Spatial Transformations and Social Relations

Axis 1 “Spatial transformations and social relations” brings together some twenty laboratory researchers. The aim is to use different fields of study and disciplinary approaches – social geography and history, the sociology of physical activities and sports – to again question the relations between the production of space and the configurations or evolutions of past and present societies. This “between” and this “and” attests the refusal to consider space as an inert given or a simple framework for observing social developments, but rather to understand it as a social construction and as an issue of power.

As a privileged place of interaction between space and society, the city – whether ancient or contemporary – constitutes the special point of intersection for several research projects, even if other aspects (tourism, for example) do not fall within the scope of urban studies. The term ‘transformation’ also emphasises that it is a question of going beyond the static or structural observation of social relations in a given territory to emphasise the dynamics by which societies and the spaces they occupy, compete, interact and reconfigure themselves regularly. The debate on theoretical references is one of the challenges of the collective work, as well as the methods used (quantitative or qualitative) or the corpus (from archaeology to sociological surveys).

Axis 1 Participants

Sandie Beaudouin, Audrey Bertrand, Amandine Chapuis, Armelle Choplin, Anne Clerval, Florence Costa, Matthieu Delage, Gabrielle Frija, Thierry Guillopé, Danilo Guiral Bassi, Mathilde Larrère, Vincent Lemire, Éric Levet-Labry, Antoine Marsac, Sophie Moreau, Mari Oiry-Varacca (coord.), Diane Roussel, Pierre Savy, Loïc Vadelorge (coord.), Anne-Emmanuelle Veïsse, Serge Weber