Formalizing a psycho-social geography: contributions from French-speaking geography to behavioral geography
Résumé
Session "Future directions in behavioral geography II". ---------- Faced with the deficit of a psycho(socio)logy of space and the behaviorist turn missed in French-speaking geography, I suggest the formalization of transdisciplinary methodological tools and theoretical contributions to the epistemology of a psycho-social geography, and more generally to behavioral geography. As an innovative and pioneering geographical field in French-speaking geography, psycho-social geography aims to understand in a more complex way the role of space in the constitution of the individual, his psyche, behaviors, attitudes, and in his relationships to others, how each individual understands himself and the world, and how he approaches it according to his own conditions and modalities of existence. (1) Firstly, I present this geography that feeds on other fields of the geographical discipline (phenomenological, humanistic and hermeneutic branches of a social, cultural and emotions geography) and on other social and cognitive sciences (mainly on social and environmental psychologies, socio-anthropology and biographical research). (2) On the other hand, I propose three methodological-conceptual tools to analyze, from the discourse of the individual, his spatiality-psyche-biographic relationships: the bio-geography, the personal geographic investment, and bio-geographicity and locality links.