Research activities

We seek to turn ecological issues into opportunities for thought. Ecology and development are the subject of important critical work. In particular, we study the effects of the mechanisms put in place around the discourse on access to and conservation of nature, using the ‘political ecology’ approach, in order to detect the forms of insecurity that they produce among the most vulnerable populations. The same is true of sustainable development mechanisms, which we consider, based on various approaches from the socio-anthropology of development, postcolonial studies and political economy, as the heirs of modernisation operators. The aim is to study the effects of violence within these same populations, again from ethnographic and socio-anthropological fields, in Europe and Africa. Ecological disasters are based on systemic forms of racism, and vice versa. We study the phenomena of racism from some of their sites of production: police violence, borders and anti-migratory institutional violence, courts, North/South relations, but also scientific and cultural institutions. We seek to understand how these relate to colonial relations, including its epistemological dimensions. To do so, we mobilise decolonial and postcolonial studies as well as subaltern studies, critical race studies, cultural studies, the Afrocritical tradition, and certain minority forms of European knowledge (pragmatism, in particular). But it is also a question of studying the countless forms of resistance or the deployment of alternatives to these devastating models. Thus, the struggles for environmental justice, but also certain trade union innovations attentive to residual wage forms (precariat) and their effects, as well as certain local forms of production, decolonisation movements, new anti-racist struggles (BLM, committees), demands for dignified burial (cemeteries, repatriations) propose other relationships to human and non-human beings, and outline other territorial proposals. These are often unexpected alliances that are formed, underneath the furrows and sectoral domains of collective action. If they deploy forms of ‘situated’ knowledge to do this, the role of sociology and anthropology is also to describe their scope. This is an ethical dimension of knowledge. The relationship of these initiatives to institutions (participation, conflict, notion of target public) and to public action is the object of our attention. The medical humanities are studied in this sense, both from a historical and a contemporary point of view. From problematic situations in the world of illness and health – concerning unreflected biases in fundamental and clinical research as well as the violence that is all too often present in clinical encounters – we aim to reconstruct their epistemological and institutional genealogies and we endeavour to explore and give a chair to contemporary situations. We conduct fieldwork in laboratories, in hospital settings (in Europe and elsewhere) but also and crucially within user groups and health activists. Our research in this field draws on historical epistemology and Science Studies, but also on the pragmatist tradition in that it systematically questions the effects of each practical, conceptual and theoretical element.

Our unit is also associated with the following UMONS research institutes :