Article Being surprised and surprising ourselves: A geography of personal and social change Dragos Simandan Brock University, Canada Abstract Surprises are refuted expectations and therefore an inevitable concomitant of errors of anticipating the future. This paper argues that the timing is just right for a spatial account of surprise, or rather, for a geo- graphy of personal and social change that deploys the trope of surprise to help explain how and why change happens. Whether we are surprised by what transpires in our surroundings or we are surprising ourselves by leaping forward in impetuous deeds of reinventing who we are, the common denominator of these processes of becoming is that they produce geographical space and are produced by it. Keywords affect, embodiment, geographical change, geographical scale, personal and collective futures, surprise, uncertainty I Introduction Curiously, the direct, explicit, exploration of ‘surprise’ as a conceptual entry point and tool for understanding the production of space 1 has been a rather marginal preoccupation in social theory and human geography. A bibliographic search for geographical scholarship that con- tains at least one of the words ‘surprise’, ‘sur- prised’, ‘surprising’ in their title returns only a handful of papers (Deutsche, 1995; Lee, 1976; Mackenzie, 2007; Mills, 2013), none of which is dedicated to the detailed investigation of the phenomenon of surprise as such. The indirect, implicit exploration of ‘surprise’, however, has been a long-standing endeavor in phenomenol- ogy, social theory, and human geography, under the guise of related terms such as ‘encounter’ (Adams, 2017; Kallio, 2017; for a review, see Wilson, 2017), ‘event’ (Dilkes-Frayne and Duff, 2017; for a review, see Shaw, 2012), ‘unpredictability and uncertainty’ (Simandan, 2010a, 2019a; Tucker, 2017; for a review, see Fusco et al., 2017), ‘estrangement’ and the ‘extraordinary’ (Ash and Simpson, 2016; Larsen and Johnson, 2012; McCormack, 2017), as well as ‘risk’ (Neisser and Runkel, 2017), ‘hazard’ (Nobert and Pelling, 2017), and ‘disaster’ (Hu, 2018). Surprises are violated expectations and there- fore an inevitable concomitant of errors of anticipating the future. Geographical work on anticipation has mirrored the internal diversity Corresponding author: Dragos Simandan, Geography Department, Brock University, 1812 Sir Isaac Brock Way, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, L2 S 3A1. Email: simandan@brocku.ca Progress in Human Geography 2020, Vol. 44(1) 99–118 ª The Author(s) 2018 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0309132518810431 journals.sagepub.com/home/phg