My three end years articles

 As well as creating maps and datavisualisations, I sometimes write scientific articles. And the last few months have been very productive, as I've completed and submitted three texts for publication!

1. The call Spatially and in all directions: methodologies, sensitive methods and geography of scientific journal Norois focused on the various issues involved in sensorial geography. With the late arrival of the ‘sensitive turn’, the call for papers noted the development of a geography of emotions, structured under the label of ‘sensorial geography’. The emergence of this new term led to question this notion, both in terms of objectivity and scientificity of the produced knowledge.

My personal practice of sensorial cartography makes sensorial geography a logical field to explore the place of ‘emotions’ and their ‘subjectivity’. The relationship between the geographical field and the researcher's position seemed essential to me, leading me to engage in an epistemological reasoning about the role of the ‘field’ and its ‘experience’ in sensorial geography.

My paper ended with the following conclusion: although influenced by cultural and feminist geography, sensorial geography stands out for its attempt to put an end to the researcher/subject dualism which is characteristic of field survey. It favours the creation of a space-time of its own, aimed at helping both the researcher and the enquiry subject to escape from the various dualisms, injunctions and dominations experienced in the field/territory, through a new relationship built on the sharing of each person's sensory/sensitive worlds.

Originally, the article was also dealing with the links between geography and literature, and in particular the interest in reinvesting ‘literacy’ analyses and theories to study and describe the haptic data, the unspoken meanings and other subjective data of these moments of ‘sharing’. But this part of the paper was far too long for the 50,000 character limit requested by the journal, and I had to shorten my text.

2. The call Politic of objects of the journal Tracés was the opposite of the approach that Norois adopted. Although its theme focused on ‘objects’ (and potentially the emotions produced by them), the journal mainly considered them in terms of their ‘political’ aspects, whether from a critical perspective of their analyses, their participation and representation in politics, or the normativity and ideology that they support.

These questions were at the very heart of my Master's thesis. Dealing with space debris/waste in outer space, I analysed their techno-scientific management and theirs political implications in orbit. An idea that stood out in my work was that space debris/waste are more than that; they are real geopolitical and geo-economic objects. This goes beyond their typical technical and ecological perception.

The article reintroduced various concepts from my thesis (including the inclusion of debris/waste in three modes of techno-scientific risk governance), while introducing new aspects. I specifically developed the reasons why these objects were ‘forgotten’ at the start of the space conquest, and why they became a ‘problem’ at the turn of the 1980s.

This article almost never saw the light of day. Caught up in the morass of writing, I greatly exceeded my schedule and the call deadline. But the coordinating team was kind enough to offer me an extension, which enabled me to finish it. However, the text submitted was truncated by 30,000 characters — developments on the tactical/strategic interest of this ‘oversight’ of the space debris/waste, as well as their links with the ‘adaption government’, were removed to reach the 50,000 characters requested.

3. The Visionscarto website does not operate by calls for papers, but is ‘a place of open exchange’ mainly centred on geography and cartography. I submitted articles to this website in July and August 2024, about the mapping of the gold geopolitics in Kenya and on the Noumean Youth Identity Day (NYID).

The idea of a sensorial cartography workshop on the first three months of the 2024 New Caledonia unrest came to me at the start of this crisis, but seemed impossible to put together quickly. In August 2024, in the middle of an editorial correction, Philippe Rekacewicz reactivated this project, leading me to organise it at Rex Nouméa on 29 August 2024 with the help of Tehani Omar.

As with the NYID, this workshop became the pretext for an article dedicated to it, presenting the (geo)political discourses of the Caledonian unrest. Unlike my usual methods, I based my outline on poetic quotations from Déwé Gorodey, Nicolas Kurtovitch and Grace Mera Mollisa, which form the real structure of the article. Synthesising the various points set out in the prologue caused me some difficulties, as the bibliographical research was very extensive. Over forty sources were consulted in the process.

The article was published in French on 10 January 2025.

All in all, these three very different - and seemingly independent - themes kept me fully occupied at the end of 2024. While one of the texts is beginning its editorial life on Visionscarto, the others are currently being proofread by the scientific committees of the two journals. It is very likely that these two texts will never be approved, but they were an enriching and structuring experience for me, both in terms of writing/style and reflection/thinking. Perhaps I could publish them on this blog if they get rejected?

I only have two regrets:

- Choosing (due to lack of time and energy) not to use inclusive writing for the Norois and Tracés calls;

- Not having the time to produce explanatory dataviz and infographics for these same two texts.

I hope I'll be able to resolve these two points when I get the feedback and proofreading!

Read ‘Three months of violence in New Caledonia through sensorial maps’ → https://www.visionscarto.net/trois-mois-de-violences-en-nouvelle-caledonie