Research activities
The research carried out by its members falls within the “alternative political approaches” axis of the SOCI & TER Institute – Interdisciplinary Research Institute for Societal and Territorial Development.
Starting from political ecology and / or eco-critical thinkers of modernity (ao Bruno Latour, Philippe Descola, Augustin Berque, Bernard Charbonneau, Jacques Ellul, André Gorz), researchers from the Art and Techniques of Representation department study, highlight, or even develop, other ways of making territory or of forming a society, breaking more or less strongly with the dominant logics in architecture and town planning, this one still being largely centered on the Plan or the Project, zoning and functionalism .
Each time, these bring into play a more radical critique / reorganization of the societies and territories analyzed, the common characteristic of which is to reinvent the relationships between the living, human and non-human, who inhabit a given territory as singular or, to put it differently. , to experiment with other ways of composing worlds, alliances between the living and their territory.
The members of the service thus work on movements such as the Zones to defend, the new peasants, the autonomous villages or, more broadly, the alternative ecological-political communities.
The analysis of these alternative approaches involves a solid critical reflection on images in two ways: on the one hand, by deconstructing them, and on the other hand by reinventing them. Indeed, identifying new ways of composing worlds or working more broadly in the field of political ecology involves reconsidering the images with which we think or more precisely those which, in spite of ourselves, make us think. Our relationship to the world is full of images: city, countryside, visions of virgin space, representations of the “wild”, socially constructed landscapes, fantasies touching the non-human living. We sometimes forget that these images are modern fabrications. However, having narrowed or stereotypical images available does not help transform the way we think. Worrying about these images, disrupting their confidence, putting them aside for a while, establishing their genesis allows us to identify what is aged, devitalized, even false in them and, inseparably, in our ways of thinking. This is very precisely one of the challenges of the research carried out by our members: to deconstruct the images with which we think in order to give ourselves the means to think differently.
To give an example of concrete research, service members work, for example, to invent new ways (countermodern, counterfunctionalist) to map a territory including non-human living. In short, the research carried out by members of the Arts and Techniques of Representation Department within the SOCI & TER Research Institute seeks, on the one hand, to deconstruct the images through which we relate today to the territory and, to the other side, to reinvent new ones in order to be able to think of desirable futures.
Our unit is also associated with the following UMONS research institutes :
