Dear CGFers,
Denis Cosgrove asked me to post this on the forum. We held the last
Symposium of the European Group for the Study of Geographic
Representations at Royal Holloway (known here as Euro96, but let's not
get the list started on football again). Given some of the comments in
the past about Anglo-centrism, it's a good place to meet and discuss
matters with people in different traditions (albeit still, obviously,
Euro-centric before you write - although the last one contained some
interesting discussions about different kinds of Eurocentricism from
different Europes.) It's multi-lingual, and some of the different
perspectives are fun: I enjoyed being told over coffee that we Anglo
geographers are obsessed with discredited French philosphers and critics
and that we should be thinking about, well er, what sounded like urban
morphology to me. But maybe it lost something in translation .... which
maybe is the point ....
SPACE: NARRATIVE AND IMAGE
Symposium of the European Group for the Study of Geographic
Representations, organised by the Laboratoire Ville/Société/Territoire
and the Maison des Sciences de la Ville at the Université
François-Rabelais of Tours, 4-5 December, 1998
The European group for the Study of Geographic Representations was
founded in 1980, on the initiative of researchers and teachers, mainly
from France, Switzerland and Italy who share interests in an
international approach to social representations of space. Later opened
to British scholars, the group holds a biennial symposium to survey
current work and propose future research directions on a chosen theme.
Contributions from members stimulate critical debate among a group who
share common interests in issues of images and representations but who
often approach similar questions in quite diverse ways. Critical
external contributions are equally significant to the Group's work, thus
each symposium offers the opportunity to invite specialists from other
social science disciplines to assess the ideas developed within
Geography.
The next biennial symposium of the Group will be held at the end of 1998
at the Université François-Rabelais at Tours. The last meeting at Royal
Holloway University of London in 1996 took as its theme
Centres-Margins-Networks: European perspectives on space, identity and
representation. This meeting will address more general questions
concerning the ways in which narratives, graphic images and diagrams
represent and mobilise space in the context of social action. The
objective of the symposium is to stimulate epistemological and
theoretical reflection and discussion, allowing a forum for comparing
diverse approaches and objects of study within geographical research on
these matters.
The symposium will have three strands, structured around a limited
number of presentations, each coordinated by a commentator charged with
stimulating debate, which will be the principal objective of the work of
the symposium.
i. Iconic space/textual space
An epistemological and cognitive interrogation of the ways in which
space is realised and presented within diverse texts and images:
academic, professional and popular. By referring to 'realised and
presented,' we imply that space is at once communicated and constructed
through representation. It is suggested that as an object of knowledge,
a spatial object varies according to the semiotic medium through which
it is represented. While easily stated and acknowledged, this claim is
insufficiently analysed in its foundations and consequences for the
understanding it can offer of spatial phenomena - if the message is not
entirely the medium, it remains nevertheless the case that the latter
does more than simply conveying and giving appropriate form to the
former.
This session is devoted to determining the different knowledge effects
of textual and graphic spatial representations. This is not in any way
to suggest a superiority of one over the other but to address certain
key issues:
- How do texts and images articulate within statements made and
used by geographers, planners, urbanists etc?
- What spatialities and temporalities are constructed, utilised
and diffused through these means?
- Such questions should lead us to question the individual and
complementary status of narration and description within spatial
discourses (ie those which take space more or less as their object) and
to overcome the tendency to oppose text and image.
- This session should also serve to generate a genuine debate on
the ways in which different schools of thought within the social
sciences have treated these questions. It seems for example that French
social science may have undervalued the figural and iconic rather less
than is customarily thought, and that very many authors are interested
in thinking through the status of graphic images as sophisticated
instruments of knowledge.
ii. New imageries/new spaces
This session will be devoted to an even less fully considered problem
within geographical research, or rather, too often considered
exclusively as a matter of technique: that of relations between spatial
representation and new forms of numerical and image production,
especially GIS.
There are three dimensions to the objects designated by the generic name
'imagery.' Geographic, or more generally spatial, imagery generates a
specific object: the icon in the sense of a formal visual message, whose
presence is permitted by the existence of a surface: classically a sheet
of paper, increasingly a screen alone without recourse to 'hard copy.'
Such modifications of the iconographic medium raise vital questions for
this session. Every icon is the result of an enunciative act which puts
to work the third dimension of imagery: the modus operandi, ie. it
employs particular means of realisation, determined as much by
discursive as by technical considerations.
This analytic approach reminds us how much our present modes of iconic
spatial figuration tend to be aligned to Modernity in the respect they
pay to certain fundamental principles of representation and
objectification. However, behind this relative uniformity, diverse
types of modern iconic figuration are profoundly differentiated at every
level of analysis. For example we recognise, even if only intuitively,
that 'new technologies' such as PC and GIS introduce profound
modifications as much in the form of the icons they produce as in the
ways they produce them. According to some, therefore, we can no longer
believe that computer operation does not introduce supplementary effects
into the performance of images which remain basically unchanged. On the
other hand we should recognise that we have been witnessing over a
number of years now a genuine change in the principles and values of
'classic' spatial imagery. Thus, it appears that the modalities of
realising both time and space have been transformed by these processes.
This session will be devoted to specific studies taken from the domains
of geography, GIS, planning and urban studies which seek to evaluate,
following the claim made by Gaston Bachelard that 'when the image is
novel, so is the world,' where novelty resides within the spatial worlds
communicated by new technologies.
We might equally seek to grasp this novelty by interrogating certain
emblematic figures in contemporary geographic discourse which are
powerful in organising spatial knowledges and which find in different
information systems media perfectly adapted to their expression. We
wish particularly to examine critically the image of the network which
seems today to subsume more and more of geographic discourse and thus to
become the titular figure of so much thinking on space, a fetishised
object ripe for deconstruction.
iii. Contestation and conflicts: the image in action
Since its first symposium the study group has consistently directed its
critical attention towards what might be called the pragmatics of the
image, studying images in and through their actions. The proposed
symposium will naturally pick up this theme, taking stock of existing
geographical research on the issue and examining different ways of
approaching the fundamental questions of relations between image and
action, whether through the agency of major social actors or of ordinary
individuals operating within the economy of signs.
In this area, it seems that studies of urban conflicts: environmental
disputes, contestations between institutions, local people and consumers
around planning issues etc. should constitute the basis of this session.
Situations of disagreement and contestation and also of eventual
movement towards consensus, allow different systems of representation
and different practical instruments to be brought into play, more or
less intentionally, by the protagonists involved.
Organisation
Coordinator:
Michel Lussault,
professeur de géographie, Laboratoire Ville/Société/Territoire, Maison
des Sciences de la Ville, université de Tours.
Organising Committee :
Christian Calenge, (Prag de géographie, Ville/Société/Territoire, Maison
des Sciences de la Ville, université de Tours),
Bernard Debarbieux (Maître de conférences de géographie, université
Joseph-Fourier, Grenoble),
Michel Lussault (professeur de géographie, Maison des Sciences de la
Ville, université de Tours),
Serge Thibault (professeur d'urbanisme, Ville/Société/Territoire,
Directeur de la Maison des Sciences de la Ville, Tours).
Scientific Committee:
Rafaele Cattedra, (géographe, université de Naples), Bernard Debarbieux
(Maître de conférences de géographie, université Joseph-Fourier,
Grenoble), Denis Cosgrove (Professeur de géographie, Royal Holloway,
University of London), Michel Lussault (professeur de géographie, Maison
des Sciences de la Ville, université de Tours ), Ola Söderström
(géographe, directeur de la Fondation Braillard-Architecture, Genève,
enseignant à l'université de Lausanne) Jean-Bernard Racine (Professeur
de géographie, université de Lausanne), Serge Thibault (Professeur
d'urbanisme, université de Tours).
Conference Languages:
French, English, Italian
Registration
If you wish to present a paper or to attend the Conference, or receive
further information, please complete the form below. Those wishing to
present a paper are requested to attach a brief summary of their
intended presentation.
Name: .............................................................
Institution:
........................................................................
..............
Postal address:
........................................................................
........
Email address:
........................................................................
..
Telephone:
........................................................................
..............
Fax:
........................................................................
..............
If you are wishing to present a paper:
Provisional Title:
Abstract (5 - 10 lines)
Please return before March 30 1998 to:
M. Lussault, Maison des Sciences de la Ville, 4 allée du Plessis, 37000
Tours,
email: [log in to unmask]
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David Gilbert
Department of Geography,
Royal Holloway,
University of London,
Surrey TW20 0EX.
Tel (01784) 443653
Fax (01784) 472836
[log in to unmask]
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