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.