On geography and encounter

I Introduction

Over the last decade, ‘geographies of encounter’ has been used as a shorthand for a body of work broadly interested in social diversity, urban difference, and prejudice, which has sought to document how people negotiate difference in their everyday lives (cf. Matejskova and Leitner, 2011; Valentine, 2008; Schuermans, 2013; Wilson, 2011). Arising from this geographical scholarship are questions regarding the value of encounters, what potential they might hold for catalysing change and what might be said about their politics and spatio-temporality. This work has made some important interventions into understandings of urban life, the taking-place of prejudice and the assembling of different forms of sociality. Yet whilst the notion of encounter is frequently used, not only is little said about how it is conceptualized, but a much wider geographical engagement with encounter remains absent from recent work.

The central aim of this paper is to argue that, far from a general term for meeting, ‘encounter’ is a conceptually charged construct that is worthy of sustained and critical attention. To do so, it traces the historical links between geography and ideas of encounter and draws on a range of interests from across the discipline to interrogate the different ways in which encounters have appeared as a central feature of geographical work. In offering the first conceptualization of ‘encounter’, the paper not only demonstrates why encounter has rightly gained such currency in the discipline, but outlines an agenda for future research and debate. As I will argue, this is an important project for two reasons. First, by teasing out the different ways in which encounters have featured in geographical work, we can better address how ‘encounter’ is both implicitly and explicitly deployed as a specific genre of contact across a number of key issues. This is vital, for without attention to how encounters are conceptualized there is a danger that ‘encounter’ becomes an empty referent, which undermines the critical and analytical force of work that engages it as a key site of scholarly interest. Second, in bringing a diverse range of interests together, we can establish new avenues for collaboration and discussion that can better respond to questions that have arisen from recent work on the geographies of encounter. This includes questions of meaning, power, temporality, ethics and scale. Crucially, the paper is not intended to offer an all-encompassing theory of encounter but to better scrutinize how encounter is theorized as a distinctive event of relation. In so doing, it places encounter firmly within the remit of difference, rupture and surprise.

With these aims in mind, Section II begins with the etymology of encounter to demonstrate that encounters are historically coded as a meeting of opposites. In so doing, it then outlines three bodies of work where the notion of ‘encounter’ appears most frequently – (post)colonial writing, work on urban diversity, and animal geographies – tracing how they are connected by an interest in grammars of difference, ‘border imaginaries’ and antagonism (Rovisco, 2010: 1015). In Section III, I argue that encounters are fundamentally about difference and are thus central to understanding the embodied nature of social distinctions and the contingency of identity and belonging. By paying attention to the spatial concepts that are frequently used in writing on encounter, I outline what a focus on encounters can do for how we think about borders, boundaries and forms of relationality.

Section IV moves to a focus on enchantment, as a concern that has shaped some of the contemporary work on encounter and as a state that embraces the potential to become otherwise. In so doing, it reflects on the efficacy of the sensuous and the turn to vitalist modes of thought that have positioned the encounter as a site of analytical import. As I argue, this allows us to interrogate questions of meaning and so Section V attends to the contrasting narratives of ‘meaningful encounter’ that can be seen across the discipline. I contend that greater attention be given to questioning what implications these narratives have for how encounters are framed and mobilized within a variety of social and environmental projects. Finally, the paper turns to questions of temporality and asks what an emphasis on the momentary and fleeting does to how we understand the encounter as an event of relation. To conclude, the paper highlights what a critical scrutiny of encounter can offer geographical scholarship and how such scrutiny can push current work on the geographies of encounter in new and novel directions.

II Adversaries, opposition, and conflict

Arising from the late Latin incontrāre, meaning against, contrary or opposed to, the first definition of encounter is a face-to-face meeting between adversaries or opposing forces and thus a meeting ‘in conflict; hence a battle, skirmish or duel’ (OED, 2015). As such, ‘encounter’ is not an empty referent for any form of meeting, contact or interaction, but is instead historically coded. As Rovisco (2010: 1015) notes, this can be seen in the way cultural encounters are regularly read through Manichean grammars of difference, which perpetuate ‘border imaginaries’ that assume a lack of commonality, absolute opposition and thus crystallize symbolic logics of ‘us versus them’. Whilst work has challenged static understandings of identity and polarization, this notion of opposition is further underlined by the spatial concepts that are regularly deployed when speaking of cultural encounters, including ‘frontier’, ‘border’, boundary’, ‘margin’, and ‘borderland’ (Leavelle, 2004: 915). I will return to these in Section III but it is worth noting, as Leavelle argues, that these spatial concepts achieve much of their ‘explanatory power from the strong link between colonialism and geography’ (see also Driver, 1992; Kearns, 2009).

‘The age of Empire’, as an era of exploration, boundary-making, economic exploitation and cultural imperialism, produced ‘diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination’ replete with narratives of encounter (Pratt, 1992: 7; Livingstone, 1992; Carter, 2013; Smith, 2015; Stoler, 2006). In these narratives, ‘encounter’ was deployed as an ‘analytical device’ to recount the dramatic spatial and temporal coming together of different geographical imaginations that were often marked by highly unequal relations of power (Domosh, 2010; Leavelle, 2004). Such a deployment not only (re)affirmed binary logics but concealed the messy and ‘fine negotiations, intersections and exchanges’ that occurred ‘within and across borders’ (Rovisco, 2010: 1024). Colonial discourses pitted Europe against the Orient, the rational against the irrational and the advanced against the backward (Driver, 2001; Said, 2003 [1978]), in ways that continue to shape global politics, geographical imaginations and bodily encounters (Gregory, 2004; Haldrup et al., 2006).

As Driver (2001) argued, such narratives of encounter are not confined to history, but are present in forms of contemporary tourism (Gibson, 2010). Here, a focus on encounter has brought the embodied figure of the tourist into view to question how geographical knowledge is produced through engagements with places and people that are in some way considered ‘other’ (Crouch and Desforges, 2003: 8; Burrell, 2011). As Gibson (2010) reminds us, the tourist gaze is about an encounter between producers and consumers and thus about the production of practical ontologies. As such, tourist encounters have become a critical site of analysis, not only for the purpose of carefully describing the things, bodies and places that are brought together through tourism, but also for examining the exercises of power involved (Callon and Law, 2004). This can be seen in a wide range of writing, from work on ‘slum-tourism’ and the ‘erotic appeal of underprivileged urban districts’, which has concerned the opportunity it provides for encounters that transgress economic and social boundaries (Dürr, 2012: 340; Dovey and King, 2012; Wilson, 2016a), through to work that has focused on the agency and perspective of hosts in order to challenge the tendency to privilege tourist accounts (Malam, 2008; Qian et al., 2012).

A concern with border imaginaries and postcolonial theories carries over into a second body of work that has focused on social difference and sites of ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey, 2005). Although there are some notable exceptions (Faier, 2009; Horton, 2008; Jones, 2012), this work has tended to privilege the urban (Wilson, 2016b). It has long been argued that the city is not a container in which encounters occur, but is rather made from encounters (Amin and Thrift, 2002; Darling and Wilson, 2016; Isin, 2002). As Massey (2005) argued, urban space is the product of a multiplicity of encounters and thus always under construction. For Shapiro (2010: 1), ‘the encounter’ might be considered the ‘signature event in city life’, whilst for Stevens (2007), chance encounters are what give urban life its ‘distinctive character’, liveliness and risk, making the urban a site of ‘permanent disequilibrium’ where ‘normalities and constraints’ are continuously dissolved (Lefebvre et al., 1996: 129; Merrifield, 2013). Drawing on a long lineage of urban theory that has celebrated ‘the serendipity of casual encounter’ and its link to the development of urban civic culture (Amin, 2002: 967; Jacobs, 1961; Sennett, 1992; Tonkiss, 2005; Young, 1990), studies of urban encounter have focused on the anonymity of urban life – and the figure of the ‘stranger’ in particular – to pull apart the techniques of differentiation that have allowed some bodies to be identified as strange, abject or unfamiliar (Ahmed, 2000; Amin, 2012; Haldrup et al., 2006; Hopkins, 2014).

More specifically, the concept of encounter has been most frequently used to examine contact where a lack of commonality is assumed or where some form of existing conflict, prejudice or unease is present (Askins and Pain, 2011; Valentine, 2008). This ranges from an interest in the ambiguous or contentious nature of multicultural and multi-ethnic encounters (Amin, 2002; Clayton, 2009; Swanton, 2010; Wilson, 2011, 2014a), to encounters across class, economic position or legal status and between different forms and expressions of religion and sexuality, to name just a few (Darling, 2014; Darling and Wilson, 2016; Hubbard, 2002; Lawson and Elwood, 2014; Middleton and Yarwood, 2015; Schuermans, 2013; Valentine and Waite, 2010). These interests combine a focus on discourses that depict clear distinctions of social identity and categorization, with an attention to how difference is negotiated, constructed and legitimated within contingent moments of encounter (Brown, 2008; Haldrup et al., 2006). Scholars working in this area have also paid considerable attention to the spaces of encounter, to consider how encounters shape space but are also shaped by it (Leitner, 2012). This includes spaces of work and education (Ellis et al., 2004; Wilson, 2013a); food and consumption (Laurier and Philo, 2006; Vertovec, 2015); public transport (Wilson, 2011); streets and plazas (Pikner, 2016); and spaces of leisure and community (Neal et al., 2015; Parks, 2015), to name just some of the sites that have drawn attention.

Moving to a very different set of ideas, the third body of work that I want to highlight has emerged from the field of animal geographies. Whilst narratives of encounter are common to this work – given that animals have regularly been positioned as the ‘ultimate Other’ and the embodiment of alterity (Bull, 2011; Hovorka, 2015; Wolch, 2002) – this field has been absent from recent debates on the geographies of encounter. Following calls to bring animals back into Human Geography (Philo and Wolch, 1998), this scholarship has focused on the significance of human-animal relations to society and space (Bull, 2011; Keul, 2013; Lorimer, 2015; Wolch, 2002); the spatial and temporal construction of animal agency (Bear, 2011); the co-constitution of trans-species socialities (Buller, 2014; Lorimer, 2010); human/non-human conflicts (Barua, 2014; Brown and Dilley, 2012; Yeo and Neo, 2010); and narratives of ‘becoming-animal’, which have sought to destabilize identities and the means through which otherness is enacted, legitimated and normalized (Bear and Eden, 2011). Animal geographers have raised questions about how we might better grasp encounters that might be ‘elusive’ to the social researcher (Callon and Law, 2004; Hodgetts and Lorimer, 2015), whilst a recognition of the tendency for work to focus on warm-blooded animals in ‘airy spaces’ where animals are easily encountered (Keul, 2013) has prompted reflections on angling encounters (Bear and Eden, 2011), encounters with swarming bats (Mason and Hope, 2014), and an encounter with an octopus named Angelica (Bear, 2011).

There are connections here to wider discussions on more-than-human ethics (Bennett, 2001; Ginn, 2014), which have called for new terms of engagement for human/non-human relations (Latimer and Miele, 2013: 5; Wilkie, 2015). These calls have advocated a move beyond notions of division or asymmetry to focus on attachments, affective relations and narratives of ‘being alongside’ (Latimer, 2013), without losing a focus on the different ways in which animals and materials have been used as the ‘prototype for most forms of Othering’ (Latimer and Miele, 2013: 14). Whilst the language of encounter is most prominent in work on non-human animals, a concern with encounter can also be seen in work on other organic agencies, as well as the geographies of materiality, to which I will return in Section IV (Bhatti et al., 2009; Head and Atchison, 2009; Swanton, 2013).

In identifying three bodies of work where encounters are most prominent – (post)colonial scholarship, urban diversity and animal geographies – I argue that encounter is deployed in instances where difference is particularly noteworthy or of analytical interest. These bodies of work thus form the basis for the remaining theoretical discussion, which begins by examining how diversity and difference is engaged and theorized through encounter. Section III therefore continues the work of unpacking how encounters are coded as distinctive forms of relation to place encounter within the remit of difference and surprise.

III Diversity, difference, and borders

Encounters allow a focus on the embodied nature of social distinctions and the unpredictable ways in which similarity and difference are negotiated in the moment (Hubbard, 2013; Keul, 2013). For instance, whilst noting that the tourist industry is still shaped by binary thinking, Gibson (2010: 521) argues that a focus on encounters can enable a better grasp of the contradictions, entanglements and momentary extensions of power that undermine such essentialist thinking and can thus ‘sharpen ethical concepts’ (see also Rovisco, 2010). Difference is not fixed but rather emerges from encounters (Ahmed, 2000). This understanding also remains sensitive to the differences that are subsumed within categories of social distinction, enabling an address of momentary articulations that keeps a hold of subjectivity, intersectionality and ‘species differences’ (White, 2013: 93). Crucially then, I suggest that encounters are about more than the coming together of different bodies. Encounters make difference. Indeed, as Haraway (2008: 4, my emphasis) argues, ‘species of all kinds, living and not, are consequent on a subject- and object-shaping dance of encounters’, and as such we see an emphasis on beings that are formed, remade and given meaning through ‘intra- and interaction’ (p. 4).

To note a concern with the emergence and fluidity of difference is not to overlook or dismiss categories of diversity. Rather, work on encounter is simultaneously sensitive to what these categories do. As Brown (2008: 915) argues, whilst encounters ‘exceed the boundaries of reified identities’, which demands that we focus on the contingent nature of identity, belonging and power, they also demand that we keep hold of how societal attitudes, discourses and categorizations shape and constrain them. For instance, this might include a concern for the different ways in which an encounter might be ‘mediated’ by the endurance of colonial taxonomies of race (Smith, 2015), or how anxious encounters are produced by security logics and anticipated terror (Anderson, 2014; Simon, 2012).

Whilst keeping hold of how encounters are shaped, managed and constrained, the recognition that the negotiation of Other bodies can never be fully predicted is supported by a ubiquitous reference to ‘possibility’ and ‘potential’ (Ahmed, 2000, 2002; Anderson, 2014; Askins and Pain, 2011; Halvorsen, 2015; Houston et al., 2005; Stevens, 2007; Watson, 2006; Wilson and Darling, 2016). This ubiquity demonstrates an understanding that actions are brought forth from encounters and, as such, that we can never predict what affects minds and bodies might be capable of ahead of any given encounter (Massumi, 2002). The language of ‘becoming’ is thus used to recognize the potential of becoming ‘otherwise’ and to move away from static notions of essential, pre-existing beings (cf. Bear and Eden, 2011; Brown, 2012; Ginn, 2014; Lorimer, 2010; Swanton, 2010). With this in mind, I suggest that this specific terminology is a valuable starting point for thinking more carefully about borders, boundaries, and relationality. For instance, words such as ‘rupture’, ‘surprise’, ‘shock’ and ‘animation’ are common to descriptions of encounter and describe a moment or instance in which something is unexpectedly broken open (cf. Hubbard, 2002; Lapworth, 2015; Laurier and Philo, 2006; Leavelle, 2004; Power, 2009). As Edelman remarks, whilst shock can be ‘an exceptional experience of radically traumatising discontinuity’ (in Berlant and Edelman, 2014: 8, my emphasis), shock can also be a core element of the everyday. It ‘retains the potential to undo our faith in our ongoingness, our sense of our consistency as subjects (however inconsistently conceived) and to obtrude with an incoherence we cannot master’ (p. 8, original emphasis). Similarly, if we take surprise, we find an ‘etymological link to being seized, overtaken or taken over’, something that ‘disrupts expectations’ and thus ‘inheres in experiences of nonsovereignty’ (p. 120). When understood in these terms, shock and surprise might ‘correspond to a breach of security and so to a possible threat’ (p. 120).

As already noted, the spatial concepts of border, boundary, margin and frontier are commonly deployed when discussing cultural encounters (Leavelle, 2004). It should therefore come as no surprise that a lot of work on encounter takes place at the border – whether at securitized borders and checkpoints (Christou and Spyrou, 2012), borderland regions (Yeo and Neo, 2010) or the perimeters of enclave spaces (Schuermans, 2013, 2016b), where limits are marked and lines are drawn. Yet, as can be seen in the border imaginaries that are traced in readings of encounter, whilst the concept of the border might evoke a concern with spatial territory, the disturbed presumption of sovereignty described by Edelman is also about conceptual and bodily borders and the troubling of authority, rightful presence and power. For instance, as Abrahamsson and Simpson (2011: 336) argue, encounters between body-subjects can put many boundaries at stake. Encounters demand that we rethink the limits of the body, its capacities and thresholds, and in so doing, they open up questions about how we approach the body ‘as a specific form of relationality’ (ibid). This form of relational analysis can be seen in work on therapeutic landscapes (Rose, 2012), which places encounters within a wider web of socio-natural relations in order to better understand the taking-place of personal renewal. As Conradson argues (2005: 343), it is the relation between the body and wilderness that is therapeutic rather than the landscape itself. In a different example, taken from suburban Sydney, Power (2009: 30) argues that encounters between humans and animals can not only ‘rupture’ the physical borders that materially separate the spaces of the home from the outside, but can also undermine conceptual and symbolic borders to challenge human/nature distinctions.

What I want to underline here is that encounters do not simply take place at the border but are rather central to the making and unmaking of them. Indeed, what we see in these accounts of surprise, shock, rupture and non-sovereignty are momentary destabilizations where borders are shifted, exposed, crossed, made, unmade and undermined. Whilst these might be read as threatening – as some form of security breach – a number of scholars not only render such destabilization ordinary but a site of emergent politics and pedagogy. As Berlant (in Berlant and Edelman, 2014: 67) argues, ‘nonsovereignty can engender different atmospheres and potentials’ and so it should not necessarily be read as the experience of failed mastery, but where ‘all kinds of significant transformations happen’.

The potential for different forms of transformation is perhaps best articulated by Pratt’s (1991: 34) influential description of the ‘contact zone’ as the space of colonial encounter where ‘cultures met, clashed and grappled with each other’ in instances of highly unequal relations of power. For Pratt, the contact zone was characterized by ‘rage, incomprehension, and pain’, but also by ‘exhilarating moments of wonder and revelation, mutual understanding, and new wisdom’ (p. 39). It was a site of destabilization that was laden with risk, coercion and inequality, but also co-constitution, improvisation and interaction. Pratt’s (1992: 7) account of the contact zone thus prioritizes the dimensions of encounter that were largely overlooked by the accounts of domination and conquest characteristic of early travel writing and exploration (Rovisco, 2010). It therefore offers a critical perspective on the unequal exchanges and ‘material and cultural costs of colonialism’, whilst not overlooking the agency, participation and resistance of colonized and indigenous people (Nash, 2002: 221; Shaw et al., 2006; Stouraiti, 2012). Because of the emphasis placed on the links between encounter, unequal exchange and pedagogy, the ‘contact zone’ has been used to examine other settings, including spaces of education and research (Besio, 2003; Elmborg, 2006; Manathunga, 2009). It has also been used more broadly to think about the different spaces in which categories of identity, power, and belonging are negotiated. Whether negotiations over ‘Tibetanness’ (Zhu and Qian, 2015), faith (Mayblin et al., 2015) or local belonging (Askins and Pain, 2011), the potential that encounters pose for learning and politics is not only underlined but is what makes them so compelling as a site of analysis.

It is this potential that can be seen in Merrifield’s (2013) work on urban protest, which places emphasis on the politics of encounter to focus attention on how crowds, occupations and social movements are formed and assembled in urban spaces. Encounters between different individuals, agencies and activists, not only produce urban space but generate ideas, build new relations, destabilize boundaries and generate hope, to enable new articulations of power from the ‘bottom-up’ (Halvorsen, 2015; see also Chatterton, 2006; Vasudevan, 2015). This emerging work on the politics of encounter has developed in parallel to work on urban diversity, but the shared interest in the transformational capacity of encounters is clear (Wilson and Darling, 2016). It thus connects with those interested in the ability of encounters to chip away at prejudices or misconceptions of others (Leitner, 2012; Schuermans, 2013), to enact cultural destabilizations (Malam, 2008; Power, 2009), shape subjectivities (Conradson, 2005; Crossley, 2012) or to produce new convivialities and knowledges (Hincliffe and Whatmore, 2006; Leavelle, 2004; Vertovec, 2015).

Such an investment in the possibility of encounter should not be taken as a naïve celebration or assumption that any transformational potential is necessarily good or realized (Halvorsen, 2015). Encounters can also produce anxiety, fear, resentment or violence (Hou, 2016; Listerborn, 2015). They can harden prejudice, affirm and (re)produce binary logics, aggravate existing conflicts or re-enact unequal power relations (Allen, 2004; Lobo, 2013; Stouraiti, 2012). Indeed, recognition of the negative potentials of encounters has led to well-documented efforts to restrict, minimize or prevent them (Schuermans, 2016b). Yet, precisely because the transformative potential of encounter is directly linked to its unpredictability – to the simultaneous risk and repair that it entails (McCormack, 2003) – I share Carter’s concern that any attempts to design out the risk of encounter effectively destroy the very grounds for encounter in the first place (Carter, 2013). In this vein, regardless of how ‘unbearable’ the unpredictability of encounter may seem, it should be accepted that ‘life entails vulnerability to it’ (Edelman in Berlant and Edelman, 2014: 120).

Whilst Section II identified how encounter has been deployed to describe events of relation that are shaped by binary logics, this section has paid closer attention to what happens in the doing of encounter. More specifically, by focusing on the simultaneous making and unmaking of borders, a site of potential, politics and pedagogy comes into view. In the next section, I take the emphasis on vulnerability forward and make a link to enchantment. An investment in enchantment has been described as ‘an open, ready-to-be surprised “disposition”’ (Woodyer and Geoghegan, 2013: 196) and as I will argue, is not only common to descriptions of encounter, but also reflects shared ontological commitments that place encounter at the heart of how we understand the world.

IV Enchantment, the sensuous, and the more-than-human

Geographical work on encounter has demonstrated a substantial investment in the notion of enchantment (Pyyry, 2016), from enchanted encounters in the garden (Bhatti et al., 2009; Ginn, 2014) and the wonder of multi-species encounter (Lorimer, 2015; Mason and Hope, 2014), through to the charm of multicultural encounters and encounters with materialities (Burrell, 2011; Ramsay, 2009; Tarlo; 2007; Watson, 2006; Wilson, 2016). As Bennett (2001: 4) suggests, ‘to be enchanted is to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday’. It involves the unexpected and an encounter with something that you ‘are not fully prepared to engage’. It is worth quoting her at length here:

Contained within this surprise state are (1) a pleasurable feeling of being charmed by the novel and as yet unprocessed encounter and (2) a more unheimlich (uncanny) feeling of being disrupted or torn out of one’s default sensory-psychic-intellectual disposition. The overall effect of enchantment is a mood of fullness, plenitude, or liveliness, a sense of having one’s nerves or circulation, or concentration powers turned up or recharged. (2001: 5, original emphasis)

The conviction that ‘worlds are sensed, not just seen’ (Greenhough, 2010: 43), has not only brought encounters into view but has given the ‘event of encounter’ primacy (Lorimer, H., 2010: 74; Popke, 2009). As Greenhough (2010: 43) argues, Non Representational Theories (NRT) have placed emphasis on understanding life, space and time as ‘emergent properties of the encounters we undertake and study’ – as actualized as a result of encounter. Whilst Section III placed emphasis on social difference and the different ways in which encounters produce such difference, I argue that encounters also make a difference – that encounters register as events that are in some way worthy of note; as events that enact a shift in sensory perception. This is evidenced in geographical work on visceral intensities and the bodily apprehension of encounters (Dixon and Straughan, 2010; Spinney, 2015). For instance, we might reflect on how abject encounters – as encounters beyond the scope of the tolerable (Kristeva, 1984: 1) – are felt through gagging sensations, spasms in the stomach, perspiration and nausea (p. 3), or how exhilarating encounters might be felt through a sudden rush of adrenaline. Spinney (2015) has recently argued that mobile bio-sensing technologies might be one way of examining how difference is momentarily registered on the body, offering an alternative means of researching ‘close encounters’ and one that moves beyond a dependency on auto-ethnographic work. This emphasis on the unspeakable nature of affective experience and intensity is significant. Encounters are joyful, fearful, anxious, uncanny, enchanting and hopeful, and how they are named and experienced as such is of critical import (see Section V).

A focus on the sensory has also concerned how people, objects and places are encountered through the senses – through soundscapes (De Witte, 2016), taste (Slocum, 2008), smell (Wise, 2005) and touch (Lorimer, 2015; Schuermans, 2016a). Whilst this has opened up understandings of how difference is lived, performed and engaged, it also connects with work in animal geography where attention has turned to ‘non-proximal encounters’ as a way of examining animals that are difficult to detect. In reflecting on encounters with animals through trails (Hinchliffe and Whatmore, 2006), smells, sounds, technology and intensities of movement (Mason and Hope, 2014), a concern with encounter has necessarily moved beyond an interest in face-to-face physical contact and demonstrated how the other is brought into intimate contact without necessarily being visible or physically present.

In a similar effort to move away from the emphasis on face-to-face interaction, Swanton (2016) has argued that work on encounter has failed to pay enough attention to the material. For instance, he demonstrates how encounters with materialities become significant to the assembling of multicultural life, highlighting how differentiation occurs through encounters with cars, clothing, shop signs, architecture, backpacks and groceries. Thinking about encounters with objects more broadly has opened up a number of theoretical reflections. For example, Bridge and Smith (2003: 258) demonstrate how thinking about encounters with objects ‘not as place-based intimacies, but as local articulations of material flows’ demands a recognition that only ‘particular qualities of each object are disclosed’ in any encounter because they are shaped by ‘things on the move’. Furthermore, this disclosure is dependent upon who or what is encountering the object in question (Ash, 2013: 23; Warren, 2013). In other examples, Hughes (2008: 328) has considered how encounters with museum objects ‘reconstruct moral geographies’ by making the past proximate, whilst Ramsay (2008) and Burrell (2011) have examined how object encounters become enchanted. Whilst these encounters still focus on the human, Swanton’s (2013) ‘performative economic geography’ of a steel plant considers the transformations that are made possible through material encounters by placing emphasis on ‘the autonomy of parts [to] recognise the vitality and agency of matter’ (p. 287). Whilst material encounters might be difficult to grasp for social researchers (Gregson, 2009), to focus on encounter, he argues, is to focus on material process and instability rather than product.

Some of these examples, which take us beyond the human, feed into very particular narratives of ‘border-crossings’. These ‘crossings’ are about a more ‘radical permeability’ than those outlined in Section III, for they not only open one up to the ‘surprise of other selves and bodies’ (Bennett, 2001: 131), but are extended to ‘nonhuman animals, the wind, rocks, trees, plants, tools and machines’ (p. 131). For Bennett, such confusion of categorical boundaries offers up contemporary sites of enchantment, which gives some indication as to why there is such a strong link between work on encounter and enchantment. Such enchantment is about more than the enactment of ‘hyphenated selves or cultural hybridity’. It is about ‘cross-species as well as inter-human relations’ (p. 163) and a becoming more responsive to the ‘other material forms that share our space’ (p. 157). As noted earlier, this feeds into the wider concern for a more-than-human ethics, which has sought to understand how ‘a redistributed sense of ethical and political possibility emerges from encounters between species’ (Ginn, 2014: 537; Yusoff, 2013) and other organic agencies, landscapes and materials (Bauch and Scott, 2012; Hitchings and Jones, 2004). This not only places emphasis on gathering understanding from the ‘practice of co-relationality’ (Johnston, 2008: 645) but also offers up a way of thinking about the production of empathy when understood as a narrative or sense of something shared (Lorimer, H., 2010).

This emphasis on the ethics of becoming ‘more responsive’ to the world offers a useful way into my next concern, which is the notion of ‘meaningful’ encounter. As I will argue, if we are to take encounters seriously as sites of political and pedagogic transformation, how meaning is defined is a question that demands much closer scrutiny than it has received to date.

V ‘Meaningful’ encounters

Ideas of enchantment have demonstrated how meaning can be found in new forms of attachment to the world and thus in a renewed attention to the vitality of life. ‘Meaningful’ encounters in this context are thus about joy, wonder and animation – about encounters that can disrupt, shake or surprise. In contrast, ideas about meaningful encounter within recent work on urban diversity are markedly different. Here, whilst a concern with ‘meaningful encounter’ is mentioned sometimes only fleetingly, in other instances it forms a key line of inquiry (see for example Hemming, 2011; Matejskova and Leitner, 2011; Valentine, 2008). For instance, in 2008, Valentine called for a greater emphasis on ‘meaningful encounter’ following her critique of ‘romanticized’ accounts of urban conviviality. Such accounts of convivial culture, she argued, have the tendency to emphasize the positive potential of urban encounters for forging new cultures and belonging, without demonstrating how that potential might be realized. In particular, by highlighting the often paradoxical gap between encounters in public space – which are often shaped by expectations of polite and appropriate conduct – and ‘actual values and belief’, Valentine (2008) argues that proximity alone does not necessarily equate to a change in values or behaviour (Valentine and Waite, 2010).

Valentine’s (2008) account of meaning is linked to a concern with the relationship between encounter and prejudice, which draws upon Allport’s ‘contact hypothesis’ (1979 [1954]) to critically examine how contact with difference might reduce prejudice. These important interventions call for a more careful account of the inequalities and relations of power that operate on and within geographies of encounter to shape their effects and potential (see also Wessel, 2009). However, there are two points that I want to draw out here. The first relates to the notion of ‘actual values and belief’. This gives the impression of a set of values and beliefs that are somehow separate and formed in isolation from encounters, rendering them fixed, stable and clearly defined. Noting the paradoxical gap between practice and belief is an important reminder of the other forms of regulation that shape public encounters, but it also highlights the challenge of evidencing the link between encounters and subjectivity. Whilst it would be a mistake to assume that polite encounters can tell us something about prejudice (or the lack of it), this doesn’t take into account how the accumulation of encounters over time might gradually shift perception (Connolly, 2002; Wilson, 2013b).

The second point is in relation to how ‘meaning’ is conceptualized and by whom, for to identify something as meaningful is to simultaneously create value. Work on encounters has often tended to focus on the perspective of the majority or the powerful, whether this be the colonizer, the tourist, the citizen, the ethnic majority or the human. This not only marginalizes a plurality of perspectives, but also has clear implications for how encounters are named, understood and identified as ‘meaningful’. Similarly, in cases where particular outcomes are desired or are of interest, whether the reduction of prejudice, the production of social cohesion or the development of empathy, encounters that do not contribute to these projects, or perhaps even work against them, are rendered inconsequential or even meaningless. This risks overlooking the different ways in which encounters come to matter, equates meaning with positive experience and posits only those encounters that have ‘lasting effects’ as meaningful (Valentine and Sadgrove, 2012: 2050). Such renderings prioritize sequential experiences of time over and above the different ways in which the potentials of the moment are experienced and disrupted (Halberstam, 2005). This is not to suggest that all encounters are equal, are experienced as such or indeed should be. Rather, it is to highlight the danger of dismissing the different ways in which encounters are valued but also of deploying uncritical accounts of ‘meaning’, which can have the effect of undermining their political and pedagogic value and ignoring the context in which they are analysed.

Just as emphasis has been placed on the temporal resonance of encounters, a similar concern can be seen in questions of ‘scaling up’, which have asked how encounters that transform relations at a micro, individual level might have wider impact. For example, Matejskova and Leitner (2011) have demonstrated that whilst encounters with Russian immigrants in Berlin altered how local German residents viewed individual immigrants, they did not have any impact on their thoughts about immigrants more widely. As they argue, this invites the question as to how the ‘logic of singularity’ that precludes the scaling up of any positive encounters might be addressed.

Rather than asking how positive encounters might lead to an automatic change in wider beliefs, we might instead ask how encounters have been strategically mobilized to promote increased awareness. This is a question that I have grappled with in my own work on ‘encounter workshops’, which facilitate encounters between diverse and sometimes hostile individuals with the intention of building new relations (Wilson, 2013b, 2014b). Workshop encounters are used as a means to encourage reflections on attitudes towards others, but they require a deliberate and carefully facilitated process that combines a focus on encounter with wider discussions on prejudice, structural inequalities and the circulation of stereotypes. In another example, Bauch and Scott (2012: 401) focus on a Los Angeles art collective that takes on the persona of US National Park Rangers to provide urban dwellers with the opportunity for encounters with non-human life. The programme is successful, they argue, because it has ‘relocated the affect associated with (supposed) pristine nature to urban places’, purposefully enacting moments of destabilization but also encouraging people to reflect on nature-society relations and environmental issues more broadly. In both examples, it is not assumed that encounters with difference will necessarily lead to a shift in behaviour or thinking. Rather, they demonstrate how encounters have been placed into wider social or environmental contexts for the purpose of reflection and debate.

The mobilization of encounters with ecological diversity can be instrumental to the ‘shaping of environmental responsibility and citizenship’ (Lorimer, 2015: 165), but there is also a need to be cautious. For example, in his engagement with the politics of wildlife conservation, whilst Lorimer has noted how encounters with particular organisms can motivate and transform volunteering practices, he also demonstrates how encounters have been increasingly commodified. As such, encounters have become central to a number of neoliberal logics that demand critical scrutiny. For instance, in noting how the ‘selling’ of encounters is fast ‘becoming the orthodoxy in twenty-first century conservation’ (2015: 143), he argues that encounters with ‘flagship species’ and those with ‘nonhuman charisma’ or ‘exotic’ appeal have been privileged over others as a means to ‘save’ species through zoos, safaris, hunting, wildlife documentaries and cinema. The pursuit of affective and haptic encounters with ‘alterity’ has thus seen the development of a ‘taxonomy of encounter value’ (2015: 11), which places emphasis on aesthetic and corporeal charisma. This not only underlines the relational nature of value and ‘meaningful encounter’, but also demonstrates how, in the context of wildlife conservation, the focus on encounter can prove a problem for those species that do not hold aesthetic charisma. At the same time, it highlights that a focus on encounter does not deal well with absence and thus can actively marginalize species and non-human animals that are not easily encountered.

Rather than suggest that there is no place for the strategic mobilization of encounters within social or environmental work, the above points highlight the need for scrutiny – to better understand how encounters might lend themselves to commodification, biopolitics or neoliberal logics that can have damaging consequences. At the same time it should be clear that those interested in encounter should not always be looking to make wider claims in order to demonstrate value and should thus remain open to the different ways in which encounters come to matter as a site of politics in and of themselves (Closs Stephens and Squire, 2011).

In addressing questions of meaning I have touched upon the temporality of encounters. I turn to this concern in the penultimate section as a second line of inquiry that presents an opportunity for new debates and that might shape future work.

VI Temporality, mobility, and the fleeting

Common descriptions of encounter present it as a meeting that is ‘casual’, ‘undesigned’ or ‘chance’. With the exception of writing on colonial encounter, these descriptions tend to invest the encounter with a particular temporality, demonstrating an interest in the ‘fleeting’, the ‘momentary’ (Lawson and Elwood, 2014), the ‘passing’ (Laurier and Philo, 2006; Wilson, 2011) and the ephemeral (Brown, 2008; Halvorsen, 2015). Reference to the fleeting is so prevalent in work on encounter that there has been some concern that it has gained too much significance with not enough evidence of its value (Valentine and Sadgrove, 2012). Whilst this is a claim that has been contested, there have been calls for a greater engagement with more ‘sustained’ forms of encounter as a result (Matejskova and Leitner, 2011). These calls invite the question as to whether encounters have a particular kind of temporality and thus whether ‘encounter’ is a useful description for more ‘sustained’ relations. Indeed, work on ‘sustained encounters’ is, more often than not, about multiple or routine encounters in spaces such as neighbourhoods, community centres, public transport and schools, rather than single events of relation that take place over a longer period of time.

These questions aside, there are some valuable points to be made about the status of the fleeting. Encounters are not free from history and thus whilst the taking-place of encounters might be momentary, they fold in multiple temporalities. This is a different engagement with history to the kind seen in work that has traced how the past is encountered through material remains, monuments and memorials (Swanton, 2012; Till, 2004; Wilson, 2016a). Instead, this invites questions about what comes to bear on one’s encounters with others, for example, how histories of racism, or aspects of one’s biography become significant in different moments (Connolly, 2002). A concern with time can also be seen in accounts of anticipation and futurity (Anderson, 2014; Adam and Groves, 2007), which have demonstrated how anticipated futures impact upon the present in different ways. For example, anticipatory logics can produce ‘suspicious encounters’ (Schuermans, 2016a; Simon, 2012) in ways that not only shape their momentary taking-place but also their subsequent interpretation.

Alongside a concern for the ways in which different temporalities are folded into the moment of encounter is an interest in the durative quality of encounters. This is not just about identifying those particularly noteworthy encounters that have had a lasting effect in some way. For instance, in reflecting on how one’s capacity to affect and be affected is shaped, Anderson (2014: 85) has argued that ‘capacities have been formed through past encounters, that repeat, with variation, in the habits, repertoires and dispositions of bodies’. Recent geographical interest in habit has demonstrated how situated encounters are affected by social processes that operate ‘elsewhere and in other times’ (Ahmed, 2002: 562) and so not only draw from previous encounters but also tend towards the future and thus the ‘risk of the new’ (Dewsbury and Bissell, 2015: 22). This understanding not only undermines linear accounts of temporality, but also challenges conceptions of habit that render it stable, demonstrating how ‘repetition itself’ can produce difference (p. 24). As such, thinking through the links between habit and encounter invites a reflection on how encounters not only work to differentiate bodies but also become part of their incremental constitution in ways that might eventually lead to ‘tipping points or breakdowns’ (p. 24). Thus, whilst fleeting encounters have been dismissed as having little meaning or little ability to transform values and belief, it is possible that encounters accumulate, to gradually shift relations and behaviour over time – to both positive and negative effect.

As is clear in the discussions on meaning, how the durative qualities of encounter are evidenced is a question that poses a considerable challenge, particularly in relation to the kind of slow and incremental constitutions described by Dewsbury and Bissell (2015). However, this challenge should not be cited as a reason to dismiss the significance of seemingly ‘fleeting’ encounters. Whilst the durative qualities of encounter have been less readily addressed, I would suggest that this says more about methodological challenges than it does about the value of the ‘fleeting’ as a site of analysis.

If references to the fleeting invite reflections on the significance of time (Merriman, 2012), they also necessitate a focus on movement. Movement is often central to the unfolding of encounters, with many descriptions of encounter providing a sense of both mobility and velocity. Often, encounters are not just about propinquity but ‘passing propinquity’ (Brown, 2012; Wilson, 2011). In this regard, it is notable that the turn to encounters has been deeply connected to the turn to mobility, whether research on the fleeting aspects of embodied and affective movement (Spinney, 2015), a focus on mobile spaces of encounter, or work on superdiversity (Vertovec, 2015), which has considered how urban spaces of encounter have been shaped by the diversification of migration channels. Encounters are also at the heart of Bull’s (2011) volume on ‘animal movements’, which presents an understanding of animal movement as central to ‘comprehend[ing] the animal question’ (p. 24) and to engaging animals as active creatures. As Bull argues, when animals are incorporated into global networks of production and consumption at ever faster rates, and as species continue to ‘cross imperceptible boundaries’ (p. 23), encounters must become the key site of analysis for thinking through questions of ‘direction, velocity and power relations’ across a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary debates. Similarly, Callon and Law (2004) have argued that it is precisely because of increased mobility that work on the geographies of tourism should necessarily turn to the study of encounters in place of embeddedness.

A reflection on the momentary enfolding of multiple temporalities and ‘elsewheres’ is not about throwing everything back into the encounter (Ahmed, 2002; Massey, 2005). It is about recognizing that daily life is constituted through ‘attachments and influences that are distanciated’ (Amin, 2004: 39) and, as such, that we need to question what ‘vies for attention’ in different moments of encounter. It is also about disrupting the normative spatio-temporal logics that shape understandings of practice. This links back to the deep commitment to understanding encounters as performed, fluid, and momentary, whilst retaining a critical eye on the structures, histories, and subjectivities that constrain and shape them, but that also allow them to live on.

VII Conclusion

… we learn to be worldly from grappling with, rather than generalising from, the ordinary. (Haraway, 2008: 3)

In particular, the conceptual work of this paper has placed encounter firmly within the remit of difference and surprise. In short, encounters are meetings where difference is somehow noteworthy. Whilst, historically, encounters have been understood as the coming together of opposing forces, which can be seen in the spatial concepts and binary logics that are deployed in descriptions of encounter, a focus on the doing of encounter reveals an interest in the momentary enactments and rhythms of difference that undermine and contradict essentialist thought. Crucially, I have argued that encounters are not only about the coming together of different bodies but are about meetings that also make (a) difference. This dual focus on the naming of difference and its momentary taking-place not only enables a critical reflection on the different ways in which subjects and objects are formed, remade and given meaning, but also on how extensions of power are both undermined and enacted.

In arguing that encounters make (a) difference, the paper has paid particular attention to their transformative capacity and thus to the multifaceted ways in which they have become sites of political and pedagogic interest. As I have maintained throughout, this is not to say that the outcome of encounters can be taken for granted. Encounters are events of relation and are thus unavoidably risky and unpredictable. As such, a heightened sensitivity to conceptualizations of encounter should necessarily accept that ambiguity is not only a core feature of encounters, but is what makes encounters of analytical interest. In making this claim, I suggest that any conceptualization must accept the impossibility of fully ‘capturing’ encounters, their potentials and taking-place. Encounters are mediated, affective, emotive and sensuous, they are about animation, joy and fear, and both the opening up and closing down of affective capacity. An attention to the ways in which encounters are sensed not only moves us away from a focus on face-to-face contact but, as I have argued, can also take debates about the meaning of encounters in new directions by emphasizing the manifold ways in which encounters come to matter. In this vein, I have outlined some future lines of inquiry, which include: a focus on the value and meaning of encounter (and who has a stake in these claims); the tensions that exist between the desire to design encounters and their inherent unpredictability; and, finally, the temporalities of encounter, how they might be grasped, and what implications they have for the status of encounter in different contexts.

Given the nature of these lines of inquiry, I want to finish by thinking about the ethics of attunement. In the context of this paper, the ethics of attunement is not only about researching encounters in less self-focused ways but about attending to and embracing failure, unbecoming, ambiguity, ambivalence, rupture and the fleeting – which, as I have argued, is where the creative potential and political possibility of encounter lies. This is vital if we are to challenge the normative understandings of authority and voice that can so easily inflect work on encounter and leave ‘certainties’ unchallenged. As animal geographers have highlighted, the danger that human-animal encounters could become yet another way in which we learn and think about ourselves (Buller, 2015) has demanded a continued push for methodological innovation. Of course, this is a danger that is not limited to animal geographies. Partiality is inevitable, but the ‘emancipatory energy’ (Ullrich, 2011) of methodological experimentation and debate, whether in animal geographies or mobile geographies, would benefit work on encounter more broadly. This, I contend, requires more conversation and connection across the diverse interests outlined in this paper than has been afforded to date.

For Ahmed (2014), attunement might be taken to be our openness to perceive and deal with what we encounter – an openness to the unknown, which shares some of this paper’s concerns for a redistributed sense of ethical possibility. However, at the same time, non-attunement is taken to be those moments where we fail to ‘pick up’ how another body might be feeling – those moments in which some bodies are rendered strange. An attunement to encounter is thus a call for an attunement to moments of non-attunement, or rather about attending to events of relation where attunement and non-attunement are experienced simultaneously. With this challenge in mind, I share Berlant and Edelman’s (2014: ix) belief that in order to confront the challenge of encounter we must ‘attend to those things that remain opaque or unpersuasive’. Indeed, to borrow the words of Haraway (2008: 3), to be attentive to encounters is to ‘grapple with the ordinary’ rather than generalize from it. For future work on the geographies of encounter, here lies both the challenge and the promise.