Search/ing for missing people: Families living with ambiguous absence Hester Parr a, * , Olivia Stevenson a, c , Penny Woolnough b a Geographical and Earth Sciences, East Quadrangle, University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK b Division of Psychology, School of Social and Health Sciences, Kydd Building, Bell Street, University of Abertay, Dundee DD11HG, UK c IRIS, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT, UK article info Article history: Received 24 November 2014 Received in revised form 24 August 2015 Accepted 8 September 2015 Available online 28 September 2015 Keywords: Families Missing people Absence Ambiguous loss Search abstract Families of missing people are often understood as inhabiting a particular space of ambiguity, captured in the phrase ‘living in limbo’ (Holmes, 2008). To explore this uncertain ground, we interviewed 25 family members to consider how human absence is acted upon and not just felt within this space ‘in between’ grief and loss (Wayland, 2007). In the paper, we represent families as active agents in spatial stories of ‘living in limbo’, and we provide insights into the diverse strategies of search/ing (technical, physical and emotional) in which they engage to locate either their missing member or news of them. Responses to absence are shown to be intimately bound up with unstable spatial knowledges of the missing person and emotional actions that are subject to change over time. We suggest that practices of search are not just locative actions, but act as transformative processes providing insights into how families inhabit emotional dynamism and transition in response to the on-going ‘missing situation’ and ambiguous loss (Boss, 1999, 2013). © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). 1. Introduction “His last words to us were ‘I'm off, see you tonight’” (Charlotte, mother of Paul, missing for 3 years and still missing) Most of us in well resourced, democratic societies live with taken-for-granted securities in ordinary life in which our living loved ones are almost always contactable or known to be some- where. For some, however, this sense of security is threatened when a family member or friend or colleague is missing, something that happens with surprising frequency with approximately 306,000 annual incidents in the UK (NCA, 2014). This paper considers what emotive actions accumulate in the space of absence for the people left behind, drawing on a funded research project in which UK families 1 were interviewed about their experience of living with the absence of, and search for, their missing person. As we discovered, search/ing 2 for a missing person is an emotional process, one also marked by (often competing) geographical knowledges and com- plex relationships with police officers charged with the task of locating the missing (this process may be significantly different elsewhere in the world, and see Edkins, 2011; for examples). We start by situating the paper with reference to interdisciplinary research concerning ambiguous loss and grief. This literature sug- gests that humans cope with absence via ‘continuing bonds’ with those who are gone, but that they also may become fixed or frozen by the trauma of their loss, especially in the case of ambiguous * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: hester.parr@glasgow.ac.uk (H. Parr), olivia.stevenson@ glasgow.ac.uk (O. Stevenson), p.woolnough@abertay.ac.uk (P. Woolnough). 1 According to Valentine (2008) ‘families’ have been uncritically understood within human geography, as they have been primarily interpreted as a unit of analysis through which to study social reproduction. Valentine has sought to broaden debate about the utility of analysing families and their relative ‘related- ness’ and ‘intimacy’. Although we do not explore the use of the term ‘family’ in this paper, we recognise critical family scholarship that argues that families are complex in form (Finch, 2007; Morgan, 1996). Each family member will experience being ‘left behind’ in missing person cases differently and we have endeavoured to use a range of voices (of mothers, a father, daughters and sisters) in the main text, although fathers and brothers are also represented more fully in our wider study. For scholarship on missing persons from the perspective of the siblings of those reported missing see Clark 2011. 2 In using 'search/ing' we deliberately use a combined construction of ‘search’ and ‘searching’ to indicate the simultaneous reference to a practical, material or virtual act with particular parameters (a search) and reference to a constant pro- cessional investigation to locate another human being (searching). Search/ing may have emotional or psychological dimensions, and may combine in a variety of ways at different stages of a noticed absence and be operative at different scales. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Emotion, Space and Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emospa http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2015.09.004 1755-4586/© 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Emotion, Space and Society 19 (2016) 66e75