Un acteur dans une société d’acteurs.
Xavier Bernier, Olivier Lazzarotti et Jacques Lévy | 01.05.2022
Actor and ‘actor’: Is there more than a metaphor between a performer and this concept of social science? Probably, and the war in Ukraine makes us more clearly aware of this. [...]
Si tu ne viens pas au commerce, le commerce ira à toi !
Xavier Bernier, Olivier Lazzarotti et Jacques Lévy | 01.04.2022
Itinerant trade is a very old activity. Today, it is deployed in a variety of forms and contexts. Nowadays, store trucks are developing very different business proposals with a large variety of vehicles. Their commercial tours produce social links in specific networks. It is a model of original urbanity. [...]
Le populaire et le populisme.
Jacques Lévy, Olivier Lazzarotti et Xavier Bernier | 01.03.2022
Of the wise and the foolish, of the moon and the finger, the popular proverb chooses the former. It is nevertheless advisable to question the obvious. Between the unchangeable visible and the works in progress, between imitation and invention, between forms of ease and a work on oneself, on others and on the World always difficult, who wants to make the fool does he not make the wise man? [...]
Michel Carrard | 08.02.2022
In this book published in 2020, Robert Boyer keeps a diary of the Covid-19 pandemic in order to make its effects on societies intelligible. The author emphasizes that the pandemic has completely overturned the dogmas erected for several decades by liberal economists. It has accelerated the transformation of capitalism by reinforcing the opposition between a transnational platform capitalism and a state-driven capitalism. Moreover, the pandemic sheds a harsh light on the weaknesses of the European Union. The book concludes [...]
Les choses ne sont pas des gens.
Jacques Lévy, Olivier Lazzarotti et Xavier Bernier | 01.02.2022
Billions of ‘connected objects’ give new leverages for an ontological blurring between humans and things. The discussion should be taken back to basics in a context where actors, environments, and material or immaterial objects populate our daily lives. [...]
Léopold Lucas | 27.01.2022
The smartphone has infused our lifestyles to become a ubiquitous actant. As a true spatial technology, it has also transformed how individuals cope with space. But what meaning do we give to this object? How do its uses change our lives? What does it make us do (or not do)? These are the research questions at the heart of Nicolas Nova’s book. [...]
Comment continuer à recevoir les plus précaires tout en les espaçant les uns des autres ?
Joan Stavo-Debauge, Maxime Felder et Luca Pattaroni | 17.01.2022
This paper interrogates the social and spatial consequences of lock-down and “barrier” measures for newcomers and precarious foreigners in the city of Geneva. Linking these measures to the question of urban hospitality, the article documents the paradoxical transformations of the “hospitable milieux” that usually offer newcomers — and established “undocumented” migrants — the possibility to “take place” in the city and to stay there somewhat poorly. Addressing the case of “domestic workers” as well as “low-threshold” shelters and the [...]
Noël Barbe | 04.01.2022
As the process of its reconstruction begins at the end of 2019, the aim here is to grasp the registers and devices through which the burning of a church in the heart of summer 2018, in the department of Doubs, is converted into a public problem in which the ways of problematising it as an event and authorising a reconstruction operate, and in the course of which a series of tests emerges in which the qualities of some and [...]
Yann Calbérac | 04.01.2022
Based on a close scrutiny of Michel Foucault's interview published in the very first issue of Hérodote, a journal dedicated to geopolitical approaches founded by Yves Lacoste, this article unfolds, thanks to the analysis of spatial metaphors, the conceptions and functions of space for the philosopher as well as for geographers. This symmetrical reading enlightens a subtle system of similarities, between Time and Space (two categories rejected by Foucault and the geographers alike, as they abandon grand concepts in [...]
Le poison qui rend fou.
Marinette Lévy | 01.01.2022
Bedbugs and Covid-19 are two seemingly unrelated phenomena. Except for one: their common and similar capacity to make us go crazy. These two plagues, which nothing seems to bring together, pull in fact on the same strings in our minds. If we look at their devastating psychological effects, we discover to what extent human irrationality is activated more than ever in contact with them. Invisible enemies with a galloping contagion, contradictory injunctions, human incapacity to overcome them... Everything is [...]