Losing Touch with People and Place: Labor Mobilities, Desensitized Bodies, Disconnected Lives

Abstract

Losing touch is a pervasive bodily experience that has received surprisingly little geographical attention. Developing geographical thought on mobility and touch, our article aims to provide a more comprehensive account of the geographies of losing touch. Conceptually, we propose that enclosure and exposure are two spatial metaphors that can help to understand processes of losing touch in terms of reconfigured body–environment relations. Substantively, we explore losing touch by referring to experiences of mobile workers who work away from home for periods of time. Reflecting on interview encounters with male mobile workers in Australia, we present four distinctive experiences of losing touch and analyze them in terms of enclosure and exposure. For our mobile workers, losing touch is an iterative process of desensitization that can crystallize in tipping points where losing touch eventually becomes sharply registered in sensation, potentially catalyzing new forms of agency. We conclude that losing touch can be understood as a form of estrangement that is intensified by mobile work regimes.