The Élisée Reclus Professorship on human
geography is a joint initiative from the Centre for Research and Higher
Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), the Institute for Research José
María Luis Mora (Mora Institute Mora), the Centre for Research in Geography
and Geomatics “Eng. Jorge L. Tamayo” (GEO Centre), and the College of Michoacán
(COLMICH). This professorship aims mainly to disseminate among researchers,
students and general public, the contributions of French specialist in the
field of human geography. It also seeks to improve the interdisciplinary,
inter-institutional, and international dialogue.
The professorship, inaugurated in 1997,
took the name of the anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus as a tribute to this
distinguished figure. Since then, outstanding French geographers have come to
Mexico to give courses, working in different fields of the discipline, such as:
definition of regions, cities and their change processes, frontier definition,
planning, public policies related to the territory, geopolitics, historical cartography,
territory modeling, tourism and its impact, conceptualization of environment and ecosystem,
the contribution of geography to the study of identities, reconfiguration of rural spaces
in times of globalization. The invited professors are scholars working at different
universities and institutes in France, hence links have been established between
Mexican and French academic institutions.
The compilation of the texts used as a base for the
courses of the Reclus Professorship can be consulted in the Élisée Reclus Collection at
the Library “Ernesto de la Torre Villar” of the Mora Institute. The Élisée Reclus
professorship in the Mora Institute is supervised by PhD Eulalia Ribera Carbó.