Laura Talamante is the holder of the Transregional studies – EHESS/Iméra Chair. Her research project at Iméra, the Institute for Advanced Studies of Aix-Marseille University, focuses on Marseille as an alternative center of revolutionary politics and power in the south of France. The current project builds upon her previous digital mapping publications as part of the development of a digital mapping book and interactive website that illuminates women’s revolutionary political influence and the possibilities and limitations for control of the daily environment. Her goal for expanding the project is to use digital mapping as another lens to develop her previous research and publications on women’s influence on and use of revolutionary divorce and marriage laws.
To learn more, view her resident page by clicking here
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Video transcript
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0:06 I'm Dr. Laura Talamante. I'm Professor and Chair of History at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson, California. Here at AMERA, I am the holder of the Transregional Studies Chair of the Ecole des Autitudes de Sciences Sociales, and I'm part of the Necessary Utopias program. My research focuses on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, specifically in the city of Marseille, and the role of women. I look at the development of proto-feminism, the development of citizenship practices, politics and culture, and women's contributions and their experiences.
0:46 and I've been using digital mapping in the last few years to expand the breadth and depth of how I communicate women's roles and activities. My research looks at women's political contributions and experiences during the French Revolution through innovative digital mapping techniques. I use what is known in the field of digital humanities as thick mapping and thick mapping allows you to aggregate layers of data historically and spatially and that allows for a better understanding of the depth of women's activities. My work also intersects with feminist geographies through two concepts feminist
1:36 visualities and feminist cartography where women as the subject of mapping allows us to subvert the male-centric use of mapping and to represent women's activities both historically and in the present. I look at women through their political contributions in the public sphere, churches, markets, but also the private sphere in their homes. What I'm focusing on here while I'm at the AMIRA is women's challenges to patriarchal authority through the new marriage and divorce laws that allowed women equal rights to men for the first time.
2:21 I was asked to contribute a chapter to a book that's now come out, Life in Revolutionary France. And I decided to use digital mapping as a way to help me better understand women's activities. And it helped me to see how they use their familial, economic, and social networks. as part of their contributions to changes in revolutionary consciousness, culture, and practices, and even helped create a new mental map of the city. What I like about digital mapping is that users of the digital maps are able to go beyond the analog text, and they can actually, through the different layers of information,
3:07 students and researchers come to their own conclusions and expand their understanding and their own research in these areas. I am so fortunate to have met Dr. Marc Calvini-Lefebvre, who is a professor at the University of Aix-Marseille, and he worked on the Amadex-funded sites and Agents of Feminist Memory Project while he was here, where he is, through a citizen science project, globally mapping. the rise of feminism which is a perfect overlap for my mapping of women and proto-feminism in revolutionary marseille i'll also be participating in programs at the VA charité in
3:56 marseille by the Ecole des Auditudes de Sciences Sociales which i'm very excited about and mark and i have been invited to present our work on digital mapping to the group genre dans l'espèce euro-mediterranéenne which is part of the MMSH at Aix-en-Provence
