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The paper discusses the notion of places of power considering the successive rewriting of the scientific article, from its original version submitted to the publisher to its final stance authorized with its ready for press. During this phase, the article becomes the object of negociation; the research looses her authority on her writing and must compose with readers who amend her text. Drawing on the deciphering of graphic codes, on the one hand, and rhetoric norms on the other, the paper analyzes to what extent these corrections may reveal the conditions of acceptability of the writtent text, and with them, the existence of an editorial norm that is not fully explicit.

The paper discusses the notion of places of power considering the successive rewriting of the scientific article, from its original version submitted to the publisher to its final stance authorized with its ready for press. During this phase, the article becomes the object of negociation; the research looses her authority on her writing and must compose with readers who amend her text. Drawing on the deciphering of graphic codes, on the one hand, and rhetoric norms on the other, the paper analyzes to what extent these corrections may reveal the conditions of acceptability of the writtent text, and with them, the existence of an editorial norm that is not fully explicit.

The proliferation of digital data goes with the growth of data centers, a territorial infrastructure occupying vast surfaces in the suburbs of large metropolis. These massive warehouses with blind frontage are quite far from the immateriality and the intangibility suggested by the cloud. From 1990 to 2015, in the north of Paris, the concentration of data centers was the highest in Europe. Their presence triggered investigations and controversies amongst dwellers, elected representatives, territorial agents and the electricity network operators. This article explores the various ways in which data centers facilities were denounced to be invisible and thus became issues for local actors. It analyses how these actors engaged in clarifying the material, economic, legal and ecological entanglements that compose such infrastructures. Two dimensions of data centers’ territoriality are stressed on. First, the paper suggests that they become objects of political concerns and part of a territorial agenda only after having mushroomed on the territory, and that elected representatives were reluctant to develop constraining instruments to regulate the installations. Second, the paper highlights the emergence of a local ecological protest movement who grasped data centers facilities to illustrate and materialize digital technologies’ environmental footprint.

This paper gives a first-person account of three contrasting experiences of interdisciplinary research (spanning life sciences and anthropology) on biodiversity issues, most often in the form of “participatory action research” projects. In these projects, the anthropologist is torn between an ideal of evening out power relationships in participatory research, which would ideally require a systematic co-construction approach, and the need to reaffirm her autonomy (with respect to the life sciences) in defining her research questions and methods. This results in uneasiness and friction. This contribution puts forward some guidelines for transcending this situation, including friendship and a shared normative horizon.

Yang Hyunah’s paper is both a committed feminist paper and a cautious and moderate text: while the author explicitly seeks to criticize a conservative court decision, she abides by academic writing norms and established values, which would be shattered in the case of extension of legal access to abortion, according to its opponents, seems to avoid any disruptive argument. This is probably one of the reasons why her study rests on a peculiar method, with a strong focus on the individual and psychological side of the issue. Even though such a difficult research cannot encompass all the integral issues of abortion, the paper sheds light on a series of interesting facts. In a comparative perspective, it reveals experiences and representations (notably regarding law consciousness), that prove to be strikingly similar to better-known historical cases.

This paper is a critical review of the Constitutional decision held in 2012 regarding Article 270 [Abortion by the Medical Personnel] of the South Korean Criminal Code. Grounded on the “law and society” approach, our study investigates the result of an empirical survey on women’s experiences and perceptions of abortion. In this way, we aim at making the women’s voices heard, especially in a context where the Constitutional Court does not seem to acknowledge it, even when it comes to abortion. The first part of our article presents the main aspects of abortion in South Korea and focuses on its legal status and social reality. Although most cases of abortion are illegal according to the law, surveys show that this practice is extremely common in South Korea. Does it mean that, in practice, Korean women benefit from a right to abortion? As feminist socio-legal scholars, how are we to understand this phenomenon? The second part of this paper uses a qualitative approach to analyze the result of our survey. It explores how women express their experience of abortion and how it affects their relations with others, in particular with their male partner. It also shows how this experience affects women’s perception of sexual relationships as well as their sexual subjectivity. This paper argues that if policy makers acknowledge that no contraception can perfectly prevent unwanted pregnancy, then they also have to accept the consequent needs of women. It also advocates that abortion in Korea is not only related to women’s claim for autonomy, but can also be a desperate necessity.

Yang Hyunah’s paper is both a committed feminist paper and a cautious and moderate text: while the author explicitly seeks to criticize a conservative court decision, she abides by academic writing norms and established values, which would be shattered in the case of extension of legal access to abortion, according to its opponents, seems to avoid any disruptive argument. This is probably one of the reasons why her study rests on a peculiar method, with a strong focus on the individual and psychological side of the issue. Even though such a difficult research cannot encompass all the integral issues of abortion, the paper sheds light on a series of interesting facts. In a comparative perspective, it reveals experiences and representations (notably regarding law consciousness), that prove to be strikingly similar to better-known historical cases.

This paper is a critical review of the Constitutional decision held in 2012 regarding Article 270 [Abortion by the Medical Personnel] of the South Korean Criminal Code. Grounded on the “law and society” approach, our study investigates the result of an empirical survey on women’s experiences and perceptions of abortion. In this way, we aim at making the women’s voices heard, especially in a context where the Constitutional Court does not seem to acknowledge it, even when it comes to abortion. The first part of our article presents the main aspects of abortion in South Korea and focuses on its legal status and social reality. Although most cases of abortion are illegal according to the law, surveys show that this practice is extremely common in South Korea. Does it mean that, in practice, Korean women benefit from a right to abortion? As feminist socio-legal scholars, how are we to understand this phenomenon? The second part of this paper uses a qualitative approach to analyze the result of our survey. It explores how women express their experience of abortion and how it affects their relations with others, in particular with their male partner. It also shows how this experience affects women’s perception of sexual relationships as well as their sexual subjectivity. This paper argues that if policy makers acknowledge that no contraception can perfectly prevent unwanted pregnancy, then they also have to accept the consequent needs of women. It also advocates that abortion in Korea is not only related to women’s claim for autonomy, but can also be a desperate necessity.

This paper examines the epistemological differences between the theoretical frameworks of conventional agronomy and agroecology. The analysis focuses more specifically on their methods for administrating living’s variations, meaning ecological, evolutionary and behavioural dynamics. Through a synthesis of the historical conditions of the emergence in France, of agronomic sciences, we attempt to isolate more precisely the postulates and protocols which have led to the institutionalization of conventional agronomy as the dominant model. We also try to emphasize how this historical structuration of agronomic sciences in a nomological-prescriptive paradigm is a condition of possibility for an objective alliance between agronomy and industry. As an alternative to the dominant model, this paper hypothesizes that a specific form of ecological inquiry, historical and situated, which structures the various agroecologies, and particularly permaculture, could be a better way to inform renewed agricultural practices, answering both political and scientific erosion of the dominant agronomic model, and the systemic ecological crisis it is partly responsible for.

This paper is a critical reading of the three precedent articles, especially of the legal reasoning approach adopted on the issue of the commons in Italy. By examining the political experience of the commons and comparing it to other contemporary democratic movements in Europe, this paper argues that the critical potential of this concept and these experiences is political, rather than just legal. The main point of these movements is the renewal of radical democracy, the related legal developments being just one specific aspect of this renewal.

This article considers the history of interactionism through the lens of contemporary art, and in particular, performance as it emerged in the 50s and 60s in the United States. In the specific context of this paper, I analyze Charles Goodwin’s work through the work of some contemporary artists (Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Yoko Ono) whose theoretical issues echoes those raised in Goodwin’s work. The objective of this paper is to foster a closer dialogue between contemporary art and interactionism by highlighting five relevant, common key points : a collective approach to speakership, a multisemiotic vision of talk, a procedural perspective on action, a holistic view of multimodality and a focus on creativity in the accomplishment of social practices. The dialogue between the two fields requires an operation of cultural translation and sheds new light on the phenomena under study, which should lead rethinking and historicizing some of our most important analytical categories.

This paper gives a first-person account of three contrasting experiences of interdisciplinary research (spanning life sciences and anthropology) on biodiversity issues, most often in the form of “participatory action research” projects. In these projects, the anthropologist is torn between an ideal of evening out power relationships in participatory research, which would ideally require a systematic co-construction approach, and the need to reaffirm her autonomy (with respect to the life sciences) in defining her research questions and methods. This results in uneasiness and friction. This contribution puts forward some guidelines for transcending this situation, including friendship and a shared normative horizon.

The paper is devoted to the analysis of the emulator called “Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator” (MAME), a piece of software developed with the intent of recreating the inner functioning of arcade video games. While MAME allows players to re-play extinct games, its rhetoric and positioning towards the history of the medium should be discussed. On the one hand, MAME’s claim to authenticity significantly downplays the role of materiality in the experience of playing arcade video games. Moreover, MAME’s focus on exact reproduction triggers a number of questions regarding the value and extent of archival, archeological and preservative practices within the context of arcade video games. The paper will eventually confront MAME’s implicit rhetoric of “video game code as an entity that speaks truth” (Murphy, 2013), with a more nuanced reading of the experience of playing a video game, encompassing materiality, hardware and the social context.

Social phobia or social anxiety disorder is currently a widely recognised and diagnosed psychological disorder throughout the world. However, it was in Japan, between the 1960s and the 1990s, that this form of pathological shyness first acquired both medical legitimacy –as a psychiatric diagnosis– and social legitimacy, as a recognised mode of expression of psychological suffering, called “interpersonal phobia” (taijin kyôfu or taijin kyôfushô). What may seem astonishing in retrospect is that Japanese psychiatrists then considered this to be a Japanese neurosis, which led in the 1990s to its international validation as a “culture-bound syndrome”. In this paper, I analyse the development of the culturalist perspective in psychopathological theories on interpersonal phobia and the conceptual circulations and rearrangements that determined it, in the historical context of the decades of high economic growth.

This paper is a reflection on the phenomenon of voluntary isolation in Amazonia, about anthropology’s implication in its formation as a concept, and what anthropologists might profitably say about it as a concrete phenomenon in the world. While knowledge based on ethnographic fieldwork might by minimal or even totally absent for people in voluntary isolation, anthropological research has produced a very impressive understanding of indigenous Amazonian social forms in general, knowledge that can be brought to bear on the question.

This paper investigates relations between philosophy and social science in the field of social aesthetics, which brings together such disciplines as sociology, literature, and art history, from a philosophical prospective. The main problems of social aesthetics are illustrated by a series of social and aesthetic phenomena (such as lifestyle, prestige, and luxury) at the intersection of social science and aesthetics (interpreted both as theory of perception and theory of arts). Social aesthetics is defined as the study of appearance in the society. The paper investigates the knowledge model and theoretical foundations of this interdisciplinary field. Respecting legitimacy and disciplinary boundaries of social science, the papers reminds us that the domain of philosophy is synthesis, ability to bring together and to give a coherent structure to empirical knowledge derived from social science. Philosophy is concerned with problematisation, homogenisation, and articulation, and also with history and genealogy: these domains are illustrated by a history of the divide between aesthetics and economy, which dates back to the 18th century. The example demonstrates critical potential of philosophy, since it allows us to question several a priori concepts that frame our idea of knowledge (such as opposition between useful and useless, necessary and gratuitous), to connect, and to find analogies between seemingly distant spheres of reality.

This paper characterizes sociology as a form of knowledge of society about itself. It asks what makes sociological texts successful when evaluated by the community of sociologists. In order to answer this question, sociological texts are examined through the cooperative work which connects the author and the readers in the act of reading. Based on a case study, the paper shows that an implicit pact governs their relationship. In exploring what this implicit pact consists in, it comes to the conclusion that a political frame underlies the production-reception of the text. This pact delineates a mode of implication of the reader in a text and organizes the modalities of this implication. Making this pact explicit as well as the entailed implication, means intensifying the reflexivity of sociology itself.

In modern societies, the fact that a specifically intellectual authority acts as a normative basis is a crucial question, in philosophy as in sociology. This paper argues that it is primarily a sociological question, before being a philosophical one. More precisely, as Max Weber’s work shows, it can be approached in the context of a comparative sociology of religions, a dimension well brought to light by the opposition between a corrupted figure of the prophet – the « chair prophet » –, and that of the scientist endowed with well-established professional ethics – an opposition central to his 1917 conference Science as a Vocation. In that regard, Weber’s text is viewed in a critical way, as this paper shows that, far from abandoning all reference to religion in a secularized context, Weber’s thinking eventually redefines what it may mean for social scientists in the Modern era, if however they are able to measure up to its singular fate.

This paper presents a recent pedagogical practice in the field of philosophy in schools : Discussion with a Democratic and Philosophical Aim (DDPA). According to the author, this practice differs from a more traditional conception of philosophy teaching by upsetting three key aspects of the pedagogical relationship : the relationship to knowledge, the relationship to the teacher, the relationship to the group. For each of these aspects, there is an analysis of, on the one hand, how authority is questioned and reworked, and secondly, how the power relations relayed by the school system are revealed and transformed. More broadly, the author argues that the DDPA, in its very practice, sheds new light on the nature of the philosophical act and undermines the established partitions between teacher and student, philosopher and non-philosopher, scientist and ignorant. This paper therefore ambitions to highlight the concept of emancipation – inseparably intellectual and political – that underlies such a philosophical learning device.

This paper considers the diaspora as a vantage point from which to challenge the traditional opposition between national and regional/local identities. Through a study of the institutional and social organization of the Greek-Orthodox colony in Venice in the early modern period, the paper investigates the ways in which regional belonging informed communal logics in a diaspora context, as well as the ways in which communal governance informed these local identities. The Venetian case therefore invites one to consider the « diaspora experience » as part and parcel of the political and social construction of local identities, in particular through patterns of trans-local mobilization of regional markers. This analysis shall finally allow us to question the situation of the Greek-Orthodox colony in Venice, in face of the emergence, in the middle of the xviiith century, of a « new Greek diaspora », and to offer an alternative model to the implicit assumption of an existing continuity between « the making of the community » and that of the nation.

Hunger strikes are often presented as a weapon of last resort for oppressed and socially powerless groups. This hypothesis is tested through the case study of a hunger strike that was launched in Chicago in August 2015 against the closure of a public high school and which resulted in its reopening. Beyond its empirical interest, the study of a struggle through hunger argues for embedding the analysis of how hunger is turned into a contentious resource within its context of production. Because this context is shaped by the politicisation of the forms of violence imposed onto racialised groups, the paper also argues that hunger as a contentious resource must be viewed in relation to the social agents using it, to their social positions and the resources at their disposal when claiming to stand for broader interests.

Food gleaning is usually considered as a subsistence practice, related to scarcity and hunger. This paper revisits this assumption by focusing on gleaning by the lower fractions of the working classes. Based on data from fieldwork still in progress, this article shows that even though gleaning is a way of consuming food that is excluded from the official market supply channels, it cannot be reduced to that. First, through an interactional approach, we explain how this practice can, in some cases, make visible the constitution of close protection, based on moral values of reciprocity and solidarity. Secondly, this article takes a dispositional approach, by analysing the genesis of the non-market economic arrangements of one of the gleaners. We show that these arrangements are not only determined by situations of survival struggles, lack and hunger, but that they are established during past stages of school and professional socialisation, transforming both the modalities of action and the meaning given to the practice.

In the latin and christian world, we find the first regular uses of the words contagium and contagio in the doctrinal and normative literature which severly condamns the heretic groups. At the same time, the theology, still in its enfancy, uses the same words to refer to the original sin’s transmission – but this paper doesn’t deal with this issue. Globally, they contribute to form the medieval sphere of sacrality, since this one includes which has not been polluted or contamined by the original sin. With the notion of contagion, the canonists try indeed to conceptualize the pollution of the sacraments, but also to define the sins’ spreading. During the last third of the xiith century, lawyers seem yet to prefer the biblical notion of « slander » (scandalum), which becomes the touchstone of the disciplinary building of the Church. To face up to the evil’s propagation, the ecclesiastical power choose different « techniques » : pastoral sollicitude, exclusion measures, and government by secret. Finally, this paper invites to understand the contemporary biopolitics in the light of christian governmentality.

The activity called Neogeography was born in the 2000s when new Web tools appeared, that allowed people to annotate space and places and attach personal information to them. Neogeography is considered in this paper as a prism through which it is possible to observe the changing interface between geography and computer science, a role that Geographic Information Science had been playing for over twenty years. Going back to the emergence of neogeography and studying its definition and its affirmation makes it clear that geographers have remained absent from the debate while GIS were clearly called into question both as a professional activity and as a discipline. The paper then reviews the answer offered to NeoGeography by Michael F. Goodchild, which stands clearly within the paradigm of Geographic Information Science, and discusses its limitations. The conclusion addresses some geographical challenges of Neogeography by comparing the very different theoretical approaches of two philosophers, Henri Lefebvre and François Dagognet.

The post-disaster environment frequently places response personnel in life or death situations in which they are under considerable pressure to think, communicate and act quickly. It is well known that individuals, groups and organizations working under these conditions engage in actions that range from conventional to improvised, yet the thinking and communication processes underlying these actions have only recently begun to be explored. A concomitant challenge is in creating publicly available data sets to support this work. A natural next step is in developing and evaluating materials to support training and policy making regarding improvised response to disaster. This paper reports on work to date – as well as a number of unaddressed issues – in seeking to understand improvisation (through theorizing and data collection) and to support it (through training) in the context of emergency response. Various examples from prior and ongoing studies of improvisation in emergency response illustrate the points of the paper, grounding this work in the practical realities of undertaking field studies on this highly salient but very transitory phenomenon.

This paper explores the relationship between social and cultural history, the antagonism which has kept them apart for a long time, and the reasons for a new convergence between the two which has emerged recently. The case of microstoria and of its “fathers” (Edoardo Grendi, Carlo Ginzburg or Edward P. Thompson) provides an example of the limitations of both approaches. The paper shows that the combination of “pragmatism” applied to judiciary documents and sociological theories of action opens the way for a new convergence between social and cultural history.

When the existing order cannot offer a solution, the solution to climate crisis must come from the radical left, and this is precisely why Karl Marx’s idea of ecosocialism is more important than ever. In this context, it is worth revisiting not only the legacy of István Mészáros’s theory of “social metabolism” and that of his successors – who can be categorised as comprising the “metabolic rift school”, which includes John Bellamy Foster, Paul Burkett, and Brett Clark –, but also Karl Marx’s own theory of metabolism. In order to highlight the contemporary importance of Marx’s theory of metabolism, after its long suppression in the twentieth century, this paper aims at classifying three different levels of Marx’s concept of “metabolic rift”, which also entails clarifying three different levels of “metabolic shift” as the theoretical foundation for updating Marx’s theory of postcapitalism, in the age of global ecological crisis.

Based on the work of the American microbiologist Lynn Margulis, this paper proposes an overview of the ontological, epistemological and methodological contribution made by scientific and anthropological analyses concerning bacteria. The aim is to show how attention to bacterial microfauna has led to a renewed understanding of both the living world and materiality, opening up a horizon of thought for living matter. Bacteria transform organic and inorganic matter and appear therefore to be capable of agentivity, of doing and acting. In order to understand, from their point of view, the meaning of materials, and to think about matter through the prism of its particular combinations and specific transformations, an alchemist reading of the bacterial world, based on the new materialisms, allows us to underline the entanglement of matter and interactions, and to deepen the decentring in a more-than-human direction.

This paper reflects on the recent changes in the French academic world. Drawing on a series of significant figures and statistics, the author traces the ongoing dismantling of French higher education and research, up to the recent law on multi-year research programming (LPPR).

This paper provides feedback on the protest movement against the law of multi-year research programming (LPPR), as seen by six female activists from the National Mobilisation Committee of the French academic labour movement “Facs et Labos en Lutte” (“Faculties and Laboratories in Struggle”). Building on an analysis of practices and experiences in organisation and mobilisation, it aims to portray how a feminist dynamic unfolded and endured within the movement. The text aims to draw attention to an often-overlooked aspect of this social movement, in order to leave a legacy that may be useful for future political struggles.

This paper starts from the ambivalent relation that links researchers and intellectual journals during the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. After questioning the definition of these journals as critical media of knowledge, as specific supports for the elaboration, the circulation and the appropriation of critical theories, we will focus on the meaning of this ambivalence. The first ambivalence analysed is the one that links intellectual journals from the years 30’s to 60’s that assume a critical perspective and the cultural industry (Kulturindustrie). In the continuity of this investigation, we will try to understand how to think today this relation to intellectual journals. Does this apparent ambivalence prevent the production of critical knowledges? Due to the inherent complexity and the contradictive substance of intellectual journals, our perspective gives rise to an interest for the notion of inheritance: how could we inherit, as researchers in Humanities and as journal producers, these fundamental contradictions ? We will suggest, as last questioning, some critical commentaries, on the one hand, about the work produced by the Groupe de recherches matérialistes (GRM) in relation with problematic inheritances – the inheritance of intellectual journals and the inheritance of heterodox marxisms –, and, on the other hand, about the form that has to be developed by an intellectual journal today

The author returns to a professional career path in the publishing of the humanities and social sciences, from the publication of a dictionary to that of a scientific journal in paper and digital format. This path is part of a profoundly changing technical and economic context: while school publishing remains flourishing, driven by the needs defined by the Ministry of National Education, university publishing became more fragile at the end of the 1990s in a context of exponential growth in subscription costs charged by commercial publishers, leading to a gradual reduction in institutional acquisitions. This involves in particular the publication of small scientific journals. Initiatives were then launched to develop digital publishing, initially in an uncoordinated way. The author’s journey allows us to trace in the singular the history of the transformation of editorial models and the role played by the various actors in research.

Tracés’ visual identity lacks unity due to the inner constraints of its different medium formats (paper print, website, blog): colours, graphic composition, typographic fonts differ from one medium to another. Every student of the diplôme des métiers d’art “Typographisme” from the Paris Estienne School of Graphic and Industrial Arts made a visual identity proposal, which may be adapted to all editorial media in a unified manner. In order to do so, some of them chose to create of typefont for the journal or to make use in their designs of open access typesets and of “contributive graphic tools”, accessible without the mediation of a graphic designer.

In the aftermath of the publishing of Tracés’s special issue (no 32, 2017) contextualizing the translation of Natalie Zemon Davis’ paper about “Women and the world of the Annales” and the answer provided by the Annales’ editor-in-chief, Tracés invites a retrospective and critical analysis on the part played by the women who first belonged to the editorial board of the journal. The interview is introduced by a quantitative discussion, drawn from the journal data for 2007-2018, of the male domination over the publication, although gender studies were given significant room. The interview given by the first four female scholars to join the editorial board provides evidence that parity – although imperfect – was achieved thanks to the combined efforts of women and a few men. The interview retraces the four women’s motivations to take part of the journal’s board, their roles in the editorial process, their interactions within the editorial board, and it addresses the editorial choices which they took part of.

This paper offers to reconsider the contemporary environmental shift observed in urban rainwater and river management in France. Based on the analysis of technical documents from the 19th century to nowadays, it aims at cast new light on this change, arguing it lies on a redefinition of the notion of “environment” and on the rise of ecology as a useful knowledge within city management, rather than of a shift in urban management or a redefinition of the city itself.

The author returns to a professional career path in the publishing of the humanities and social sciences, from the publication of a dictionary to that of a scientific journal in paper and digital format. This path is part of a profoundly changing technical and economic context: while school publishing remains flourishing, driven by the needs defined by the Ministry of National Education, university publishing became more fragile at the end of the 1990s in a context of exponential growth in subscription costs charged by commercial publishers, leading to a gradual reduction in institutional acquisitions. This involves in particular the publication of small scientific journals. Initiatives were then launched to develop digital publishing, initially in an uncoordinated way. The author’s journey allows us to trace in the singular the history of the transformation of editorial models and the role played by the various actors in research.

This paper starts from the ambivalent relation that links researchers and intellectual journals during the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. After questioning the definition of these journals as critical media of knowledge, as specific supports for the elaboration, the circulation and the appropriation of critical theories, we will focus on the meaning of this ambivalence. The first ambivalence analysed is the one that links intellectual journals from the years 30’s to 60’s that assume a critical perspective and the cultural industry (Kulturindustrie). In the continuity of this investigation, we will try to understand how to think today this relation to intellectual journals. Does this apparent ambivalence prevent the production of critical knowledges? Due to the inherent complexity and the contradictive substance of intellectual journals, our perspective gives rise to an interest for the notion of inheritance: how could we inherit, as researchers in Humanities and as journal producers, these fundamental contradictions ? We will suggest, as last questioning, some critical commentaries, on the one hand, about the work produced by the Groupe de recherches matérialistes (GRM) in relation with problematic inheritances – the inheritance of intellectual journals and the inheritance of heterodox marxisms –, and, on the other hand, about the form that has to be developed by an intellectual journal today

In the aftermath of the publishing of Tracés’s special issue (no 32, 2017) contextualizing the translation of Natalie Zemon Davis’ paper about “Women and the world of the Annales” and the answer provided by the Annales’ editor-in-chief, Tracés invites a retrospective and critical analysis on the part played by the women who first belonged to the editorial board of the journal. The interview is introduced by a quantitative discussion, drawn from the journal data for 2007-2018, of the male domination over the publication, although gender studies were given significant room. The interview given by the first four female scholars to join the editorial board provides evidence that parity – although imperfect – was achieved thanks to the combined efforts of women and a few men. The interview retraces the four women’s motivations to take part of the journal’s board, their roles in the editorial process, their interactions within the editorial board, and it addresses the editorial choices which they took part of.

Tracés’ visual identity lacks unity due to the inner constraints of its different medium formats (paper print, website, blog): colours, graphic composition, typographic fonts differ from one medium to another. Every student of the diplôme des métiers d’art “Typographisme” from the Paris Estienne School of Graphic and Industrial Arts made a visual identity proposal, which may be adapted to all editorial media in a unified manner. In order to do so, some of them chose to create of typefont for the journal or to make use in their designs of open access typesets and of “contributive graphic tools”, accessible without the mediation of a graphic designer.

The present paper offers an analysis of two periods in the development of the concept of singularity in Alain Badiou’s philosophy. 1) In Theory of the Subject, published in 1982, he opposes himself to structuralist tendencies in French Marxism by trying to think that which substracts itself from any structure. 2) In Being and Event, in 1988, he tries to make singularity compatible with a general ontology. The article concludes, after examining the coherence of the concept as well as its aptitude to do the work for which it was designed, that it is in the first period that Badiou can serve as a guide towards a theory of the singular, since he presented then some of the concepts necessary to think that which is over and above any structure.

Since the 1990s, the norm of singularity has been spreading across the political field. The purpose of this paper is to analyze a specific object: the political book. The careful examination of 210 publications from the 1958-2011 period makes it possible to identify changes within the genre. The political book is, at the beginning of the period, marked by the strength of the institutional hold on authors, ministers or party leaders. Things change with the normalization of the Gaullist model that establishes a “right to style” at the top of the State, which will subsequently be claimed not only by his successors but also by various candidates to the presidential election. Currently, the political book is free from institutional exemplarity: politicians mark their distance from the requirement of loyalty (valorization of free speech); they publish autobiographies and resort to the ideology of authenticity.

This note brings additional information about the translation from Korean to French of a paper written by the sociologist Yang Hyunah on the legal status of abortion in South Korea and the experience of women. This short text aims at presenting the process of this translation in order to give a better understanding of the questions we met and the choices we made concerning characteristics of the Korean language, the positioning of the author and some lexical issues.

Why to engage in the ungrateful task of translating the social sciences of Asia? How to overcome patterns of unequal exchange between disciplines embedded in Western languages and fresh scholarly proposals elaborated in other languages of the world? Building on examples taken from Korea and Asia, this article aims at offering insights into translation, both as a practice and an object of research. Starting from a quick look at the Index translationum and flows of translation, it then broaches a programme designed at re-exploring cultural history from the angle of translations, and translators. It finally questions the location of translation in current academic and public debates. This paper also propounds two sorts of conclusive remarks. For one thing, it appears that translation studies overinvest in pondering concepts while under-investigating the more complex problems conveyed by the issue of argumentation, academic genres, and the normalization of scholarly writing. For another thing, too high expectations bear on less-translated languages when they are expected to quickly deliver new ideas to rejuvenate worn-out theories. Patient and reflexive translation might be a slow boat to Asia: it is a safe boarding for anyone who seriously wants to engage with otherness.

This paper aims at briefly presenting the historical, social and political context of the debates on abortion in South Korea. The situation of abortion in Korea is characterized by a gap between its legal status and its reality: in spite of its illegality (in most cases) this practice is extremely common. In addition, debates about abortion entered the broadest discussion about the women’s rights to autonomy only recently. Since the 1960s and even more the 1970s, abortion has been politically tolerated and even sometimes encouraged by population control policies. This context changed around 2010 when the state decided to reinforce the criminalization of abortion as a way to increase birth rate. Abortion arrived as a major topic in public debates and the claim for its legalization became an important issue for South-Korean feminist movements. Feminists have started to mobilize for its legalization, generally in the context of broader claims for women rights to autonomy, and while also advocating the importance of sexual education and better contraceptive choice.

This paper highlights how much the notion of governmental innovation is closely related to the idea of incremental transformation of the political system and to the strengthening of the Party-state’s capacity to govern as well as to its legitimacy. The focus is also put on the relevance of the institutional genre of expression and to the use by the political scientist Yu Keping to highly recurrent modes of formulation that firstly stress the achievements in the Party-state’s endeavours to improve governance in order secondly to put forward functional improvements to the governing mechanisms.

In the middle of the 1920’s, a few years after the Great Kantô Earthquake, artist and intellectual figure Kon Wajirô (1888-1973) begins, with the help of some friends, to observe the movements and daily lives of Tokyo’s inhabitants. This new science, called modernology, aims at compiling the infinite variations of contemporary life’s ordinary practices and details, through numerous drawings, sketches and graphs. This paper intends to reflect on this original attempt to grasp the present by recounting its main protagonist peculiar path.

This paper highlights how much the notion of governmental innovation is closely related to the idea of incremental transformation of the political system and to the strengthening of the Party-state’s capacity to govern as well as to its legitimacy. The focus is also put on the relevance of the institutional genre of expression and to the use by the political scientist Yu Keping to highly recurrent modes of formulation that firstly stress the achievements in the Party-state’s endeavours to improve governance in order secondly to put forward functional improvements to the governing mechanisms.

This note brings additional information about the translation from Korean to French of a paper written by the sociologist Yang Hyunah on the legal status of abortion in South Korea and the experience of women. This short text aims at presenting the process of this translation in order to give a better understanding of the questions we met and the choices we made concerning characteristics of the Korean language, the positioning of the author and some lexical issues.

This paper aims at briefly presenting the historical, social and political context of the debates on abortion in South Korea. The situation of abortion in Korea is characterized by a gap between its legal status and its reality: in spite of its illegality (in most cases) this practice is extremely common. In addition, debates about abortion entered the broadest discussion about the women’s rights to autonomy only recently. Since the 1960s and even more the 1970s, abortion has been politically tolerated and even sometimes encouraged by population control policies. This context changed around 2010 when the state decided to reinforce the criminalization of abortion as a way to increase birth rate. Abortion arrived as a major topic in public debates and the claim for its legalization became an important issue for South-Korean feminist movements. Feminists have started to mobilize for its legalization, generally in the context of broader claims for women rights to autonomy, and while also advocating the importance of sexual education and better contraceptive choice.

Why to engage in the ungrateful task of translating the social sciences of Asia? How to overcome patterns of unequal exchange between disciplines embedded in Western languages and fresh scholarly proposals elaborated in other languages of the world? Building on examples taken from Korea and Asia, this article aims at offering insights into translation, both as a practice and an object of research. Starting from a quick look at the Index translationum and flows of translation, it then broaches a programme designed at re-exploring cultural history from the angle of translations, and translators. It finally questions the location of translation in current academic and public debates. This paper also propounds two sorts of conclusive remarks. For one thing, it appears that translation studies overinvest in pondering concepts while under-investigating the more complex problems conveyed by the issue of argumentation, academic genres, and the normalization of scholarly writing. For another thing, too high expectations bear on less-translated languages when they are expected to quickly deliver new ideas to rejuvenate worn-out theories. Patient and reflexive translation might be a slow boat to Asia: it is a safe boarding for anyone who seriously wants to engage with otherness.