Movement refrains of people with visual impairments: A post-phenomenological geography beyond space and place

The paper intervenes in current discussions within post-phenomenological geography. It analyzes the movement of people with visual impairments in order to develop an approach to post-phenomenology that emphasizes the in-betweenness of bodies in motion. Our perspective differs from phenomenological (and humanistic) geographies and from post-phenomenological geographies that are rooted in object-oriented ontology. They both rely on the differentiation between space and place, accept pointillism, treat places as points in space, time as exclusively chronological, and bodies as beings, not becomings. We analyze data from interviews with people with visual impairments. We first consider their movement through the perspective of humanistic (particularly phenomenological) geography. After acknowledging the limits of this approach, we turn to our actualized conception of post-phenomenological geography, which draws on Deleuze’s concepts of movement, path, refrain, and involuntary memory. With this conceptual repertoire, we go beyond the space-place dichotomy and highlight the in-betweenness and virtuality of movement. We explore difference-producing repetitions, which are constituted through refraining into paths. Our approach conceptualizing movement as “refraining into paths” is instrumental to studying the movement of people with visual impairment: It helps to dispute ableism, and it enriches the current discussion about post-phenomenological geography in its insistence on relations and becoming.