ANR-DFG IMAGEUN

Investigating Macro-Regional Imaginaries

IMAGEUN Project

IMAGEUN research project « In the Mirror of the European Neighbourhood (Policy): Mapping Macro-Regional Imaginations » aims at studying macro-regional imaginaries, their constructions and evolutions based on their spatial, representational, discursive, material and tangible dimensions. To this end, it positions itself in the fields of political geography, critical geopolitics, the geography of representations and theoretical and quantitative geography. As part of the French-German ANR-DFG Funding Programme for the Humanities and Social Sciences 2020-2024, this research project ran from February 2020 until May 2024. Led by the Collège international des sciences territoriales (CIST) on the French side and the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main on the German side, it involves eleven research teams and universities based in France, Germany, Ireland, Tunisia and Turkey.

Scientific coordinators

  • Veit Bachmann (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main) - Germany
  • Claude Grasland (Université Paris Cité, UMR Géographie-cités, FR CIST) - France

Researcher members

  • Kmar Bendana (Université de La Manouba, Tunis - Institut de recherche sur le Maghreb contemporain) - Tunisia 
  • Hannah Boettcher (Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Institut für Geographie) - Germany
  • Camille Dabestani (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - UMR Géographie-cités) - France
  • Clarisse Didelon-Loiseau (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - UMR Géographie-cités) - France 
  • Georg Glasze (Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg - Institut für Geographie) - Germany
  • Murat Güvenç (Kadir Has Üniversitesi) - Turkey 
  • Alun Jones (University College Dublin) - Ireland 
  • Antoine Laporte (ENS Lyon - UMR EVS) - France
  • Betty Rouland (Institut Convergences Migrations - Institut de recherche sur le Maghreb contemporain) - Tunisia
  • Sophie de Ruffray (Université de Rouen Normandie - UMR IDEES) - France
  • Neila Saadi (Institut de recherche sur le Maghreb contemporain) - Tunisia
  • Laura Schuhn (Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Institut für Geographie) - Germany
  • Étienne Toureille (Université de Rouen Normandie - UMR IDEES) - France 

Engineers

  • Elina Marveaux - Géomatique (CNRS - FR CIST) - France
  • Hugues Pécout - Géomatique (CNRS - UMR Géographie-cités) - France 

Support team

  • Marion Gentilhomme - Communication (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, FR CIST) - France
  • Helena Larcher - Finance (Université Paris Cité - FR CIST) - France 

Objectives

This project is concerned with the spatial imaginaries (Agnew 2016; Bailly 1989; Gregory 1994) that construct the world and its regions. It aims to analyse the representations, practices and possible feelings of belonging to these groupings, defined as macro-regions. In geography, a macro-region is first and foremost described as a region: “a piece of space that is distinct from the neighbouring space” (Beaujeu-Garnier 1971), but with the originality of existing on a scale situated between the State and the World (Mareï and Richard 2020).

Based on Murphy’s hypothesis Murphy (2013) that macro-regional imaginaries play a decisive role in the understanding of the world by its inhabitants and the various actors in geopolitics, the aim of this project is to understand how regional divisions of the world are constructed, how the imaginaries associated with different regions are connected to one another (Jessop 2012; Montello 2008; Murphy 2013; Paasi 2010) and how they are understood, explained and appropriated by individuals. As part of a French-German research program, this project focuses on the European space in a wider scope. By considering the EU and its neighbourhood, it aims to question the link between the construction of these macro-regional imaginaries and that of a European region understood as a territory shaped by the relations linking the European Union (EU) to its neighbourhood (Moisio et al. 2013).

Despite this European focus, the aim is to extend the analysis beyond a single European space by situating it within a wider whole in order to study its relations with the macro-regions of the rest of the world (Asia, the Mediterranean, the Maghreb, the West, etc.) and the imaginaries associated with them.

Study Areas and Themes

With a view to studying macro-regional imaginaries in a dialogue between Europe and its neighbours, the questionnaire survey was distributed online to students in five countries: mainland France and the French Caribbean communities (Martinique and Guadeloupe), Germany, Ireland, Tunisia and Turkey. The project is being carried out in five countries, involving research teams in France, Germany, 1, Tunisia and Turkey.

Each of these territories has a specific spatial position and political, historical, institutional and administrative status in relation to Europe and the European Union. Mainland France and Germany are members of the EU and considered to be at the heart of the European region. Ireland, also an EU member state, has the particularity of being an island territory, facing both the continent and the Atlantic. Outside the context of the EU, Tunisia and Turkey are located in the European neighbourhood and present two distinct positions. Turkey, which has long been a candidate for EU membership, is represented as a crossroads of world’s regions, between Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. To the south of the Mediterranean, Tunisia is anchored in a large European region that is both functional and political, but above all in a Mediterranean and North African space where migration issues and political and post-colonial relations intersect.

The project focuses on three areas of analysis:

  1. Political figures and decision-makers: Through interviews (coordinated by Veit Bachmann and Antoine Laporte)
  2. The media: Through semi-automatic analysis of a corpus of news items (coordinated by Claude Grasland and Georg Glasze)
  3. Higher education students via a digital survey (Student Survey) (co-ordinated by Sophie de Ruffray, Clarisse Didelon-Loiseau and Camille Dabestani)

For more information on the ANR-DFG IMAGEUN

The Student Survey

The main aim of the third part of the project, which is the subject of this document, is to study students’ macro-regional imaginations by analysing their individual and collective practices and representations (Bronner 2018; Dernat et al. 2018). Considering students’ geographical imaginations on a macro-regional scale as political, historical, social and cultural constructs (Grataloup 2009; Lewis and Wigen 1997) means taking into account the multiplicity of territorialities (Cattan 2014; Guérin-Pace 2006) as well as their complex and blurred nature (De Ruffray 2007; Didelon et al. 2011). The idea is to analyse the semantic and spatial definitions of macro-regions and their possible relationships from the point of view of a survey population made up of undergraduate students (survey called IMAGEUN Student Survey).

The survey is aimed at students from the five countries mentioned above, including the French Caribbean communities (Martinique and Guadeloupe). These island territories, which are part of an EU member state (France), have a set of criteria (distance from the continent, island economy, size of the territory, etc.) that give them the status of Outermost Region (OR) as defined by the EU. Martinique and Guadeloupe are thus at the crossroads of the Americas, within the Caribbean and institutionally within the EU, and are caught up in political and social relationships linked to the French colonial heritage2.

This study, which takes the form of a questionnaire survey, is part of the legacy of work on spatial practices and representations at small scales: EuroBroadMap on representations of Europe and the world in forty-three cities in eighteen countries (Beauguitte et al. 2012; Brennetot et al. 2013), Europe in the world (financed by ESPON) on the representations of Europe by researchers and policy-makers in the field of European spatial planning involved in the ESPON programme (Bachmann 2015; Didelon 2010), GlocalMap on citizens’ perceptions of France’s territorial network (Grasland et al. 2019) or on the representations of Europe and the worlds of Turkish students (Toureille 2017). These researches are based on questionnaire surveys and use in particular a mental map methodology (Gould and White 1974), a device for collecting spatial representations in graphic form (drawing, outlining, locating).

The mental map as an investigative tool has had an original and relatively long-standing place in geography, particularly considering the possibilities it offers for obtaining a spatialised representation of geographical objects (Sudas and Gotken 2012). Unlike Saarinen’s pioneering work Saarinen (1988), which adapts this method (hand-drawn maps or sketch maps) to a small scale, the methodological contribution of the research mentioned above is based on a data collection protocol (“interpretative mental maps”) enabling quantitative processing of the geographical information describing these vast areas (Didelon 2010; Didelon-Loiseau et al. 2018, 2019). The innovation proposed as part of the IMAGEUN Student Survey is to take this methodology, which was initially developed for surveys carried out on paper (printed questionnaires incorporating one or more map backgrounds) and implement it as part of an online survey.

This choice was made in the very specific context of the start of the Covid-19 pandemic (2019-2020). This unprecedented and highly restrictive situation for a survey requiring access to numerous survey populations located in different countries with different crisis management and containment policies, called for major adaptations. It involved taking into account the limits and constraints on accessing the survey population in relation to the health instructions issued in each country and in each university, and changes in these instructions from the start of the questionnaire construction to the final administration (from 16 November 2021 to 30 June 2022). The various choices made in this context of major constraints are presented in the Methodology of the Survey section.

  1. The United Kingdom was replaced by Ireland during the course of the project.↩︎

  2. Camille Dabestani’s thesis on “Construction des imaginaires macro-régionaux dans les marges ultra-marines de l’Europe : études des territoires français de la Caraïbe↩︎