Ressources numériques en sciences humaines et sociales OpenEdition Nos plateformes OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypothèses Calenda Bibliothèques OpenEdition Freemium Suivez-nous

To take care of plurality in participatory sciences – from the inter-individual to the systemic

Cette transcription correspond à mon intervention dans le cadre du Colloquium “Society and Nature” du Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin (MfN).

NB : la traduction suivante est largement perfectible et présentée comme un document de travail. Il s’agit d’une adaptation de la conférence donnée le 26 avril 2024 lors de la journée Sciences et recherches participatives à l’Alliance Sorbonne Université.

Good morning everyone,

Let me introduce myself, my name is Mélodie Faury and I am a junior professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, for the Research Chair on Participatory Sciences.

Thank you for your invitation, and a special thank you to Ulrike and Elisabeth for their warm welcome and the whole organization.

I am pleased to share today some of my research reflections on the subject of participatory science, which I recently presented at the Sorbonne University during a day co-organized by the university and the museum.

I have spent the last ten years working in Strasbourg with local partners on participatory science and teaching university students, I have had very little opportunity to intervene in English in these two contexts, so excuse me in advance for the quality of my English that I have quite abandoned and that I will use again in the years to come! And that’s why I wil read my talk today.

Today, I choose to talk about participatory science through the notions of taking care of plurality.

In my research, I pay attention to what sets us in motion, what motivates us, what guides our actions from the interindividual to the systemic.

What is the link with participatory science? The one I am doing is that of plurality. The idea being to say to ourselves that the otherness is always already there, the otherness is always already there where we already are. At this time, with my french colleagues we discuss a lot about consideration and about the legitimacy of knowledge coming from experience. All of us, we have knowledge of experience, and it is sometimes difficult to consider it, both in the sense of its legitimacy, but also in terms of the attention mode that we could deploy to perceive it.

The approach that I unfold is an anthropologist’s approach to research, and in particular to participatory research and science. My approach is interested in the everyday, in the infra-ordinary (I borrow the expression from Georges Perec, the writer), in gestures in the practices – which are ways of thinking, and meanings that we put into our actions, and in our ways of being present and especially present to situations and to others.

In this way of approaching the question of participatory research and science, the question of our relationship to science quickly arises. Let us say more broadly relationship to knowledge: those that we carry, those that we encounter, how we encounter them, how do we connect in fabrics of interdependence, with, let’s say, forms of entities in presence – I will remain quite broad here by using this term.

My method is very inspired by the question of the commons: what do we constitute as common? Do we have common spaces, common times, common places, common languages, a common culture? And so on. We might even ask ourselves: who welcomes whom? In my opinion, this is one of the central questions: who welcomes whom and who is transformed by whom in participatory research? Are we seeking to sensitize society or are we making ourselves sensitive to society? Or both. These are questions of this type that concern me. And I am very interested at the moment in the notion of appropriation. It’s a term whose translation or polysemy I am not sure of in English, but I could try to share with you some thoughts about it the next time I will come or sending you additional elements to my presentation of today if you are interested in the question of “appropriation”.

Appropriation. We spontaneously hear a certain meaning when we say this term, and I try to open up the plurality of meanings that this word can carry.

The other question I ask is the following: is there a link between appropriation of knowledge and participation in its development, since we are talking in particular about co – construction of knowledge.

I use a lot the table proposed by Trench. I will not go into detail here. I use it as a focal point. I can send it to you later and we can discuss it after.

It is already relatively old, it dates from 2008 in the field of science and technology studies, at the intersection with information and communication sciences, a field in which I am involved and which allows us to question in particular the practices of scientific mediation or popularization, not only under the angle of what they produce, but also from a relational angle. What interests me is the relationship, what happens between – in particular with the audiences, the contributors, the public, the stakeholders, whom we designate in multiple and non-neutral ways in our participatory science practices. But I am also interested, like Trench, in the relationship that mediation practices propose with the sciences or Science (with a big ‘S’), and what it constructs as a world and possibly as a desirable future. And there we could make connections with our ways of telling stories from knowledge and relations, but I won’t have time today. That is another focal point for another meeting. I present to you where the branches are, the thresholds.

I want to consider people who make connections between stakeholders in participatory science, as people working for care, without perhaps they are even considering it under this term. My colleague Clara Chavanon in Strasbourg often talks about the care she puts into the links as part of her work at the Citizen Lab. Within projects, it is not only about producing, it is also about taking care of an intention, of a space between – which has been posed as a desire, an idea, a need. A desire to respond to what has been asked. I will come back to this question of response capacity. Would “building skills” be empowerment ? I don’t know. In this case, I lack joy, in Spinoza’s sense: joy as the power to act, from within and collectively.

What interests me is what you deploy in your practices of citizen science and in your spaces, which is already there. I insist, everything is already there in a certain way. And I am interested in what we perhaps do not yet consider (enough) in our stories, in our ways of transmitting, of sharing, to bear witness from participatory science and research, and which would precisely be your ways of taking care of the link and an idea how to make links happen, precisely in this space between people, between stakeholders who might never have met without this maintained space.

I’m quoting Charlotte Hesse about knowledge as commons:

“We need every bit of local knowledge as much as we need scientific knowledge. Through the knowledge as commons, we also begin to understand that there are all kinds of shared, nested and intertwined knowledge, each of which responds to the demands of different times and places. »

And it seems to me that one of our challenges is to recognize, to identify what we call the knowledge coming from experience and how we constitute it in expertise. Expertise, in whose view? For me, one of the questions is “what matters to whom?” What is valuable to whom? And in what context? » Behind these questions, you can see that the question of support, evaluation and indicators is emerging.

I see the professionals of citizen science as weavers. In France we sometimes talk about “d’intermédiateurs”, I don’t know if you have an equivalent term. Professions of interdependence and care are often professions which disappear from our sight and our attention. You may know this if you know, for example, the work of the philosopher Sandra Laugier. These are the jobs that we often don’t see. This was very noted especially during the pandemic. These are professions that hold, which hold the fabrics, which hold the interdependencies, which hold us and which take care of what we hold dear. Hold and be held.

So I come to these questions: are our participatory science contexts sensitive? Listening, welcoming. What is the local knowledge, carried and valued, legitimized within them? Do we have space for the unexpected?

So I suggest that we increase the points of view and attention modes for our practices. It seems to me that we can tell the same participatory science experience in a thousand different ways. And when we choose to tell it with certain terms, certain stopping points, certain focal points, we make choices that make import certain parts of the story, certain parts of the experience. It is not neutral or innocent.

“Tell me how you tell your story and I will tell you what you are participating in the construction of. » Isabelle Stengers

Realizing this is important. I was recently talking with my colleague Asma Steinhausser, and we said to ourselves that certain ways of telling stories allow us to make ourselves readable in the eyes of each other, to sometimes also make ourselves legitimate in the eyes of the executives who support us. Stories can therefore have a function of conversation and create collective meanings, which is very important. But the frames and terms of our stories also offer frames which necessarily create something outside the frame, and in doing so do not allow us to explore the plurality – of the othernesses, languages and frames of reference present. This is in fact always what will happen, but being aware of it already allows us to multiply frames.

I took the example here – without going into detail, of the participatory research prize which I had the pleasure of co-chairing two years in a row, where we worked in particular with Romain Julliard of the Museum in Paris, and other colleagues from civil society, from Inserm also from the Fondation de France, etc. In this jury, we multiply our attention modes. To express the interest of a project, we never evaluate it with just one look. We are not going to evaluate it only with a “research-centered” look, for example. It is not only what it brings to participatory research that counts, we always situate ourselves in between(as a place, as a relationship) and it is this in between which interests us, because it is it which holds us together.

We can theorize everything I am telling you, but more directly, it is a question of attention to vitality, to the plurality of practices, to emergence, to the material, institutional, temporal conditions which allow us to welcome and take care of this attention to plurality.

How to do it concretely? I will take some time to talk to you about the Commons method which inspires me a lot. It is indeed an attention which goes from the interindividual to the systemic and which joins the approach consisting of moving from the matter of fact to the matter of concern, and to the matter of care. These aspects are developed in particular in the sociology of science and in science and technology studies.

Concretely. I was lucky enough to arrive at the Museum in Paris on February the 1st.  Since I arrived there, I already have an intensity of stories in my head, thanks to the interviews with colleagues from MOSAIC and Science Ensemble for example, and thanks to Science Ensemble workshops. I will describe these two organizations in more detail on slides. I had the chance to listen to their daily lives as citizen science workers, according to my approach as a science anthropologist and, interested in their infra-ordinary life, in what makes sense of their practices. What motivates actors and actresses in their work, what moves them?

And it’s the people I meet who build my attention. I don’t have an a priori vision of what should matter in the situation. It’s co -constructed.

I had the pleasure of visiting and meeting a number of colleagues from the MOSAIC team, a service unit or we can also say a center of skills and expertise. And in my opinion, it is precisely a place where colleagues provide the conditions for the bond, for the links. It’s not just about producing platforms for citizen science. Which they do of course and what they are most of the time identified for. When I hear the people and the professions carried out within the team, I see professions of caring. I see people who ensure that stakeholders can meet, talk to each other, understand each other to transform an idea into reality. But everything in between the idea and the execution, for me that’s expertise. Both experience and expertise.

To ensure the conditions of the meeting, to ensure the conditions for the Common. The datas will certainly be Common, but the construction is also common. It is a space-time, in itself.

And Science Ensemble as professional network is also a place of thought. There, I see places of knowledge and reflexivity, as for the MOSAIC team and its partners, and through the experience of practice. There, we take the time to exchange based on experiences. It is also about testifying to failures, to what did not work. And meeting each other first from failure, I find it really interesting. These places restore the possibility of sharing everything that we cannot value elsewhere: what we cannot value in institutional spaces, what we need to share because it allows us to take steps aside (or to think “outside the box”) and to think better about what we ultimately contribute to and what we want to do, regain contact with our experiences and the meaning of our achievements.

I could talk for a long time about MOSAIC and Science Ensemble. These are valuable and important spaces in the institution. MOSAIC is especially working on the project Changing nature, to make it possible. They are also important as reflective spaces precisely, as places for sharing experiences. And there we find the ability to situate a need for production and co-construction of knowledge in relational issues. And I think that if we miss the relational dimension, we miss one of the main issues of participatory science and research, from the point of view of what they allow in terms of particular inter-individual relationships, but also as a governance issue for the project. Who will take care of what has been produced or of the process which creates value in itself (that is not necessarily linked to production, in experimental projects for example)?

(…)

When we consider things from this relational and experiential point of view, we start from situations, from singularities – and I will arrive soon to Commons. We start from the intersections at which each and everyone finds itself. We are singularities through our intersections, that is to say that we all have different addresses.

By coming into contact with science and participatory research from this approach, we also value the fact that a collective can be built, not from what we should do together, but rather from the fact that a priori we do not know how to do something together, and that we will together take care of the plurality of presences, meanings and commitments that are gathered there. Thinking this way changes our attention patterns.

This is what Vinciane Despret says in her introduction to Donna Haraway ‘s Companion Species Manifesto when she says

“to become capable, to learn to pay attention. Attuning here supports the dual meaning of giving attention and recognizing the ways in which other beings are bearers of attention. This is another way of declaring importances. »

(…)

So the question I ask is the following “when we meet to co-construct knowledge – whatever the modality of the meeting is, whatever the space, whether digital, physical or of other kind, what are we exactly taking care of? How do we relate to each other? There are spaces for exchanges, spaces for sociability, convivial spaces. Entretenir (in french – I’m not sure that there is an equivalent translation) in both senses of the term in french, which Sandra Laugier addresses in her ethics of care: conservation and conversation. Bounding can be both at the same time, in the same gesture.

And this ultimately comes together with the following question: what do we give value to? I can certainly tell everything I do in my work with a grid that tells me what I should value. But I can also bring out from meeting and the contact with the concrete experience, what had value for all the people engaged. How can we promote it in frameworks? How do I value it in the settings where I already find myself? In fact, that’s where the difficulty lies.

I think that we come back to the question of the Commons by what Christian Laval says about it. We often confuse “commons” with “what we already have in common” as a common denominator. To create commons, in the sense of Laval, we do not connect through common experiences. This can have a lot of meaning in many contexts, to regain contact with one’s experience, to name it, to make it readable and to regain the power from within and with a group to act. And then to join a collective that does not necessarily share the same experiences.

“Think about a modern way of creating community, which does not aim to reactivate the community clause based on the identity of similar people (…) but to update the conception of a society of citizen cooperators based on the sharing of singularities. »

In elaborating common, there is the dimension of jointly taking care of something together. This “something” does not always have a defined or circumscribed form in advance.

If I am not mistaken, a good part of our commitments, at the personal level to the institutional level is to participate “in transitions”. It is often the ways in which our projects are formulated at the european level and national political frameworks.

What does it mean to participate in transitions? In my opinion, it means in particular “how are we going to inhabit this world and what do we want to do with this world together?” How will we respond to what is happening to us collectively, and do we have the resources to respond? Are they already there? Should we produce them, should we invent them? Can we find new powers to act, individual and collective, and how to do it? Can this be done without being transformed ourselves at the same time?

We want to transform practices. But can we transform it without being transformed? I am not sure. And what would it mean, for example, to “be transformed” by taking into account other types of present knowledge or by the presence of others and otherness?

At this stage, the question perhaps to remember would be “What does it mean to be in relationship when we are not attentive to what matters to others, to the world with which others come?” »

The Trench table that I quickly showed speaks for example of the model deficit. You may have already heard of it. This communication frame has been deconstructed thanks to research work on scientific mediation, for more than 50 years, but it is a representation that is still active in practices. Changing the communication paradigm means moving away from a representation that remains in the distance between oneself, the environment and the others.

For me, the notion of “impact” is problematic because it always stays at a distance from what is happening. If I am looking for an “impact”, I am not situating myself in the impacted situation or I am not going to seek to have an impact. Do you see the picture? If we think with “fabric” and “textile” images, an impact causes a snag or a hole. Concretely, when we talk about “impact” we do not actually put ourselves “with” it all the way. There’s something happening without us next. Have we allowed ourselves to be transformed?

In other words, we need to change paradigms on a number of dimensions.

Maybe that we are saying to ourselves “well, the knowledge that we have co -constructed, I will be able to promote it in my scientific approach, I will be able to publish, I will be able to show that it’s added value for research.” But at what point do I ask myself until the end what is the added value for the stakeholders and how do I take care of that until the end?

And I have a proposition. It is to consider that what we have co-constructed is an artwork. I could unfold it for you next time.

(…)

We are talking about major transitions, where we think that knowledge and in particular the knowledge of experience, entangled with scientific knowledge, will strengthen us in the responses we can give to what is happening to us. So it’s about everything except detachment from the situation after having built it. We’re not going to be satisfied with publishing, and that’s it. Well in my opinion anyway!

Many things prevent us from activating these transformations and connecting ourselves to our collective resources in favor of the power to act in the face of transitions (in particular). I will not go into detail here, but I will cite a few of them. It is about temporalities, there are also research production frameworks which constitute difficulties, we are caught and taken by discourses, norms, injunctions which act on us and make us act. And I invite you and I invite us to take the time to tell ourselves in other ways, about other figures in our experiences, about other voices in our experiences, to give space to plurality of what happened.

“so how did it go?” “. This is a question that is very open. Through my answer I can choose to import what I want from the experience. What mattered. On the other hand, if someone tells me “what was the impact?” » or “has there been an increase in skills? », I will only be able to show a very small part of the project, which is perhaps not what was ultimately the most important. Nor what gives the most capacity to respond and power to act. I am interested in spaces that allow us to tell each other’s experiences in a plurality of ways, to bring out a plurality of importance and stories.

Thank you very much for your attention.

Auteur/autrice

  • Mélodie Faury

    Chaire "Recherche sur les sciences participatives : rôles et modalités transformatrices" - Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle (MNHN) Docteure en Sciences de l'information et de la communication / STS (science and technology studies) Agrégée en Sciences de la Vie, de la Terre et de l’Univers


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Mélodie Faury (16 mai 2024). To take care of plurality in participatory sciences – from the inter-individual to the systemic. Formes des récits. Consulté le 5 décembre 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/14gog


Vous aimerez aussi...

Laisser un commentaire

Votre adresse e-mail ne sera pas publiée. Les champs obligatoires sont indiqués avec *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.