Search Results

In his geopoetic trajectory, Sony Labou Tansi grants Brazil pride of place, highlighting its stance (its gueule, or « maw »), open ever in retort to the « North-Deaf dialogue », the realities of its tropical « gut », and its dreams of heterotopic space. This Brazilian tropism borrows the emblematic « password » saudades from the correspondence that Sony began with Sonia (d'Almeida) following their meeting in Lomé in 1982. That same year, in Paris, a second, key meeting took place – between Sony and the poet Thiago de Mello, whom he adopted as his Amazonian « father ». As for Sonia, she became his Brazilian « sister ». Via the sense of saudade that it brings forth in him, Brazil, so close by way of its luxuriant literature, forests and rivers, comes to signify, for Sony, the real « replacement » country, a placeholder for the Kingdom of Kongo. Hailing back to his first visions, the letters to Sonia, the poems to Thiago and the final, posthumous novel seek to reconnect « the geographies of fear », if only as a default for filling the hole of History.

With the rise of globalization, a debate has started emerging to determine if transnational corporations could be held to have human rights obligations under international public law and more generally, if non-state actors could directly be subjected to international human rights standards.

Reference works which marked their day and were improvements over what previously existed are normally taken for granted, eventually forgotten. The in part posthumous work of N.X. Willemin in selecting and publishing the ‘National Antiquities' of France, is one of the earlier and more important histories of the arts on a comparative method, treating works front the sixth to seventeenth centuries as documents of the historical evolution of society. The art works discussed were not only in the leading Parisian and provincial museums and libraries, but from outstanding private collections as well, so the Monuments français inédits is the result of a complex series of relations between scholars, editors, collectors and dealers in the transitional period between Revolution and Restoration. Their identification and the characterization of their activities will provide scholars with a more secure foundation for further research in the early Romantic period which is as yet poorly documented.

This paper is a demographic study of the French colony of Saint-Pierre, near Newfoundland, between 1763 and 1816. The colony was conquered by the British in 1778 and 1793 and France only took possession again in 1816. Our data are culled from entries regarding births, marriages and deaths from the Parish registers of Saint-Pierre. In this research, we are presenting the results of a quantitative analysis. Our conclusions illustrate the fact that there was a substantial number of deaths among young children and that people chose to marry within their own social ranks. But one of our most significant findings is the high number of deaths among sailors and fishermen during the fishing season, between May and September.

Keywords: démographie, histoire, Saint-Pierre, colonie française, registres paroissiaux, xviiie – xixe siècles, demography, history, Saint-Pierre, French colony, parish registers, 18th–19th centuries

This article is inspired by a series of research studies promoting an “historical ethnography of administrative work.” One of their assumptions is that the ethnographic method should be reported to historical research as it allows to shed light on practices that are sometimes difficult to grasp in the present because of the lack of access to the research field(s). This article examines the daily work of the asylum screening process, in France, since the creation of the administrative body in charge (OFPRA) in 1952 until the early 1970s. It focuses on the social properties, trajectories, and practices of the agents of this administration, by combining ethnographic and historical approaches, and as grasped through archival sources and testimonies. The article shows that the refugee screening work depends on OFPRA's recruitment logic as well as on the ideological and diplomatic considerations of both the French government and OFPRA's agents, that all tend to converge. It also shows that the social properties of these agents as well as their practices marked by a conception of the refugee as an “orphan of the national,” and by the weight of asylum seekers' nationalities in the screening process, are in line with the practices and the international conventions of the 1920s and 1930s. The analysis therefore contributes to challenging the widespread idea of the creation of OFPRA, and more so of the Geneva Convention, as major turns in the international refugee regime.

Keywords: ethnographie historique, droit d'asile en pratique, OFPRA, Guerre froide, « âge d'or », réfugiés, propriétés sociales des agents, intérêts diplomatiques, Convention de Genève, historical ethnography, asylum in practice, OFPRA, Cold War, “golden age”, refugees, agent's profiles, diplomatic interests, Geneva Convention

In the early years of the province of Canada, Kingston and Montreal were alternately seat of government and then capital, and various development projects were proposed. However, making the history of these cities as capitals can only be done at the crossroads of political and urban history. It is therefore important first to look at what capitals are, their development and their relationship with the modern liberal state. We will then examine the three projects for the seat of government and then the capital from 1838 to 1849, in Montreal (1838–1840), in Kingston (1840–1843), and again in Montreal (1844–1849). These projects, which were more or less completed, will be examined along two axes. On the one hand, on the political level, the successive choices testify of an increasing empowerment in the face of sovereign power and a “modern” affirmation of the capital as a political centre. On the other hand, the proposed and partially implemented developments reflect a desire to enhance the material and symbolic value of emerging power in the urban space. In that perspective, the project to establish what would be called a “parliamentary city” in Montreal is the most complete, but the provincial government, limited in its resources, must adopt a more focused approach. In the end, the capital projects reflect the vicissitudes and difficulties of a new emerging state, whose marks on the urban landscape and memory of Kingston and Montreal remain unknown.

Since the XIX century, the role of green space in French urban policies underwent significant changes. Regarding the objectives of planning, we can identify three periods in which new management practices and many novel typologies of green spaces appeared: functionalist urban planning, sustainable urban planning and ecological urban planning. Therefore, the evolution of urban green spaces was based on “aturalness gradient”: from private garden with a high aesthetic level to multipurpose urban greenways. Nowadays, studies that focus on “ature”in the city are based on tow principles: (i) the evaluation of ecosystem services and (ii) the connectivity of particular habitats. The aim of this paper is to trace the historic evolution of the role of green areas in cities with reference to the diverse theories and practices of urban planning.

Keywords: espace vert, trame verte, urbanisme, planification, nature, biodiversité, végétation, green space, greenway, town planning, planning, nature, biodiversity, vegetation

Based on an unprecedented experience of bringing together two logics of research, held to be contradictory according to epistemological norms in the social sciences, this article explores how to articulate a mathematized approach to large networks, calculated from web flows, and a socio-informatics approach of controversies, evolving through non-linear critical processes. Using new digital mediations, the authors suggest some pathways for a learning interface between human interprets and algorithms. The collective cognitive device that emerges from this cross-fertilization can create a new critical approach on how social processes unfold in digital worlds, from official sites to social media.

Keywords: Analyse de réseaux, sociologie, controverses, algorithmes, corpus, processus complexes, socio-semantic networks analysis, sociology, controversies, complex processes, text-mining, macroscopes, Análisis de redes, sociología, controversias, algoritmos, corpus, procesos complejos