Geography
Pauline Guinard, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Sciences Po Grenoble, PACTE, 38000 Grenoble, France

Associate professor of geography at the École normale supérieure of Paris, Pauline Guinard conducts research on the relationships between cities and the arts. For several years, she has endeavored to study the role of emotions within the production of contemporary cities, using a practice-based research process.

For the past few years, I have been interested in the role of emotions within the relationships that individuals and groups cultivate with space, urban space in particular. What is it about a place, a neighborhood, or a city that attracts us, frightens us, or even saddens us? Why are these spaces associated, for certain people, at different moments of the day, the year, etc., with such-and-such emotion? Studying emotions in geography supposes that we have certain methods at our disposal that are capable of grasping this emotional and, more broadly, sensory dimension of our relationships to spaces. This methodological challenge is all the more crucial since –as Anne Volvey, Yann Calbérac, and Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch have shown– the tools mobilized up until recently by geographers are essentially discursive (interviews, questionnaires, discourse analysis, etc.) and visual (observations, maps, photographs, etc.). Thus, how do we as geographers achieve to grasp emotions in all their dimensions, when they are often multi-sensorial and not necessarily verbalized? Taking emotions into account therefore entails a (re)invention of the methods available to geographers.

It is in response to this issue that, in 2019, Jean-Baptiste Lanne and I began conducting a series of experimental methodology workshops within the framework of the “Geography of Emotions” seminar, aimed at collectively elaborating methods for capturing and analyzing emotions. For each session, a guest speaker offered up an investigative methodology, often drawing upon artistic media (poetry, theater, drawing, etc.). These approaches were then tested collaboratively among the workshop participants, before a discussion of their contributions and limits. During one session, for instance, Lise Landrin invited us to explore her approach on “triggering theater”, as a means of accessing emotions (our own and those of others) through words as well as with our bodies. Such experiments require that a trusting relationship be built among all participants, independent of their status (teacher, researcher, student, artist), so as to allow the expression of emotion outside of judgement. This turn toward artistic methods, which call more directly upon the sensory and subjective, widened the range of possibilities on the methodological level. In addition, this experimentation made it possible –following a trial-and-error process– to test the potentialities of each method in order to validate, amend, or invalidate its various aspects. The experimental nature of these proposed methods of emotional comprehension also led participants to accept error as part of the experience and thereby part of the learning process and the production of knowledge. Failure was, therefore, no longer conceived of as the end of something, but rather as a step, oftentimes a necessary one, in the construction of knowledge and emotional savoir-faire.

The interest of experimentation, and even more so of creative experimentation, is furthermore based in the fact that it encourages more collaborative approaches to flourish. The participation of diverse audiences in these experiments, and the validation of their diverse sets of knowledge, can in effect be a means of reducing the incertitude of the experimentation process, thus pushing it even further.

More from this author:

Pauline Guinard, Jean-Baptiste Lanne, “Emotions from and beyond the classroom. An experiment in teaching and sharing emotional methodologies in a geography course”, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 2021, [online]: https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2021.1977916 (12/10/21)

Cite this item: Pauline Guinard, “Experimentation”, translated by Lauren Fabrizio, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177829