Wandering is an embodied movement through a landscape, cityscape, or soundscape; it is a venture that one may undertake voluntarily or reluctantly. It is similar to wayfaring and roaming, and different to walking. As a metaphor and as a figuration of subjectivity, wandering allows for a number of non-linear engagements: loitering, overhearing, wildflowering, meandering, even time travel. When coupled with an act of memory or imagination, wandering can instigate wondering, and vice versa. It can refer to the physical movement of the body through space or the abstract wandering of the mind through time; more often than not, it is both.
The contributions to this special issue on ‘Wandering’ take up the theme in ways that demonstrate how straying from prescribed pathways and patterns of movement can be a transformative experience: one that renders new ways of thinking, reading, gaming, communicating, and being. For the authors featured here, wandering is deeply affectual, at times intimate and empowering, at other times disorientating, melancholy, and compulsive. Wandering provokes an awareness of the ambiances of everyday life, a response to the repression of desire, trauma, and historical violence.
Wandering, of course, is traditionally associated with the city, and many of the articles here extend this scholarship, while others move the discussion of wandering to the natural environment. Historically, wandering has been connected to patriarchal, colonial modes of exploring and mapping, of claiming and naming places. Yet these articles suggest that wandering, as a mode of resistance—as a mobility that is ideologically charged—can provide new ways of being beyond heteronormativity and outside the hold of linear boundaries. In wandering rather than waiting, the wanderer inscribes opposing devices into her narrative: her movement is infused with gendered meaning and is well-equipped to reveal the relational, discursive operations of identity.