Studying students’ macroregional imaginaries
Introduction
This site presents the "IMAGEUN - Student Survey" database produced within ANR-DFG IMAGEUN ANR-19-FRAL-011 project. This French-German research project aims at analysing the construction of macro-regional imaginaries, actors' representations of the various great regions in the world (Asia, Caribbeans, Europe…) mainly through the medias, policy-makers together with students. This last category was the public to which was addressed the “IMAGEUN - Student Survey” questionnaire survey between November 2021 and June 2022. It questions the macro-regional practices and representations of over 2,000 students in 5 countries (France, Germany, Ireland, Tunisia, Turkey), through the use of mental maps (representations of the world regions making sense to them) in order to analyse the semantic and spatial dimensions associated with the world regions. The initial objective of this site is to foster collaboration between the members of the research project, and in particular to make it easier for the team to get use of the data. It is also available beyond the project team for the reuse of the data.
Before presenting the database, the site therefore reviews the research project in which this work fits, the design of the questionnaire and the survey methodology implemented. The next step is to explain the processing and enrichments that were carried out to obtain the delivered database described after. Some details on how to get started are given to facilitate its use under specific conditions. Finally, some perspectives are presented, as well as the references used in designing the questionnaire.
The published datapaper
The IMAGEUN – Student Survey questionnaire has resulted in several open-access outputs, including a data paper published in the peer-reviewed journal DEMC, a methodological and reproducible article accompanied by code and data published in the peer-reviewed journal Rzine, as well as a structured and documented dataset deposited in Nakala. All these resources are available in open access.
Published and reviewed datapaper (Marveaux et al. 2025) : Marveaux, Elina, Camille Dabestani, and Hugues Pécout. 2025. “Studying geographical imaginaries with numeric mental maps.” DEMC Journal, no. 3. https://demc-journal.org/articles/revue-3/2795-studying-geographical-imaginaries-with-numeric-mental-maps. Methodological and reproducible article to be published in the journal RZINEThis website (Marveaux et al. 2024) : Marveaux, Elina, Camille Dabestani, and Hugues Pecout. “Studying Students’ Macroregional Imaginaries,” October 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20799613.
Published database (Marveaux et al. 2026) : Marveaux, Elina, Camille Dabestani, and Hugues Pécout. 2024. IMAGEUN - Enquête Étudiante / IMAGEUN - Student Survey. Data. NAKALA - https://nakala.fr (Huma-Num - CNRS). https://doi.org/10.34847/NKL.1DA840S6.
