Category: Featured articles

Bruno Latour Laureate of the 2021 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy

Bruno Latour, Professor Emeritus, Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po), former Professor and current Honorary member at the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI) is Laureate of the 2021 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy.

The Kyoto 2021 Prize, announced by the Inamori Foundation, was awarded to Bruno Latour in recognition of his achievement in “Radically Re-examining “Modernity” by Developing a Philosophy that Focuses on Interactions Between Technoscience and Social Structure”.

Rethinking Music through Science and Technology Studies

Edited by Antoine Hennion & Christophe Levaux

This volume seeks to offer a new approach to the study of music through the lens of recent works in science and technology studies (STS), which propose that facts are neither absolute truths, nor completely relative, but emerge from an intensely collective process of construction. Applied to the study of music, this approach enables us to reconcile the human, social, factual, and technological aspects of the musical world, and opens the prospect of new areas of inquiry in musicology and sound studies. […]

Sur la trace des suspects

L’incorporation de la preuve et de l’indice à l’ère de la génétique

edited by Joëlle Vailly

We are pleased to announce the publication of this new book at Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme to which Vololona Rabeharisoa and Florence Paterson have contributed.

The use of genetic data in the police and justice system has developed spectacularly over the last thirty years. Based on interviews, observation of trials and the examination of documents, this book analyses the social and legal issues of these innovations in France. The authors study the daily practices of […]

The Open Access Diamond Journals Study: Exploring collaborative community-driven publishing models for Open Access

The CSI is pleased to announce the publication of “The Open Access Diamond Journals Study: Exploring collaborative community-driven publishing models for Open Access” in the form of two reports: an in-depth report and then associated recommendations arising from the study of open access journals across the world that are free for readers and authors, usually referred to as “OA diamond journals”. In conjunction with the SEPS (Socio-economics of academic publications) research program held at the CSI, this research sheds light on the diversity of resources and business models for the majority of existing open access journals, often dismissed compared to the more known author-payer model.

Comparative COVID-19 Response: an international research project

A central puzzle of COVID-19 is why some nations have so successfully contained the virus while others have failed. Even more puzzling is how nations with similar systems of government and demographics have experienced the pandemic in such different ways.

To understand what leads to such contrasting situations, an international research project entitled ” Comparative Covid Response (CompCoR)” has been launched, with the support of Schmidt Futures and the National Science Foundation, by teams […]

Three layers of fabric, seven layers of politics

Morgan Meyer and Franck Cochoy

The health crisis has radically transformed the existence of the mask. Before the crisis, it was hardly visible in public debates and little worn by the public. Uncertainties and debates have proliferated as the crisis unfolds and the mask is an object that crystallises health, economic and social issues. What is most surprising is the following paradox: an object that is a priori very simple, cheap, and easy to produce… has been transformed into a coveted object, a controversial object. To understand this tension between mass object and singular object, we need to […]

Assetization

Kean Birch & Fabian Muniesa (Eds.)

How the asset—anything that can be controlled, traded, and capitalized as a revenue stream—has become the primary basis of technoscientific capitalism.

The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund […]

From pragmatism to radical meliorism

The Dossier “From pragmatism to radical meliorism” prepared by Antoine Hennion and Alexandre Monnin was published in SociologieS in May 2020.

The articles in this Dossier deal with a variety of objects: the work of maintenance agents (Jérôme Denis and David Pontille), a meeting organized with so-called precarious people (Anthony Pecqueux), support at the end of life (Anne-Sophie Haeringer), life near Fukushima “after” the disaster (Sophie Houdart) and finally, through a triple interview conducted with them by a researcher (Yaël Kreplak), the conception of inquiry defended by artists who, in various forms, make this way of […]

How covid-19 reshuffles the world of apps

Cornelius Heimstädt and Morgan Meyer

While the fight against Covid-19 mobilizes medicine, science and politics, it also involves a wide array of technological entities, such as apps. Apps can make life in domestic quarantine more bearable by providing opportunities for yoga, fitness, streaming, online dating, video calling, games or education. They […]