Xavier Bernier est professeur des universités en géographie à Sorbonne Université Paris, où il dirige le laboratoire Médiations-Sciences des lieux, sciences des liens (Unité de Recherche de S.U.). Il est également membre du rhizome Chôros. Il étudie les sociétés au prisme de leurs mobilités et de leurs différentes façons de traverser l’espace. Ses travaux sur la notion de traverser le conduisent à interroger ce défi social à travers les figures spatiales qui lui sont associées.
Queuing: although the expressions for it vary, the practice is probably one of the most widely shared experiences. However, it is far from being trivial. The observation of this singular experience, which plays with everyone's patience, speaks of cohabitation, and therefore of politics. [...]
Actor and ‘actor’: Is there more than a metaphor between a performer and this concept of social science? Probably, and the war in Ukraine makes us more clearly aware of this. [...]
Itinerant trade is a very old activity. Today, it is deployed in a variety of forms and contexts. Nowadays, store trucks are developing very different business proposals with a large variety of vehicles. Their commercial tours produce social links in specific networks. It is a model of original urbanity. [...]
Of the wise and the foolish, of the moon and the finger, the popular proverb chooses the former. It is nevertheless advisable to question the obvious. Between the unchangeable visible and the works in progress, between imitation and invention, between forms of ease and a work on oneself, on others and on the World always difficult, who wants to make the fool does he not make the wise man? [...]
Billions of ‘connected objects’ give new leverages for an ontological blurring between humans and things. The discussion should be taken back to basics in a context where actors, environments, and material or immaterial objects populate our daily lives. [...]
This work experiments with writing constructed by a combination and assembly of cut-out images. The discourse produced is based on a new visual grammar and seeks to show how space is broken up in order to be recomposed. To give substance to this project, a work of expression through images is proposed through a photograph of a district of Tokyo (Japan) likely to allow a kaleidoscopic writing and reading of an urban crossing. [...]
The presence of Freda Josephine McDonald at the Pantheon, France's national necropolis, does not only question the memories attached to each person buried here. It questions the role of the state and that of society as a whole in memorization processes. In addition, as an atypical and unique inhabitant of the place, Joséphine Baker reports significant changes in the choice of the figures honored here. [...]
Laughing is a tiny act, but not only. These seven lessons for « advanced beginners » show that models of society and politics are pervasively present in laughing practices and ethics. Moreover, as spontaneous as it may be, laughter has much to do with reflexivity and provides a major contribution in this regard. [...]
Staycation is a concept that aims to define new vacation practices from home. This work questions them in the context of a form of reinvention of tourism in connection with the Covid-19 crisis. How to consider in the space of societies what it is suggested to call tourheresm (tour-here-sm) and tourherecists (tour-here-sts)? [...]
Based on three people who have nothing in common but sharing the same surname, the text describes their possible links and formulates interpretative conclusions which put them into perspective. Beyond that, however, the main question of this ‘workroom-of potential-science’ experiment is whether it is possible to draw scientific conclusions from a corpus chosen on non-scientific criteria. [...]
