'No news today': talk of witnessing with families of missing people

The paper contributes new ways of thinking about and responding to interview talk in the context of recent scholarship on interviewing, orality and witnessing. We proceed by paying attention to specific examples of interview talk on the experience of absence via the collecting of narratives from families of missing people. We highlight how ambiguous emotions are bound up with broader ways of recognizing such talk, largely exercised here as reflections on what is involved in witnessing those who are missing in communications with police. Tensions that may be produced by official ways of regarding and responding to family character witness of the missing are discussed in the context of two case studies. In response to these tensions, we offer suggestions for finding different spaces through which to value such ‘witness talk’ by families, particularly via ideas from grief scholarship. The paper concludes by briefly reflecting on how interviewing encounters might produce versions of praxis in which the content of talk is not just, and simply, ‘apprehended’ as academic evidence

Sophie's story: writing missing journeys

'Sophie’s story' is a creative rendition of an interview narrative gathered in a research project on missing people. The paper explains why Sophie’s story was written and details the wider intention to provide new narrative resources for police officer training, families of missing people and returned missing people. We contextualize this cultural intervention with an argument about the transformative potential of writing trauma stories. It is suggested that trauma stories produce difficult and unknown affects, but ones that may provide new ways of talking about unspeakable events. Sophie’s story is thus presented as a hopeful cultural geography in process, and one that seeks to help rewrite existing social scripts about missing people

Remoteness, Rurality and Mental Health Problems (Findings paper no. 5)

Findings papers associated with ESRC-funded research project, 'Social Geographies of Rural Mental Health' (R000 23 8453)

Visibility, Gossip and Intimate Neighbourly Knowledges (Findings paper no. 7)

Findings papers associated with ESRC-funded research project, 'Social Geographies of Rural Mental Health' (R000 23 8453)

Highlands, Economy, Culture and Mental Health Problems (Findings paper no. 4)

Findings papers associated with ESRC-funded research project, 'Social Geographies of Rural Mental Health' (R000 23 8453)

Exclusionary Social Relations and Practices (Findings paper no. 3)

Findings papers associated with ESRC-funded research project, 'Social Geographies of Rural Mental Health' (R000 23 8453)

Living absence:the strange geographies of missing people

In this paper ‘missing people’ gain an unstable presence through their (restaged) testimonies recounting individual occupations of material urban public space during the lived practice of absence. We explore ‘missing experience’ with reference to homeless geographies, and as constituted by paradoxical spatialities in which people are both absent and present. We seek to understand such urban geographies of absence through diverse voices of missing people, who discuss their embodiment of unusual rhythmic occupations of the city. We conclude by considering how a new politics of missing people might take account of such voices in ways to think further about rights-to-be-absent in the city

Missing women:policing absence

This paper considers the neglected mobilities associated with a sample of UK women reported as missing. Refracted through literatures on gendered mobility and abandonment, the paper argues that the journeys of these women in crisis are not well understood by police services, and that normative gender relations may infuse theirmanagement. By selectively exploring one illustrative police case file on Kim, we highlight how reported andobserved socio-spatial relationships within private and public spaces relate to search actions. We argue that Kim’smobility and spatial experiences are barely understood, except for when they appear to symbolise disorder anddanger. We address the silences in this singular case by using the voices of other women reported as missing, ascollected in a research project to explore the agency, experience and meaning of female mobility during absence.We argue that women reported as missing are not abandoned by UK policing services, but that a policy ofcontinued search for them may be at risk if they repeatedly contravene normative socio-spatial relationshipsthrough regular absence mobilities. By way of conclusion, we address recent calls for research that explores therelationships between gender and mobility

Encountering COP26 as a security event: a short walking ethnography

This paper represents a short ethnographic encounter with the site of the COP26 Climate Conference in Glasgow in 2021. It communicates an experiential picturing of the site as it was assembled and disassembled, as this was recorded in notes, conversations, via phone footage and in a short talk afterwards with human geography colleagues at the University of Glasgow. The paper seeks to make sense of this short experiential encounter by drawing from scholarship on ethnography, security and events of emergency assemblage. The paper concludes by reflection on the ordinary purpose of walking sites of climate security and emergency

Geographies of Missing Adults

‘Every case is different [...] routine kills. I demand from my people that they look at every case from scratch as if they know nothing and it’s from looking at a case from that way that you will see some details. Some specific elements that make a case unique. [...] Never exclude anything [...] everything is possible’, Alain Remue, Head of the Belgium Federal Police's Missing Person's Unit (17 May 2013). Alain Remue, in a recent address to a European meeting of researchers on missing people, reminds us of the need to regard each missing person episode as a unique single event. Understanding the way in which people interact with the environments around them is an integral part of comprehending the behaviour of missing people and their unique journeys, and as such is the focus of this chapter. Whenever a person is reported missing to the police, there is an obvious need to locate an individual in space and time. The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) provide a definition of ‘missing’ equating to '… anyone whose whereabouts cannot be established …', and a definition of ‘absent’ as 'a person not at a place where they are expected or required to be' (ACPO 2013: 5) clearly indicating that when someone is reported as missing to the police, it is because their geographical location at that moment in time is unknown or uncertain. To complicate matters, the individual may not be static in their situation or behaviour, and may move over time, through space, navigating the environment on an evolving journey, which could also be considered uncertain in terms of its intentionality (Stevenson et al. 2013). Consequently, searching for a missing person can be a complicated process for any agency, involving interpreting the interplay of spatial, environmental and human elements at stake. In this chapter, we elaborate these complexities, and seek to use recent research evidence to shed new light on missing adult geographies and journeys