Marie Alauzen’s research intersects the sociology of the State and law, STS and the anthropology of writing.
Marie Alauzen defended her doctoral thesis at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI), under the supervision of Fabian Muniesa, on October 18, 2019. Her doctoral work titled “Unfolding the Platform State. An inquiry into the modernization of French public services” [“Plis et replis de l’État plateforme. Enquête sur la modernisation des services publics en France”] focuses on the transformations of the interface between the State and the political society, as they were surveyed in the modernization projects of the State. Her study of modernization “in the making”, dealing with the trials and errors of the project managers from the administrative department mission in charge of the reform of the State, captures several related phenomena. She describes a sociology of a modernizing work made up of mini leaders organized around a profusion of projects, in a boot-camp atmosphere, which gives room for many failures (or folds) of the projects launched. She thus characterizes the daily life of reform, which takes place without a general plan or a major ideological line, but is achieved through the ability to make decisions and through the stabilization of techniques and knowledge of government derived from design, computer science, behavioral science, and social science. Her thesis shows that the modernized State and the citizen-users undergoing changes are shaped by a human-machine relation concerned with the ergonomic quality and the readability of the interfaces, by a certain taste for experimentation or even by a concern for what is now called digital sovereignty.
During and following her PhD training she participated in three research projects:
- from 2017 to 2018: in the European program « Quantification, Administrative Capacity and Democracy» ANR-15-ORAR-0003-01 (2017-2018) project aiming at comparing the shift from government by law to government by numbers, where she investigated the accounting transformations of the hospital;
- from 2019 to 2020: in the program of the Responsible Digital Identity Chair at Télécom Paris, where she conducted a study of the controversy over the Ministry of Home Affairs’ people identification application, Alicem ;
- from 2020 to 2021: she designed a research project for the Ambassador for Digital Media of the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs on how the French State fights against the manipulation of information.
Her current work at LISIS, in partnership with INRIA, focuses on the computer alteration of law.
At the CSI, along with Jérôme Denis, David Pontille and Didier Torny, Marie Alauzen contributes since 2017 to Scriptopolis, a research project in anthropology of writing. She also collaborates with several researchers at the Centre, including Alexandre Mallard, Fabian Muniesa and Alexandre Violle, on the sociological study of the State.