Category: Featured articles

Do-it-yourself strategies against the coronavirus

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Morgan Meyer

Hydroalcoholic gels, protective masks, screening tests, ventilators: the manufacturing of these four objects is usually the prerogative of established institutions and companies. These objects can be found in pharmacies, in hospitals, in a world that is standardized and and organized. Covid-19 has changed this order of things and, for the moment, science, medicine and the market are struggling to contain the virus.

The shortage of gels, tests and protective masks has led to countless workarounds, détournements and innovations. Let us begin our overview with the story of […]

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“The very thought of what crisis preparedness is is totally absent”

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Interview of Didier Torny by François Bonnet, published in Mediapart on April 3, 2020

What do you see when you look at the French response to the Covid-19 pandemic?

What struck me first is that all the work accomplished, basically from 2004 to 2012, seemed to have completely disappeared! This work led under the authority of a service of the Prime Minister involved almost all the ministries, the local authorities, interprofessional branches, and involved large budgets […]

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Open science, closed borders: epidemics as “a test of global solidarity”

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Didier Torny and Frédéric Vagneron

Never has the genetic identification of a new virus been deciphered so quickly: on the 29th of December 2019, the first cases of an epidemic caused by a new virus are reported in China; 7 days later, a team from Fudan University in Shanghai publishes the complete sequence of the RNA virus of the coronavirus family. Since then, the sequences of its variants […]

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Labelling the Economy. Qualities and Values in Contemporary Markets

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Labelling the Economy

Qualities and Values in Contemporary Markets

Brice Laurent & Alexandre Mallard (Eds.)

This collected volume analyses labelling as a political and economic operation. It gathers contributions that focus on various domains, including the agri-food sector, the construction sector, eco-labelling, retail, health public policies and the energy sector, considering the use of labels […]

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The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory

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Book edited by Anders Blok, Ignacio Farias andCelia Roberts, with contributions from CSI researchers, Fabian Muniesa, David Pontille, Liliana Doganova and Jérôme Denis.

This companion explores ANT as an intellectual practice, tracking its movements and engagements with a wide range of other academic and activist projects. Showcasing the work of a diverse set of ‘second generation’ ANT scholars from around the world, it highlights the exciting depth and breadth of contemporary ANT and its future possibilities.

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A new issue of PRAGMATA. Pragmatism, Politics and Social Sciences: New Explorations

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The second issue of Pragmata, entitled « Pragmatisme, politique et sciences sociales : nouvelles explorations » [“Pragmatism, Politics and Social Sciences: New Explorations”], opens a series of three issues devoted to politics.

In addition to the sections “Articles”, “Translation”, “Interview” and “Reviews”, readers will find two new sections, with contributions by researchers from the CSI.

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Le design : l’objet dans l’usage

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Le design : l’objet dans l’usage. La relation objet-usage-usager dans le travail de trois agences

A book by Sophie Dubuisson-Quellier and Antoine Hennion

Le design : l’objet dans l’usage [Design: the Object in Use. The Relation Object-Usage-User in the Work of Three Agencies], originally published at Presses des mines in 1998, is now reissued.

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L’Égalité au travail. Justice et mobilisations contre les discriminations

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A book by Vincent-Arnaud Chappe

For twenty years, the law of non-discrimination has been considerably extended. The qualification of « discrimination » is currently used in many instances to denounce numerous unequal treatments.

But what about its real uses? Why and how do people decide to report discrimination in the courts? What difficulties do they encounter?

This book focuses on the appropriation of the category of discrimination in labor litigation. […]

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La fin des discriminations syndicales ? Luttes judiciaires et pratiques négociées

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The end of trade union discrimination?
Judicial struggles and Negotiated practices

A book by Vincent-Arnaud Chappe, Jean-Michel Denis, Cécile Guillaume and Sophie Pochic

The 2008 and 2015 laws on Trade Union Representatives Reform and Social Dialog have introduced within firms new corporate requirements about the “reconciliation” of trade union and professional activity. How can this sudden attention of the public authorities to “union discrimination” be explained? Are we witnessing a historic break in “French style” professional relations? […]

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SCRIPTOPOLIS, the book

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Scriptopolis is an assemblage of microsurveys on writing, equipped by photography. It contains a long-term documentation on the multitude of scriptural forms that we rub shoulders with, produce and manipulate on a daily basis. Each double page, consisting of a photo and a short text, questions a graphic trace and the world it brings about, placing in the foreground the countless inscriptions that make the infraordinary frame of our lives. […]

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