French Studies Lab Project
Taught at: Colby College
Last taught: Spring 2022
At a fundamental level, the climate crisis calls us to interrogate how we as human beings dwell in and move through the world that surrounds us. In the wake of the spatial turn, which dates from the late 1970s and early 1980s but whose origins go back much farther, there has emerged no shortage of critical theories that endeavor to provide a framework for understanding these sorts of interactions. Decades after they first appeared, such theories as Gaston Bachelard’s “poetics of space,” Guy Debord’s “drift,” Michel Foucault’s “heterotopia,” Michel de Certeau’s “rhetoric of space,” and Marc Augé’s “non-places,” among others, continue to hold sway in critical discourse across the humanities, a fact that is all the more striking given that they were all penned by white European men. As environmental justice has become a core tenet of the international response to the climate crisis, these foundational models for understanding how humans practice space and place stand to be reexamined in light of a greater diversity of human experiences.
In this course, we will use Colby’s campus, the city of Waterville, and the surrounding area more broadly as our laboratory to put various theories of the spatial turn to the test, in order to see how well they hold up or in what ways they may need to be rethought. In addition, we will also study how literary, cinematographic, and artistic productions by contemporary creators from throughout the French-speaking world have grappled with these very questions. The overarching goal of the course will be to understand how we might be able to bring together our individual lived experiences of space and place as the basis for new, more sustainable ways of engaging with our host planet.