Sur le terrain de l’émotion : déconstruire la question émotionnelle en géographie pour reconstruire son horizon épistémologique

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• Emotions
• Feminist Geography
• Fieldwork
• Aesthetics Régime of Knowledge
• Spatial Knowledge