Scientific and technical interventions on human life are raising intense debates throughout the world, all the more so when they touch at what we perceive of as the foundation of our humanity, namely procreation. Generally thought of as "natural", procreation from this perspective should not be submitted to any exterior interference. The crux of these debates inform us about what we consider to be "good" conditions for bringing a child into the world - both in terms of the family configuration in which it is born and the quality of its future life, as well as the limits we wish to place, if any, on intervening in human life and existence. The NorPro project seeks to document and interrogate the way in which all the actors involved in the practice of reproductive technologies negotiate the terms of what is reproductive acceptability. Relying on an ethnographic approach, the research team composed of anthropologists and political scientists specialized in the field of health and reproduction, will focus on the concrete dimensions of the ethical and practical dilemmas surrounding gamete donation, pre-implantation and prenatal diagnosis, genome editing, perinatal medicine and surrogacy. Our investigations will combine ethnographic observations, interviews, and analyses of the current legal framework as well as political and social debates underway at the national and international levels. We will examine the uses of techniques at play in the different procreative stages - from pre-conception to birth – with the objective being to analyze, in situ, the limits of what constitutes "acceptable" procreation, a life "worth living" and, finally, what defines the frontiers of the very notion of humanity. Through its comparison of these different situations, this unprecedented study will largely contribute to social science knowledge and shed new light on discussions whose practical dimension is often underestimated.

Drawing on Michel Foucault, many contemporary sociological works criticize social institutions by focusing on the ways in which those institutions control, limit and discipline bodies. Fewer pieces – with notable exceptions – have concentrated on the disciplinarization of minds. By scrutinizing the social production and framing of feelings and emotions, ETHOPOL will analyze institutional work as a specific pedagogy that transforms not only our identities and behaviors, but also our feelings and judgments. Members of ETHOPOL will focus on policies that aim at transforming subjectivity, in order to detect practical forms of power and government that are deployed onto and into their subjects’ “inwardness”. Hence, rather than focusing on biopolitics (which directs the lives of people), we will focus on actions that regulate feelings and redefine ethical relations to the self and to the world, a relation we define as “ethopolitics”. Unlike many contemporary approaches, ETHOPOL does not aim to describe the affective dimension of actions; we rather intend to analyze how affectivity becomes the main – if not exclusive – object of regulation policies. In fact, ethopolitics seems to encompass specific forms of social intervention, which endeavor to transform how people think (including about themselves), how they formulate moral values and judgments, and how they feel. Members of ETHOPOL have decided to focus on family intimacy to observe these dynamics – and more specifically on institutions that produce, correct, authorize, and/or impede family ties. These institutions have been carefully selected for being complementary to one another. Either belonging to public, associative or business sectors, they intervene in various fields: social work, health care, moral expertise, etc. Five different objects have been selected as sites in which to observe these processes of ethical alteration: international adoption, gestational surrogacy, paternity testing, postnatal depression, and IVF refusal. These objects share a similar but paradoxical dynamic. All five include institutions which aim to intervene in order to support, help, or appease. However, these interventions can be perceived as a means of transforming their participants’ relations to the self and to others, and which – by “working on” their affectivity – compels individuals to concur with the process to which they have been subjected. Thus, for example, adults who are engaged by Adoption Bureaus experience a transformation of their parental desires; parents by gestational surrogacy are confronted to moral and ethical dilemmas that surround the relationship between their child and his/her biological mother; individuals who resort to paternity testing question their paternal love; women suffering from postnatal depression are cured from their so-called inability to “mother”; and, finally, people who are denied IVF have to cope with a refusal based upon an expertise which judges them inapt to parenthood. Due to the fact they are “taken in charge”, all these people experience – in different ways – an evolution of their own judgments, wills, desires, and also their convictions, opinions and ways of being. As such, they experience a policy that “directs” them by arousing their voluntary adhesion to a process that limits and frames their desires and affects (rather than undergoing a mere discipline that would “correct” them by imposing new forms of action and/or behavior). Newly convinced subjects, they are now expected to feel how purposeful and well-founded enacted norms are. This project is part of a broader theoretical perspective, which aims at unifying the critique of framing processes with the comprehensive analysis of their effects, by focusing on “inwardness”. As such, ETHOPOL will help to understand sensitive marks of the government of self, and to develop a new reflection on these “ethopolicital” subjective transformation policies.

The aim of the project RESOCIT is to analyse relational logics of scientific citations and references. It is a continuation, but also an alternative to recent works on social networks of scientific citations which analyse formal aspects of combination of intellectual sphere (citations) and social sphere (collaborations). Our project is innovative on two sides. Firstly, we consider citations as elements of relational dynamism and not only as indicators. Citations and references are an opportunity for scholars to build ties with others scholars or groups of scholars, to reinforce them, and sometimes to lighten them. Secondly, our methodology consists in elaborating a “mixed method” (quantitative and qualitative, synchronous and diachronous). This method is based on selecting a corpus of scientific publications and making interviews with their authors. Our objective is 1) to use scientific citations as name generators to understand the socio-cognitive network of the publication (intellectual, professional and social); 2) to complete this analyse with relational studies of publication process (writing, evaluation, cooperation, funding, links with previous and later publications); 3) to survey the diffusion of citations with particular attention to actors, supports and temporality of mediation chains that they draw. We will gathered 4 corpus of international scientific publications from the Web of Science of Thomson Reuters (N=150), from natural sciences (chemistry and biology) and social sciences (economy and sociology). In this project, citations (with all their social substance) are seen as an expression of scientific sociability and potential vector of transformation of scientific groups. The objective is to show that published texts determinate, consolidate or even undo relations between groups of scientists. Few works pay attention to relational circles of scholars and few of them use citations to understand these relations. When they do it, they tend to consider citations like indicators of visibility (impact factors) or like indicators of specialities (co-citations). The objective in this project is, to the contrary, to highlight the social and relational substance of citations practices. The purpose of this project is to develop a new mixed method of relational analyse of scientific citations which open new perspectives: better knowledge on scientific social network but also new tools for research evaluation. Indeed, because citations are more and more used as indicators for evaluating scientific activity, a qualitative and relational analyse is necessary for better understanding the bases of these practices.

Beyond the many victims of the Covid-19 pandemic, and beyond the upheavals observed during the health and social crisis it caused, all individuals risk being durably affected in their daily lives and social relationships by its consequences. The scientific ambition of the research is structured around a first central question: how has the health crisis affected, in the long term, the social relations between individuals, but also between them and the economic, social and political institutions they belong to? The second objective is to explore the links between these transformations of social relations on the one hand, some of which we assume will be lasting if not irreversible, and developments in a number of fundamental areas of social life on the other. For instance, how do the changes in professional practices and relations interact at work, particularly with the development of teleworking? Or, regarding cultural participation, will the current enstrangement from cultural facilities last, and can it be explained by the concentration of sociability on family relationships, to the detriment of friends? And what are the effects of these tightening and recomposition of social ties on the relationship to authority, the deterioration of which the 'yellow waistcoats' crisis had already highlighted? To answer these questions, PANELVICO will rely on a large-scale longitudinal survey, over a sufficiently long period of time, in order to observe these transformations by re-interviewing several times, by questionnaires and interviews, a panel of several thousand people surveyed since the first 2020 lockdown within the framework of an initial research currently underway, and then throughout the four years of the research.

Among the recent evolutions of the tertiary work world, workspaces are today subject to powerful reconfigurations, accelerated by the pandemic and its consequences as well as by environmental concerns: development of inter-company coworking in shared spaces; development of "inspiring" and ecological premises, reputed to be modular according to their development; flex office replacing the old dedicated offices to better articulate with a project-based organization; development of an activity-based working approach based on a set of various spaces and services (meeting rooms, collective offices, individual spaces, phone room, cafeteria, concierge service, etc.). These new configurations are presented as more modern, flexible and adapted to the specificities of the contemporary economy. They are also criticized as potentially damaging to companies and the women and men who work in them. But how are these working environments really spreading? Who are their promoters, and on the basis of what arguments? To what extent are they changing the very nature of work? What are the advantages and limitations for those who work in them? And how do the institutional actors in the world of work position themselves in the face of these changes, depending on whether they seek to promote them, regulate them or prevent them ? In order to shed light on the genesis, forms, impact, justifications and criticisms of these new facilities, this project brings together researchers from sociology, psychology, ergonomics and law. Four objectives are pursued: 1) to understand the genesis of these 'flexible' offices, taking into account a more ancient history of their modularity; 2) to report on the experience of the users of these new spaces, taking into account the socio-material configurations, the practical constraints of their work and their expectations; 3) to trace the way in which these arrangements are conceived, implemented and their uses are regulated in organizations; and 4) to track the construction of a normative framework for the policies of arranging these working environments, the professional relations in charge of their regulation and the possible disputes that arise from them. The contexts studied will be deliberately contrasted: private companies aiming to optimize work organization and reduce property costs; public administrations promoting facilities deemed more attractive; international coworking chains seeking to attract start-ups and young graduates. Using a case-by-case approach and a variety of qualitative methods (interviews, archive processing, monographs, ethnographic observations, analysis of company agreements and court decisions), the research will aim to restore the converging features of these new models, while showing the plurality of their logics, forms and impacts. The aim will be to build a case library accessible to all researchers to facilitate comparison; to model these new forms of office in their diversity; and finally to explain the different ways in which employees use them. The aim of BURONEO is to develop a genuine collective and interdisciplinary scientific expertise on offices, while at the same time arming the actors in the workplace with the means to critically reflect on these changes. In addition to scientific publications (articles and collective work), a special effort will be made to disseminate the results and to ensure that they are appropriated by those involved in the world of work, notably through the publication of a white paper. Finally, this research will open up the possibility of setting up future comparative surveys at a European level.