This article looks at the constraints faced by practitioners of traditional medicine in urban areas, and more specifically their access to the plants that make up their remedies. The approach is based on a spatialisation of sampling locations collected from traditional practitioners practising in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. The aim is to show how the urban footprint and land use have reduced the availability of natural resources. This has lengthened collection distances and contributed to the emergence of new practices such as the cultivation of medicinal plants.
Feminist GIS is currently a recognized branch of (critical) GIS. Yet, this association between feminism and GIS once seemed improbable. Feminist interactions with GIS started in the 1990s in the form of strong critiques against GIS inspired by feminist and postpositivist theories. Those critiques mainly highlighted a supposed epistemological dissonance between GIS and feminist scholarship. During the following decade, feminist geographers reexamined those critiques and advocated for the development of critical GIS practices that would support feminist research. Inspired by those debates, feminist scholars did reclaim GIS and effectively developed feminist GIS practices. In this article, I explore the history of feminist engagements with GIS, from critiques to critical approaches.
This article presents an archaeological study of the Argeles-sur-Mer camp, one of the camps set up by the French government in the south of France to house refugees from the Spanish Civil War in exile in France from february 1939 onwards. The first aim of the project is to unearth the spatial forms of the camp, which have now disappeared. It then looks at the spatial translation of the socio-political processes that gave rise to them, to show how space was used to confine and monitor refugee populations until 1942. Finally, it examines the role of the camp's legacy in the contemporary transformation of space. Echoing the biographical narratives of micro-history, the study takes the form of a cartographic narrative produced on the micro-scale of the place of confinement. Based on selected archival sources, the maps tell the story of the camp in order to read and analyse the spatial dimension of confinement and question the transmission of its forms. The study also takes part of a teaching project on cartography and the history of places of memory.
Mental maps are studied in geography through a visual filter, without really analyzing the effect of non-visual perception on the construction of mental maps, especially on landmarks in the city. Our study of visually impaired and blind’s mental maps, through surveys and go-along interviews, questions a possible fragmented aspect of the mental maps of the city, built by proximity senses (touch, olfaction, hearing). Our results show that fragmentation depends upon visual impairment, but more precisely upon the individual’s self-reliance.
