France, Alternative Libertair #222 - Research and struggles: Geography, it also serves to make the Social War (fr)

A new wind blow it on geography? The question may seem surprising because reading 
textbooks leaves little room for critique. Provided there are critical currents in this 
discipline ... Geography, it also serves to make the Social War [1] ---- Symposium on 
"Space and social relations of domination, research sites", held on 20 and 21 September at
the University of Marne-la-Vall?e, a good example and allows to feed many hopes. [2] -- He 
first made a strong act of affirmation of radical and critical currents not only in 
geography, but also the social sciences. Fifty researchers reported their work in various 
fields. Thus the workshop "Managing the poor instead of fighting poverty" has attempted to 
deconstruct policy inspired more by a concern for policing a willingness to fight against 
inequality.

This discussion has been extended by another workshop entitled "The capitalist factory 
space" analyzing the mechanisms of privatization and urbanization driven by domination 
employers and councilors.

The dominant classes grow in the creation of global cities that concentrate powers 
financial, economic and political service logic of capitalist accumulation which is absurd 
as a social ecological perspective. This weakens the other areas (peri-urban areas, towns) 
while concentrating more and more wealth in the cities, not only increase by the phenomena 
of competitiveness between cities, which ultimately promotes the phenomena of 
privatization in planning, social policy and public services ... Among the targets of the 
participants there were also the notion of mobility is increasingly the injunction. It has
been shown that most mobility (international migration, occupational mobility ...) are 
constrained and do not have much to do with freedom of movement and settlement that we can 
defend. Other interventions dealt with gender and nesting relationships of domination, or 
ecology and its struggles.

Promising
Thinking went far beyond thinking university curled up on itself. Throughout the 
conference, several interventions from the floor emphasized that undermine the social and 
spatial relations of domination could be limited to a review of the dominant and the 
dominated issue struggles es should occupy a Central this link is essential if you do not 
want radical critique is enclosed in a ghetto university. From this point of view the 
intervention of U.S. nationals geographer Don Mitchell [3] was enlightening. Recounting 
his journey, he explained how Marxist ideas, libertarian and radical environmentalists 
have become the majority in some departments of geography in the United States, but also 
how this current was isolated by cutting social movements in the 1980s and 1990. It seems 
that the message has been understood. This is what one might think, seeing the 
opportunities that emerge after the conference whose proceedings will be published. 
Organize meetings in a form other than the traditional academic conference, that is to say
self in alternative spaces, with a reflection on the practices (including public 
speaking), the link with social movements, or write an anti-geography textbook for 
secondary education, an overview of the many proposals discussed. It remains only to pass 
the lab.

Laurent Esquerre (AL Paris North East)

To go further: An interview with two of the organizers in a number of books devoted to 
geography geographers criticalhttp://www.carnetsdegeographes.org/

[1] See Yves Lacoste, Geography, it is, first to the war, 1976.

[2] The call for papers and the conference program: http://acp.univ-mlv.fr/

[3] Don Mitchell is a professor of geography at Syracuse University (New York, United 
States) and one of the leading figures of the American radical geography. See especially 
Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (2000) and The Right to the City: Social 
Justice and the Fight for Public Space (2003).