Contenu du sommaire : Écritures en géographie

In the legitimate concern to consolidate their "scientific" scope, social science journals, the Annales de Géographie among others, have established publication protocols : double blind reading, evaluation grids, etc. These approaches have produced their effects : ensuring the journal's scientific readership, making it easier to read and thus encouraging the dissemination of results. The purpose of this issue is not to make a radical critique of these methods, but to point out that, on occasion, rhetorically academic writings can also lock up the social sciences and, in so doing, deprive them of expressive possibilities that are also capable of giving an account of the functioning and dynamics of men and women living in society.

The TV series are now a case-studies section in social sciences. However, they have not been extensively analysed in geography, especially the types of discourse they provide on space, and the way the spoken representation is delivered. These discourses, and the ways of writing associated, are analysed in this paper using a corpus of American and South African TV series focusing on New York and Johannesburg. Addressing how space is staged in these TV series, this paper aims at exploring how New York and Johannesburg high school students react to such representations and studying how they can acquire some knowledge in urban geography thanks to TV series.

This article presents analysis about writing poetry as a creative method in the field, in order to assist people in expressing themselves about their own life, especially those who are not familiar with storytelling. Such a methodology has been developed during a two year'ethnographic field study with private security guards of Nairobi (otherwise called watchmen), subaltern workers whose lives are structured by precarity, everyday humiliations and under strong relationships of domination. These watchmen of Nairobi appear as highly vulnerable, especially when one asks them to build and tell the story of their own life. The ability of saying “I”, the one of being embedded in a linear and progressive time structure, as well as the ease of giving sense to different lived places, are indeed not obvious skills for each and every one. Facing these challenges, I argue that the use of poetry can be of great help in order to express lives with better fluidity. Nevertheless, this requires particular caution with the concrete conditions of writing, and the examination of the ethical questions that they may raise. This paper thus deals with varied issues at stake when one engages in “making others speak” (or write): co-authorship, materiality of writing, building a “space of one's own”. Alongside, it questions the different ways by which we – as researchers and writers – can incorporate poetic productions within our own academic texts. This poetic/scientific articulation is far from reaching a deadlock, but is rather an advocacy for giving more space to unstable and precarious forms of writing in our texts.

Alexander von Humboldt wrote a huge number of pages in his long life and career : letters, papers, books constitute a large testimony of his contribution to geographical and natural sciences. The process of writing is not to be seen as superficial or anecdotic in his trajectory. On the contrary writing represents for him a major part of his scientific activity. With Ludwig Fleck and his idea of « collective thought », we can argue that Humboldt considers writing as an act of translation, a way to assure the understanding of the world to a large public. He not only built a dialogue with other scientists, but also with a non-scientist public, considering that the world has to be understood by everyone. In that perspective, he built a writing program that echoed his scientific one. By using metaphors and depicting the landscapes as paintings, by using art as a medium in his writing, he therefore emphasized the style, not over the scientific message but in order to reinforce it. In that way, the work of Humboldt is as much a work of understanding the world as much as a work of translating it.

The aim of this article is twofold. On the one hand, to propose a reading grid based on the concept of dwelling that would make it possible to explore theatrical spatialities, i. e. what happens on a stage when actors perform a text (written or not) in the context of a performance. On the other hand, mobilize this reading grid to study the geographical dimensions of the trilogy Des territoires written and directed by playwright Baptiste Amann. The analysis highlights the importance of the spatial dimension in understanding the historical, social and political meanings of the work, and its contemporary significance.

This article analyses five contemporary plays about space and effects it undergoes owing to planning projects, whose creation is based on investigative work. Its objective is to understand the intentions, investigative methods and writing practices of these artists, as well as the choices and difficulties they have faced. The aim here is not to judge the aesthetic qualities of these plays but to understand how their authors mobilize investigative knowledge to carry out their work, and can, in this way, inform about geographical issues. The theatre, through its specific means of representation and as a space for encounters between audiences, offers a stage for the representation of territories, the planning projects and the debates they generate. These experiences differ from the practices of academic writing while questioning its conventions. By focusing in particular on the place of the author, the use of fiction and formal inventions, this article will highlight how these theatrical forms open up new perspectives for producing knowledge about space, between the habitus of objectivity specific to academic research and the expression of subjectivity in an artistic creation.

From his own field notebooks where, much more than scientific notes, many treasures lie hidden, the geographer has at his disposal unused odds and ends – « fragments » – which could give rise to various kinds of writing. These include : anecdotes, personal thoughts, use of forgotten sketches, and even novelistic fiction. For example, the geographer might rediscover some typical songs of his student years to share. However, one does not usually publish this kind of material. It's simply not allowed within academic habits and traditions of academic publication. Yet field notebooks, travel notebooks and personal journals often contain lyrical and spontaneous elements which are capable of easy transformation into literary writing. Rough drawings are also a kind of writing and could be considered as texts in themselves. The strict and narrow digital standards of academic publication deprive us of many immediate and first-hand materials written from life. These materials would allow immediate access to a complementary and invaluable kind of information which would bring us closer to the moment of writing. Whatever the form used to « make » geography, the essential point is to transmit to the reader a creative, serious and at the same time joyful aspect of our discipline. Geographers are too much discreet. If geographers were less constrained in the way they communicate, they might have more media influence.

This article explores the relationships between the Tableau de la géographie de la France by Paul Vidal de la Blache (1903) and Le Dépaysement, voyages en France by Jean-Christophe Bailly (2011) around their investigation of French identity. If the first is organized around the logic of "painting", with a panoptic aim, the second, explicitly linked to the principle of travel, nonetheless produces a plurality of paintings. Both in search of a certain French identity, they compose it in their relations with places and their restitutions. The static of the "painting" never economizes on movement, while the travelogue, in its stages, never does that of stops on images. The tensions between stability and circulation, between framing and setting in motion, gradually draw the characteristics of the French identity for each one. The analysis of their respective and crossed literarities focuses on two aspects : the analysis of images and metaphorical registers, on the one hand, and the use and literary functionality of proper names on the other. These ways of writing both contribute to national geopoietics.