Spatial disorientation is of key relevance to our globalized world, eliciting complex questions about our relationship with technology and the last remaining vestiges of our animal nature. Viewed more broadly, disorientation is a profoundly geographical theme that concerns our relationship with space, places, the body, emotions, and time, as well as being a powerful and frequently recurring metaphor in art, philosophy, and literature. Using multiple perspectives, lenses, methodological tools, and scales, Geographies of Disorientation addresses questions such as: How do we orient ourselves? What are the cognitive and cultural instruments that we use to move through space? Why do we get lost? Two main threads run through the book: getting lost as a practice, explored within a post-phenomenological framework in relation to direct and indirect observation, wayfinding performances, and the various methods and tools used to find our position in space; and disorientation as a metaphor for the contemporary era, used in a broad range of contexts to express the difficulty of finding points of reference in the world we live in. Drawing on a wide range of literature, Geographies of Disorientation is a highly original and intruiging read which will be of interest to scholars of human geography, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, cognitive science, information technology, and the communication sciences.

Spatial disorientation is of great relevance in the current era of globalization, provoking deep questions about our relationship with technology and the last remaining vestiges of our animal nature. Addressing questions such as: How do we orient ourselves? and What are the cognitive and cultural instruments that we use to move through space?, this book points to the web of relations implicit in the notion of disorientation. The book explores getting lost as a practice while discussing direct and indirect observation, wayfinding performances and the different technological tools we use to find our position in space, as well as employing disorientation as a metaphor for the contemporary era.

Negative Geographies is the first edited collection to chart the political, conceptual, and ethical consequences of how the underexplored problem of the negative might be posed for contemporary cultural geography. Using a variety of case studies and empirical investigations, these chapters consider how the negative, through annihilations, gaps, ruptures, and tears, can work within or against the terms of affirmationism. The collection opens up new avenues through which key problems of cultural geography might be differently posed and points to the ways that it might be possible and desirable to think, theorize, and exemplify negation.

Examines disorientation and confusion, and their theoretical implications, in contemporary narrative film.

The Routledge Handbook of Literary Geographies provides a comprehensive overview of recent research and a range of innovative ways of thinking literature and geography together. It maps the history of literary geography and identifies key developments and debates in the field. Written by leading and emerging scholars from around the world, the 38 chapters are organised into six themed sections, which consider: differing critical methodologies; keywords and concepts; literary geography in the light of literary history; a variety of places, spaces, and landforms; the significance of literary forms and genres; and the role of literary geographies beyond the academy. Presenting the work of scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, each section offers readers new angles from which to view the convergence of literary creativity and geographical thought. Collectively, the contributors also address some of the major issues of our time including the climate emergency, movement and migration, and the politics of place. Literary geography is a dynamic interdisciplinary field dedicated to exploring the complex relationships between geography and literature. This cutting-edge collection will be an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students in both Geography and Literary Studies, and scholars interested in the evolving interface between the two disciplines.

Disorienting Empire is the first book to examine Republican Latin poetry's recurring interest in characters who become lost. Basil Dufallo explains the prevalence of this theme with reference to the rapid expansion of Rome's empire in the Middle and Late Republic. It was both a threatening and an enticing prospect, Dufallo argues, to imagine the ever-widening spaces of Roman power as a place where one could become disoriented, both in terms of geographical wandering and in a more abstract sense connected with identity and identification, especially as it concerned gender and sexuality. Plautus, Terence, Lucretius, and Catullus, as well as the "triumviral" Horace of Satires, book 1, all reveal an interest in such experiences, particularly in relation to journeys into the Greek world from which these writers drew their source material. Fragmentary authors such as Naevius, Ennius, and Lucilius, as well as prose historians including Polybius and Livy, add depth and context to the discussion. Setting the Republican poets in dialogue with queer theory and postcolonial theory, Dufallo brings to light both anxieties latent in the theme and the exuberance it suggests over new creative possibilities opened up by reorienting oneself toward new horizons, new identifications-by discovering with pleasure that one could be other than one thought. Further, in showing that the Republican poets had been experimenting with such techniques for generations before the Augustan Age, Disorienting Empire offers its close readings as a means of interpreting afresh Aeneas' wandering journey in Vergil's Aeneid.

In this engaging and spirited book, eminent social psychologist Robert Levine asks us to explore a dimension of our experience that we take for granted—our perception of time. When we travel to a different country, or even a different city in the United States, we assume that a certain amount of cultural adjustment will be required, whether it's getting used to new food or negotiating a foreign language, adapting to a different standard of living or another currency. In fact, what contributes most to our sense of disorientation is having to adapt to another culture's sense of time.Levine, who has devoted his career to studying time and the pace of life, takes us on an enchanting tour of time through the ages and around the world. As he recounts his unique experiences with humor and deep insight, we travel with him to Brazil, where to be three hours late is perfectly acceptable, and to Japan, where he finds a sense of the long-term that is unheard of in the West. We visit communities in the United States and find that population size affects the pace of life—and even the pace of walking. We travel back in time to ancient Greece to examine early clocks and sundials, then move forward through the centuries to the beginnings of ”clock time” during the Industrial Revolution. We learn that there are places in the world today where people still live according to ”nature time,” the rhythm of the sun and the seasons, and ”event time,” the structuring of time around happenings(when you want to make a late appointment in Burundi, you say, ”I'll see you when the cows come in”).Levine raises some fascinating questions. How do we use our time? Are we being ruled by the clock? What is this doing to our cities? To our relationships? To our own bodies and psyches? Are there decisions we have made without conscious choice? Alternative tempos we might prefer? Perhaps, Levine argues, our goal should be to try to live in a ”multitemporal” society, one in which we learn to move back and forth among nature time, event time, and clock time. In other words, each of us must chart our own geography of time. If we can do that, we will have achieved temporal prosperity.