Towards a New French-Speaking Social Geography?
Contemporary research in geography in Quebec appears to be divided between social and cultural geography. A similar tendency has been observed in France by Christine Chivallon. In each nation there is, however, a tendency towards reconciling the two per-spectives. Many social geographers deal with questions of representation and identity, and cultural geographers do not hesitate to refer to the social in their study of place. In Quebec, especially, both geographies show a similar interest in the spatial encounter of populations with unequal access to power, within a framework concerned with the issue of the nation. A comparative analysis of recent work conducted by two young geographers interested in the relationships of the social and the cultural, one French, the other from Quebec, shows how their trajectories meet, despite differences due to the particular context in which their knowledge is produced. This convergence reminds us of the evolution which led to the emergence of the new cultural geography in English-speaking countries in the 1980s. Would French-speaking geog-raphers from France and Quebec be in the process of creating a new social geography on both sides of the Atlantic?