The Joint research community GRAPHIC(1) is a Research and action group on living modes, socio-spatial innovation and citizenship. This community brings together players from civil society and the academic world, with a view to creating a research network. The composition of the consortium is interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary (geography, sociology, psychology, management sciences). This paper focuses on spatial approaches to disability.

The GRAPHIC community explores the question of citizenship through the lived participation of people with disabilities. GRAPHIC questions the singularity of the living experience of people with disabilities in the various territories. This participation is confirmed by the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities of United Nation and the French law N° 2005-102 for the equal rights and opportunities, the participation and citizenship of disabled people. In this paper, we focus on the principles adopted by the GRAPHIC community to encourage the participation of disabled residents in workshops and to gather different experiences of living.

Workshops with disabled people are at the heart of the GRAPHIC program. Several qualitative methods and tools are available to local residents. This paper presents the tools chosen by the residents. They enable us to understand the spatial dimension of the living experiences of disabled people. Experimenting with tools selected by the residents themselves allows us to capture their relationship with space. This paper shares experiences of living in different ways: the accessibility of housing and the residential environment, residential choices, everyday spatial practices, and so on.

Whatever their living arrangements, the places where they live, or their relationship to daily mobility, residents express common positions on the subject of their freedom to act and movement. This paper focuses on the participants' relationship to citizenship, based on their living experiences.

(1) GRAPHIC - Ce projet a été financé par la Caisse nationale de solidarité pour l’autonomie (CNSA) dans le cadre du programme de soutien à la recherche « Autonomie : personnes âgées, personnes en situation de handicap à tous les âges de la vie, proches et professionnels » conduit par l’Institut pour la Recherche en Santé Publique (IReSP) ». « AAP-2023-SCMR-331215 »

This paper deploys a legal geography lens to examine the rights of disabled people to independent living with a focus on empirical conditions in Ireland. There are over 1.5 million disabled people living in institutional settings across the EU, including at least 3,500 people in Ireland. These environments are inherently restrictive and discriminatory, and breach disabled people’s rights under international law. Drawing on the use of rights-based approaches in geography and the social sciences, this paper will outline the overlap between disability rights and the importance of personal private space to support the dignity and autonomy of disabled people. An overview of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities illustrates the socio-legal significance of being able to live independently, while engagements with the lived experiences of individuals in institutional settings in Ireland demonstrates the negative impacts of these confining contexts. Combined these strands show how geography can help articulate a distinct spatial appreciation for the private sphere as a site of dignity and the capacity to control the basic aspects of one’s life. Additionally, it will highlight the challenges faced by disabled people in exercising their entitlements under international human rights law at a local level. Finally, the paper suggests ways in which rights-based approaches can enrich how geographers theorise and study disability.

This paper is part of the recent development, in French-speaking research, of a spatial approach to disability (Rapegno and Popescu, 2020) and combines the contributions of social geography and geography of children and young people. Children's and young people's disabilities are often viewed through the lens of their access to school. Indeed, ‘inclusive education’, enshrined in French law, is a major issue. However, individuals also develop outside of school and adolescence is a period of discovery and acquisition of autonomous mobility, in negotiation with adults. Teenagers with disabilities can be perceived as doubly vulnerable in the public space, because of their age and their disability. It is then important to look more broadly at their place in the urban context.
The aim of this paper is therefore to understand the relationship between teenagers and the city from the perspective of the institution in which they are supported on a daily basis and called DIME (Medical and Educational Institution) : How do these young people experience the city? How do they use space? How do the social workers who work with them consider space ?
This paper is based on an ethnographic study carried out as part of a European program (Erasmus+ Strategic partnership, Urban Age Ethics - URGE, 2023-2026), and more specifically on observations, interviews with professionals and four workshops with a group of young people living with intellectual disability. These workshops, using pictures as well as in-situ journeys, enabled young people to express their relationship with different places. By cross-referencing these data with the observations and views of professionals, this paper suggests ways in which the relationship between young people in DIME and the city can be better taken into account.

Reference :
Rapegno, N., & Popescu, C. (2020). Géographies du handicap. In N. Rapegno & C. Popescu (éds.), Géographies du handicap (1 ). Éditions des maisons des sciences de l’homme associées. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.emsha.733

The critical turn in disability studies is characterised by an emphasis on the lived experience of disability (Tabin et al., 2019). This shift invites an understanding of disability as a capacity to establish new forms of relationship with one's environment, one's territory and the communities that constitute it. Disability is no longer regarded as merely a public health concern or an administrative category, but rather as « an opportunity to discover other ways of being in the world [...] to recognise and value our interdependence » (Kafer, 2013).

This approch to disability, by focusing on individual experiences, is part of a cultural geography approach (Claval, 2001). However, this field remains relatively unexplored in the context of health geography research (Fleuret et al., 2022). A significant challenge lies in the representation of individuals' experiences of disability. The processes of invisibilisation of marginal experiences, epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007), silencing, and issues related to enunciation and reception act as epistemic obstacles (Godrie & Gross, 2024), impeding the conduct of such studies.

The present paper puts forward the hypothesis of a literary diversion as a potential translation of the lived experience of disability. By adopting the novel as its geographical terrain, literary geography (Brosseau, 2022) has effectively revitalised its thematic content and methodological approaches. An examination will be conducted to ascertain its capacity to surmount the aforementioned epistemological impediments and to enable an analysis of the practices of places and ways of living (Stock, 2003) specific to disability.

In order to explore the methodological contributions and limitations of such an approach, three novels will be analysed through the lens of one of their characters: namely, Hippolyte in Madame Bovary (Flaubert, 1857), Aunt Léonie in La Recherche du temps perdu (Proust, 1927) and Eeyore in Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (Oe, 1977). Rather than a literary analysis, the aim will be to take account of the ways in which intimate or public space is invested, the strategies put in place and the characters' relationships to their territory, whether on the scale of a village, a bedroom or a megalopolis.