Polluted Bodies, Embodied Knowledge, Reproductive & Environmental (In)justice

Convenors: Sezin Topçu(Senior Researcher, CNRS-EHESS, CEMS) et Cathy Herbrand (Professor, De Monfort University)

Speakers:

• Janette Lamoureux  (Associate Professor, University of Arizona): “Infertile Environments: Epigenetic, exposomic and extraterrestrial imaginaries of the body in context".
• Venla Oikkonen  (Associate Professor, Tampere University): “Bodily boundaries and pharmaceutical effects: Concerns about the long-term impact of medications among persons with endometriosis in Finland"
• Nolwenn Bühler  (Senior Researcher, University of Lausanne): "Breathing with the trouble: air pollution as a reproductive issue"

Discustant: Noémie Merleau-Ponty (Iris-Ehess)

Topic:  The role played by industrial-environmental pollution in the emergence or worsening of reproductive issues or female illnesses (infertility, miscarriage, disruption of the menstrual cycle, endometriosis, SPOK, early puberty, etc.) has been the subject of an important amount of scientific research for the last decades. This problem has, however, received little media coverage and little attention from governing bodies until recently. The presence of toxic contaminants in the environment - in farmland, food, air, homes and everyday items - has been steadily increasing since the Second World War, as has their wide variety, augmenting the 'cocktail effect'. At the same time, it is their omnipresence, their multiplicity, but also their power of intergenerational transmission that make them invisible or elusive in space and time. The question of their impact on reproductive organs and processes is a sensitive, even taboo, subject, firstly because it calls into question the chemical and petrochemical industries in their entirety, while the survival of our productivist-consumer societies depends on them. Secondly, exposure to ubiquitous toxic contaminants calls into question individual responsibilities, consumption choices and lifestyles, which puts those affected in a delicate position with regard to who is culpable. Finally, in many cases, it reveals the pervasiveness of environmental and gender inequalities, particularly in post-colonial contexts. This thematic session will address this set of issues by focusing both on the dynamics of the production of scientific and medical knowledge on this topic, and on the experiences and experiential knowledge of patients and those affected. To this end, it will bring together theoretical and empirical work from feminist STS, environmental studies and/or decolonial studies, with the aim of strengthening academic reflection on the reproductive 'damage' of techno-industrial modernization.

Digital SHS : research infrastructures, tracing digital spaces and the augmented social scientist

Convenors: Marc Barbier

This session aims to address and discuss three major issues in the current development of Computational Social Sciences: 1) the challenge of research infrastructuring in social sciences through digital platforms, 2) issues related to the traceability of digital spaces, and 3) the deployment of digital methods to support the study of digital transitions by the "augmented" researchers while addressing technical and legal accessibility to data.

Speakers:

• Lionel Villard (Assistant Professor, Université Gustave Eiffel-ESIEE; CorTexT Director)
  From the conception to the adolescence of a platform: 15 years of IFRIS support for the Cortext platform
  How did IFRIS support the development of the CorTexT platform? This presentation highlights the important role played by IFRIS since its conception, presents the growth of its user community and the different modes of use associated with it, as well as its usefulness for social science researchers. And at the heart of these developments is the technical object: it is also materialized by computer code of various kinds, whose twelve years of writing will be presented.
• Etienne Ollion (CNRS, Prof. à l'Ecole Polytechnique): 
  Augmenting Ourselves 
  What can the social sciences do with LLMs, and how can they change the way we do science? After introducing the logic of Large Language Models, I reflect on their potential and limitations. I argue that LLMs can help social scientists "augment" themselves, i.e., outsource the tedious work of data extraction and labeling to a machine. In turn, the use of these models opens up a new empirical continent for social scientific analysis and promises to end the all-too-common unproductive division of labor (between annotator and analyst).
   
• Célya Gruson-Daniel (Inno³, COSTECH): 
  Platforms and Information Enclosures: What Positions for the Scientific Community?
  In February 2023, following Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, the platform—now rebranded as X—introduced new pricing for API access. For researchers, this move spells the end of various research projects, and for PhD students, it disrupts the foundation of their thesis work. Computational social science research today relies heavily on the platforms whose content (digital traces) it studies. The asymmetric relationship between platform owners and the academic world is particularly evident in access to APIs and the unpredictable changes to Terms of Service (ToS). Faced with these informational enclosures, several solutions are being considered: web scraping (often illegal), partnerships with these platforms (which are very costly), or data donation protocols (which are complex to implement). In the spirit of open access and commons movements, what positions and initiatives can be adopted to facilitate data collection in a trustworthy and ethical manner?

Infrastructures Challenged by the Ecological Crisis: Inertia, Turning Points, and Disruptions

Convenors: Sara Aguiton (CNRS, CAK) and Clément Marquet (Mines Paris Tech, CSI)

Speakers : 

- Fanny Lopez (ENSA-PARIS Malaquais, LIAT): « Changement technique : questionner les architectures, théories et doctrines des réseaux électriques »

- Daniel Florentin (ENPC - LATTS) : « Les ambivalences de la gestion des infrastructures face aux crises écologiques: entre attention à la maintenance et retour du grand système technique »

- Léo Magnin (CNRS, LISIS) : « Infrastructures agroécologiques et numériques : la grande divergence »

Topic of the session. This panel aims to explore the new, often conflicting and sometimes ambiguous relationships that are being shaped around infrastructural greening projects.
Climate and environmental upheavals are challenging the infrastructures inherited from industrial modernity, whether they are material (e.g., the electrical grid) or informational (e.g., Common Agricultural Policy subsidies).
Ecology also fuels new infrastructural promises (AI for green, hydrogen, electrification). Amidst these transformations, infrastructures are being criticized, accused of creating irreversibility or inertia in the face of urgent socio-ecological transitions. They must also be transformed, adapted, or in some cases, simply abandoned to mitigate the scale of climate change and its associated disasters. Moreover, infrastructures are also bearing the brunt of environmental disruptions, whether through their unsuitability to new weather conditions, their obsolescence, or their inability to achieve the changes expected of them.
In the context of often contradictory public policy greening initiatives, the development of networks, along with the logics and practices of urban planning and agricultural development, is the subject of new promises, increasingly fierce contestations, and is at the heart of expertise conflicts.

The aim of this panel is to question the slow reconfiguration of infrastructures toward models that extend the promises of modernization in its ecological guise, or, conversely, advocate for a clear break in order to reinvent new ways of "doing infrastructure" in a more distributed, restrained, and life-form-conscious manner.
To what extent does the weakening of infrastructures create new opportunities for making voices heard that advocate for their greening?
What standards are being challenged and revisited by proponents of ecological bifurcation or infrastructural ruptures?
What conventions, material arrangements, and practices contribute to reinforcing the inertia of infrastructures that are nevertheless being put to the test?

"Endings in the Anthropocene"

Session organisée par Bruno Turnheim (INRAE, LISIS) and Lea Fünfshilling (Lund University, Sweden)

Conférenciers: Jérôme Denis, Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, France. 

Caitlin DeSilvey, Universtiy of Exeter, UK.

Alexandre Monnin, ESC Clermont Business School, France.

Topic: With Endings in the Anthropocene, we intend to engage an interdisciplinary conversation within the social sciences and humanities about :
* How established things come to an end?
* What such processes of endings entail,  
* What can be done about them ?
* How to think through them?

Still peripheral in most social sciences and humanities, there is growing literature on destabilisation, discontinuation, de-institutionalisation, decline, degrowth, decay, dismantling, loss… These questions are, in our view, acquiring new significance and flavour in relation to major societal challenges, including those conjured up in the reflexive moment signified by ‘Anthropocene’. While appetites for emergences, continuations, accumulations, expansions and control - so deeply entrenched in the modern condition - are not so eagerly tenable any longer, ends offer no obviously palatable prospect. Provided that endings is a fundamental research problem for social sciences and humanities, and that it offers an auspicious entry point for transforming society, we would like this panel to reflect on its particular epistemological and normative profile, and possible implications.

Transport infrastructures and the authority of development. Road projects in the global south countries

Convenors :Nassima Abdelghafour (CEMS, EHESS / IFRIS) & Mathieu Quet (Ceped, Paris)

Speakers: Nitin Bathla (ETH Zurich), Nora Marei (Prodig, Paris)
Discussant: Roman Solé-Pomiès (CSI, Mines Paris)

Topic: In recent years, protests against large transportation infrastructure projects have met with growing resistance among the populations worldwide. Movements against airport projects (such as Notre Dame des Landes in France), megaports creations or extensions (such as in Colombo, Sri Lanka) have raised sometimes high intensity protests and suggest that consensus is far from being ensured on such development initiatives. In some regards, the opposition raised by these projects shares similarities from the richest to the poorest countries. However, there are multiple differences in the ways the projects are promoted and implemented, but also in the ways they are contested, depending on geographies, socio-economic contexts, government practices. Additionally, such projects take place within global scale politics (such as the European integration or the Chinese Belt and Road initiative) that operate in differentiated ways depending on the context in which they emerge and on the geopolitical strategies they support. Acknowledging these differences, the panel offers to focus on the implementation of transport infrastructures (and associated protests) as they take place in the Global South, based upon the particular case of road projects.  This panel contributes to a series of discussions at the crossroads between infrastructure studies and development studies in the Global South. Postcolonial STS has been a fast growing corpus within STS. Scholarship bearing on developing and emerging countries has brought up multiple considerations within the ambit of science studies. We hope that the discussion will help fostering the dynamics of a general reflection upon how technoscience and infrastructures expand within Global South countries – and how they are innovated, diverted, and criticized.

Practices and policies of Participatory Research

Convenors: Bertrand Bocquet (Université Lille 1 and CNAM-HT2S), Aurélien Féron(CNRS, CAK) and Germain Meulemans (CNRS, CAK)
Speakers: Cyril Fiorini (Sciences Citoyennes), Marie-Océane Fékaïri (L'Atelier Paysan), Johanna Lees (LaSSA, Centre Norbert Elias)

How do participatory science approaches and STS work feed into each other? And on our own scale, what role has participatory research played within IFRIS, and how has IFRIS nurtured it? 
This thematic session will be organized around these questions. It will look at what participatory research means for STS and, symmetrically, how STS contributes to the transformation of these approaches. 
On the one hand, the focus will be on practices, taking into account the diversity of approaches, positions and methodologies. On the other hand, we'll be looking at the politics of these projects, both in the general sense (e.g. in the rejection of preconceived distinctions between “science” and “politics”), and at the more local level of the knowledge and power relationships that are built up between partners as they choose research questions and co-produce knowledge.

Titles of communications (in French)

Marie-Océane Fékaïri (L'Atelier Paysan) : « Retour d'expérience de recherche participative côté non-chercheur dans le projet POLitique de la Machine Agricole (POLMA) ».
Johanna Lees (LaSSA & Centre Norbert Elias) : « Etre chercheur/se dans un projet de recherche participative : un changement de posture éthique, politique, scientifique ? Le cas de l'étude Fos EPSEAL ».
Cyril Fiorini (Sciences Citoyennes) : « Le tiers-veilleur : un dispositif socio-technique d’accompagnement des pratiques de recherche participative ».

Session in French

"After Pluriverse ? "

Convenors :Elise Demeulenaere (CNRS, CAK) & Diego Landivar (Prof. ESC Clermont Business School, France)

Avec: Mario Blaser (Memorial University of Newfoundland)

Since the end of the 20th century, a vast movement in the social sciences has set out to deconstruct the idea of a single, universal, objective reality, which would be the subject of a diversity of “cultural” representations. In turn, material-semiotic perspectives, perspectivism and the ensuing ontological and anthropological turn, decolonial thought and pragmatism have all put forward the idea that the entities that make up the world are the result of the practical and cognitive commitments of actors. The result is not a universe, but a pluriverse.

While this intellectual movement has made it possible to put the great modern divisions (nature/culture, subject/object, society/environment) to the test, it seems to be locked in a romantic celebration of pluralism without examining its consequences. Yet acknowledging the existence of multiple worlds opens up a number of political and epistemic questions. This session will welcome works that have in common a desire to think about the post-multi-world, not in order to draw up a critical portrait of it, but rather to imagine the more or less radical consequences of its intensification. Is the pluriverse only joyful? How do the collectives concerned compose “partial connections” between worlds? What about collectives that decide not (or no longer) to compose with others? What are the compositionist outcomes when worlds are radically distant, or when there are manifest asymmetries? What political innovations emerge? How should researchers position themselves?

Regulations of AI

Convenors:  Bilel Benbouzid, Associate Professor of Sociology, UGE; Valérie Peugeot, Social Science Researcher in Digital Studies, Orange Labs 

Spekers:

Jerome De Cooman (University of Liège, Belgium) on "The Standardization of Artificial Intelligence: What Objectives, What Legitimacy?", examining the legal and political issues of AI standardization at the European level.
Anne Bellon, COSTECH, University of Technology of Compiègne, France. on the socio-technical issues of new technologies and their regulation: the Digital Service Act and the Digital Market Act.

Topic

What form of digital governance is emerging from the new regulatory framework in Europe? Organized by Bilel Benbouzid and Valérie Beaudoin Session Topic This workshop offers an interdisciplinary reflection on the transformations brought by recent regulations in the digital sector, such as the Artificial Intelligence Act, the Digital Services Act (DSA), and the Digital Markets Act (DMA). We will analyze: 1. How these laws define the governance of digital actors; 2. The compliance, transparency, and power mechanisms of regulators that they establish; 3. Their potential to correct and guide the practices of large digital companies. These laws are part of an ongoing transformation of the law, where instead of imposing strict rules, a mode of governance encourages self-regulation and collaboration between regulators and regulated entities. Innovative tools such as regtechs, compliance processes, and regulatory sandboxes are at the heart of this transformation. However, this evolution raises numerous questions. The collaborative posture of the regulatory state sometimes risks diluting its authority in the face of companies. Moreover, despite the sanctions provided by the new regulations, their concrete impact may be delayed by the complexity of control mechanisms and legal appeals. Furthermore, the growing technicization of regulation, with the proliferation of "regulatory knowledge," raises questions about its effects on democracies. Thus, this workshop will closely examine the real impacts of these regulations and the issues they raise, particularly in terms of the protection of fundamental rights and the effective transformation of digital practices. The workshop aims to discuss these complex developments and their implications, while inviting an interdisciplinary reflection among legal scholars, political scientists, and sociologists to grasp the political meaning of this new legal framework in Europe.