This group is for people interested in the tropes of “missingness” — in writing and film, as well as broader cultural contexts ( social media, social sciences, law enforcement, folkways, etc.). In literature, among the relevant areas are detective fiction, especially postmodern detective fiction (i.e., Paul Auster) and memoir; in film, of course, the occurrences are vast, ranging from art film (Antonioni’s L’Avventura) to thrillers. In social media, we have the proliferation of Facebook pages, forum sites, Reddit, and other online spaces where people who have a missing loved one communicate and help one another, but also such spaces where “true crime” obsessives follow, comment, but also involve themselves in arm-chair searching and speculating (sometimes, if rarely, with results). How can minds trained in the study of texts apply those skills and perspectives to the study of missingness in its broader contexts?