The changes that are currently placing our societies under strain — the climate crisis, the questioning of capitalism, the digital revolution, the transformation of our relationship with the living world —  are creating a climate of urgency and uncertainty. They confront us with unanswered questions that raise joint concerns about science and technology, politics and economics, ethics and law.

Building on the achievements of the STS (Science and Technology Studies) and of pragmatist-inspired approaches, the CSI develops research on these public concerns and on the investigations carried out on them by a plurality of actors. These researches aim to examine the knowledges and the devices produced by the actors to qualify the problems at stake and tell how they affect them. The approaches implemented aim to renew the old slogan of the actor-network theory, “follow the actors themselves”, by seeking cooperation with people and collectives who strive to make these unprecedented realities count and who design new ways of reporting on them: publics, users, public authorities, companies, scientists, activists, associations… 

The themes of current research extend the previous CSI works on sociotechnical controversies, technical democracy, the making of economy, the genesis of individual and collective attachments. The surveys are attentive to the emerging character of the problems and the plurality of positions. They invest in a diversity of research areas, some examples of which are urban transformations, agriculture, the health industry, mining, development policies, energy and environmental transition. Beyond the diversity of the areas, four major themes run throughout the research carried out at the CSI: expérimentation as a modality of collective action, the place of markets within society, knowledge policies, maintenance and sustainability.