highlights four key characteristics of these experiences (anxiety, vulnerability, confusion and diminishment) and their links to self-consciousness, focusing on the transformations in both the lived body and the experience of space. The central thesis of this paper is that during disorientation a destabilization of integrated self-location results in a diminished form of self-consciousness.

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Geographies of Disorientation

Cited by 14 publications

References 0 publications

Mental maps, practical mastery and environmental experience: an analysis of the wayfinding culture of Evenki reindeer herders and hunters

Mental maps, practical mastery and environmental experience: an analysis of the wayfinding culture of Evenki reindeer herders and hunters

Pandemic disorientations and reorientations as legacies: Scoping review of COVID‐19 impacts on European cities

Disorientation and self-consciousness: a phenomenological inquiry

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