Contenu du sommaire : Géographies des émotions

At the intersection of medical, political and cultural geography, this paper investigates colonial blues (cafard colonial), a kind of homesickness, which appeared among the French Foreign Legion and African colonial army during the 1880s. At first, the cafard colonial was considered specific to these troops and claimed as one of their identifying characteristics. Then, in the 1910s, physicians defined this form of nostalgia as a colonial pathology. During Word War I, the cafard affected as well French soldiers in the trenches and in the 1920s eventually became nothing but a kind of blues that may be experienced by anyone in French Society. In French colonies, cafard crises often resulted in explosive violence, easy to excuse because of its medicalization. The cafard is indeed consubstantial with colonization and its contradictions, which make finding a rightful place impossible for the colonizers. This paper calls for a critical analysis of geographical affects.

Many contemporary urban planning professionals value affects and ideal urban dimensions. The desire for a more sensitive city symbolizes the need for spaces to be lived in, tried, contemplated and proven in the context of accelerated metropolisation. Are we witnessing a turning point in urban design ? Nothing could be less sure. The consideration of representations, sensation, feeling, and emotion associated with specific urban areas still remains marginal in urban projects. To understand the feeling of a place as knowledge, without oversimplification or exploitation, we need to definite the terms and consider the emotional relationships of places, and their spatial translations, without misrepresentation. The results of the research-action “L'Enjeu du paysage commun” and “Fabrique Active du paysage” question the methodology to consider feelings, personal experience and perception and the potential descriptors of the urban sensitive world. The system of the urban affects knowledge challenge today's urban intervention. But there is a need to reconnect urban places and landscapes with emotion and urban planning.

This study looks at emotions as a means to understand how the recent notion of “Ecosystem Services” (ES) is likely to change the relationships between natural spaces and various actors. Several ways to grasp emotions in our interviews are presented. The results highlight how ES lead to rethink the relationships of human with natural spaces and their elicited emotions. Heritage area and area of conservation interest are conceived from another perspective. A relationship of dependency between human and nature stand in for a constraint of nature conservation by human. Compensation and commodification of natural spaces trigger manifold emotions, where love of nature is replaced by personal interest. Mapping area through the notion of ES may be entailing disappointed expectations among various actors for now. Finally, studying emotions allow us to underline a complexity in actors' positions contrasting with the common idea of that ES are an overall success.

Since the 2000s, some groups of inhabitants are mobilized in the center of Santiago de Chile for a double objective. The first is the defense of their neighborhood from its potential destruction due to the rise of real estate projects in this sector of the city. The second objective is the heritage revalorization and the protection of the neighborhood. How are they structured and organized ? What are the meanings that they give to their actions ? From these questions, the paper proposes a reflection about the functions of the emotions felt and expressed by the participants of these heritage mobilizations. The discussion is based on an ethnographic field work conducted in 2014 and 2015 with residents of the Matta Sur neighborhood, in the center of Santiago. Participating observations, meetings with inhabitants and semi-structured interviews with the leaders of the mobilization movement are used in order to analyze these social-spatial processes.

Nowadays, places linked to painful memories are among the most favourite visiting spots in a world of globalized tourism. This paper deals with the experimental and emotional setups which organize the visits of such places. It endeavours to scrutinize the various scenographies and paths laid out for the tourists' use. Il also deals with the expression of emotions by the latter as well as their appropriateness to the places visited. Thus, the emotions can be construed as a spatialized agent of memory, based upon the confrontation with and the discovery of the places of painful memories. As such, they do reveal in the same space-time framework the tension between the expectations of collective experiences to be built and to be commemorated. 

The article is about emotions induced by the experience of sound. It aims at sharpening the assumption that emotional dimension is not only about an individual sphere, but rather a social sphere, which can contribute to its comprehension. Through case studies, we will argue that sound, through the emotions it engenders, participates in generating specific places identity or revealing it to the users. If « the sound makes the space public » (Amphoux, 2014), some projects are also the sign of a certain way to design the city by the institutions. How the sound interacts with an urban identity that the city of Strasbourg wishes to convey? How feelings accompany these changes? Some neighborhoods, like Neudorf, backbone of the urban marketing of Strasbourg, are put forward through the contemporary art, arousing controversial emotions; for Hautepierre, popular district in urban renovation, projects with sound are carried by an association to reveal memories connected to the urban changes.

During the 1930s, colonial movies often included a cafard (blues) scene. The cafard colonial affected female characters, played at times by realistic singers, as well as male roles, such as those played by the French star Jean Gabin. But this nostalgic feeling corresponded to different emotions according to gender : sadness for women, anger for men. Film music was a key element for staging the cafard. Just as with other pro-nostalgic props, music allowed the audience to share the character's memories and emotional experience, if not the catharsis, which concluded these experiences. Aestheticized in and by these movies, the cafard became a performance. Staging the cafard did not necessarily imply criticizing colonization, and may paradoxically have comforted the audience in its exoticism. Nevertheless, the cafard scenes presented this emotion as legitimate, and may have helped spread it among French colonists. At the same time, these scenes testified that life in the Empire was not easy, and may have lured some spectators away from colonial aspirations.

This paper investigates the aesthetic dimension of the geographical creation. It introduces both a corpus and a series of tools (conceptual and theoretical) that may serve in the development of a broader epistemological perspective of the discipline. In the first part, the aim is to contribute to a genealogy of the diverse ways in which the emotional phenomena involved in the research process has been accounted for in geography — from a problem to a significant fact, and, ultimately, to a medium in the production of geographical knowledge. This contribution is based on a study of several positions developed on fieldwork methodology, especially in feminist and qualitative geographies. On this basis, the paper then introduces three different aesthetic regimes of spatial knowledge in relation to the different methodological standards successively promoted within the discipline:  the scopic regime of masculinist fieldwork, the linguistic and haptic regimes of feminist and qualitative fieldwork. The second part of the paper critically examines the recourse to a model of care by feminist and qualitative geographers in their effort to base the disciplinary methodology on relationality. It interrogates the political limits that have been met by such approaches in their attempts to fully found an alternative mode of scientificity for the discipline on emotion. Conversely, the paper demonstrates how, if taken seriously not only for its methodological and conceptual coinages but also as a theory of subjective-identity, the psychoanalysis of care (or a so called transitional psychoanalysis) helps to support the development of a qualitative epistemology entirely based on emotion.

Within the context of the April 25, 2015 Nepal earthquake, this paper examines how four researchers deal with the disaster throught the lens of their emotions whether they are on site or away. Their personnal accounts show that their localisation both in Nepal and in France does not interfere much in the nature and the organisation of emotions. Those are indeed almost the same. Aside from an extra-ordinary event, the mechanisms which originally produce emotions and their differential impact on individuals, are widely based on various and personal references related to the researchers past experiences, fieldwork, careers and status. Finally, these emotions are also channeled more or less strongly according to each person's capacity to act and adapt him or herself to space and distance.

This study considers how to introduce an emotional geography to children and pupils. Fictional children's literature is used as object and support preferred to propose such learning (in primary school level, at the time sense of geographicity is in full development,). Firstly, this text submits a theoretical framework. Under this, emotions are based on feelings (and sentiments) that appear as the most interesting to reveal and to study. Secondly, a practical process to investigate geographic emotions with children's literature is proposed. The main purpose of this paper is to offer a set of concretes activities for a field work within the school curriculum or in extracurricular activities. A fiction's corpus (in particular a picture book) about migration and exile's experiences is taken as an example to literary and geographical works. A range of exile's emotions (sadness, surprise, peace, security, happiness) is identified.

This article deals with the use of a certain kind of walking interview, the urban walks, which I explored in the context of my master's dissertation about Johannesburg's nights as objects of desire and objects of fear. The urban walks allowed me to observe, in situ, the way people interact with urban nocturnal spaces. To walk at night in Johannesburg is, however, quite challenging, in a city characterized by a culture of fear. Astonishment was a key emotion in that regard: it made people willing to participate, but it also allowed reflexive thinking on that methodology. Mirroring the interviews, the use of the urban walks aimed at enriching data, involving certainly verbalization, but also and more importantly, non-representational ways of communicating, allowing for bodies, emotions, senses to be analyzed alongside with words and representations. Navigating between discomfort, fear, disappointment and pleasure, the urban walks question Johannesburg's nocturnal spaces and also allows for some kind of appropriation.

Employed by the managing organization of Canal du Midi, which is the object of my thesis, I witnessed daily the expression of various forms of emotions, from admiration for its designer, to indignation concerning its maintenance, through depression in front of a controversial project. Working on the actors and governance issues, in the context of a landscape upheaval deemed as a real ‟disaster″ for this Unesco World Heritage Site, I collected several points of view from territorialized actors sometimes persuings opposite objectives : the proper functioning of the hydraulic structure, economic and tourism development, heritage conservation, biodiversity maintenance, etc. These various conceptions led me to wonder about the representations and values attached to this site and seemed to me to be correlated with emotions. Indeed, emotion could be the proof of heritage. Therefore, this article aims at clarifying a reflective process on my own situation in front of negatives emotions, at considering other emotions that affect me less, and finally at overcoming this apprehension to enrich the content of my thesis and conceive emotions as a way to better understand the complex relationships between actors.

Since its creation by the situationists in the 1950's psychogeography in France has been more or less ignored by social sciences, and the sensitive approach to cartography considered an experimentation, rather than a research topic in itself. But in the sensitive approach to the notion of space, emotion, according to psychogeographers, seems to be playing an important part as far as the collection of data is concerned. This perception of space and its ensuing representations, leads to the making of territories. Thus, through an experiment held with 2nd year engineering students (from March to April 2015) this article proposes to revisit the notion of psychogeography, in order to identify and understand the connection between psychology and the apprehension of space before defining to what extent an emotional cartography can become an additional tool in the outlining of a territory.

What kind of feeling does a walk in the city leave in our mind ? Every day we go through neighborhoods, walking the streets, experiencing geographical areas. We build our own representation and memory of spaces. How can we grasp, how can we enter the hidden image of living spaces ? These are the kind of questions for a workshop of a group of researchers and artists who got together in Rezé (44) from the 1st to the 5th of September 2014 in the context of the thematic school Mob'Huma'Nip « Arts and Social Sciences in motion : narratives, iconography and walks to revisit in situ ». Therefore, the collective formed by those artist and researchers explored the sensitive relationship to places, experiencing during five days a set of artistic proposals, combining perfomance and plastic artworks. This « field notebook » is a return of this collaboration between art and science.