Appréhender les émotions dans le contexte d’une thèse CIFRE

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• emotions
• field research
• Canal du Midi
• landscape
• heritage