This interdisciplinary event draws on perspectives from STS, sociology, anthropology, empirical philosophy and, as we shall see, management sciences, economics and design research.
The aim of these study days is to explore the ways in which we can make ourselves sensitive to environmental problems by manipulating knowledge that a priori falls under the heading of ‘objective’ knowledge, in the tradition of the modern sciences.
Numbers (and, more broadly, forms of quantification) have become the tools of objectivity in many fields, even beyond scientific practice (Porter, 1995). However, ecology’s awareness-raising discourse [1] tends to draw on these forms to encourage people to rally (Tasset, 2022) under the banner of ‘raising awareness’ of scientific facts. Often teleologically characterised by criteria such as ’emotional detachment [and] recourse to quantification’ (Daston and Galison, 2012 [2007], p. 39), the knowledge objectified by science is not always devoid of affect.
The tension between, on the one hand, the scientific register that sets figures, orders of magnitude and images at a distance, and, on the other hand, the sensitive relationship with beings and things, is woven into the background of commentaries on the Anthropocene. The environmental sciences, equipped with instruments to capture, quantify and graph data, describe the Earth as a great cybernetic machine. However the ‘Anthropocene event’ is also moving humanity from a state of disinterestedness to an entanglement with Gaia (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2013). This movement is accompanied by an invitation to consider the sensitive dimension of acting to address these crises, and to consider how cognitive, emotional and aesthetic factors are intertwined (Stengers, 2009; Latour, 2015). Certain scientific tools then act as ‘receptors’ that enable us to make ourselves ‘more sensitive and responsive’ to Gaia’s sensitivity (Latour, 2015, p. 184).
The interplay between sensitivity and knowledge has already been studied: in anthropology and the sociology of science and technology, the sensitive aspects of knowledge production have been explored through gestures that enable us to know, not only in scientific practices (Bert and Lamy, 2021), but also in very practical situations such as maintenance (Denis and Pontille, 2022) [2], or in the study of non-Western knowledge, as in the ethno-knowledge tradition (Brunois, 2005). This is because ‘sensitivity’ is also fashionable outside academic circles. In the arenas of environmental activism, it is presented as an essential means of mobilisation: ‘pedagogical devices’ use the registers of ‘objectifying science’ in the work of emotional socialisation aimed at the audiences to be sensitised (Blanc, 2024). However, the few studies that have dealt with this issue struggle to move away from an understanding of awareness-raising based on an “asymmetrical and paternalistic relationship with populations deemed ‘insensitive’” (Chamois et al., 2023, p. 31).
There is a tension at the intersection of these two perspectives, a tension which is well known in philosophy and which is a legacy of sociology. Sensitivity is polarised between two facets, perception and affection, each of which raises its own questions (Peroni, 2008): on the one hand, the place of perception in the production of knowledge, as is the case in research in the sociology of science and technology, which considers sensitivity as a modality of knowledge; on the other hand, the emotional dimension of sensitivity (particularly in the case of raising awareness of ecological issues), where it is more a question of transforming oneself or others through contact with knowledge that equips a certain relationship to the world.
The programmatic book edited by Peroni and Roux (2008) proposes a shift in the analytical gesture from studying sensibility to sensitising, shifting the understanding of sensibility from an object to be known to ‘the material of doing’ (Peroni, 2008, p. 26). In order to address activities related to environmental knowledge and to question anew the dualities between knowledge and affects that are regularly reified by work in the social sciences (Peroni and Roux, 2008), we propose to place this call in the direct line of this shift.
This approach to making things sensitive echoes many recent advances, especially around issues related to the living (Morizot, 2020), with its share of criticisms. Vinciane Despret (2021) has termed it ‘too convenient a catch-all’, and other authors prefer the expression ‘to give attention’ (Haraway, 2003; Tsing, 2015). Nevertheless, the term sensitivity allows us to include in the analysis the affective and aesthetic dimension that the field of attention does not accommodate as well. This is illustrated by the work of Nathalie Blanc, who suggests that ecological participation should be considered from an ‘aesthetic perspective’ that opens up different ways of appreciating the world (Blanc, 2008). However, few studies have looked at the concrete ways in which people work with their senses. These calls to ‘make ourselves more sensitive’, especially to other living beings, remain mostly speculative.
Finally, through the environmental entry point cultivated by the act of sensitisation, this call proposes to problematise the expanded relations to the world. It follows on from Chamois, Deluermoz and Mazurel’s (2023) call for an investigation of ‘the formation of sensitive experience itself and the effects of this formation on the socio-historical sphere’. By manipulating the tools of knowledge traditionally associated with scientific objectivity, it proposes to bring together perception, affect and aesthetics in an analysis of the ways of becoming sensitive that accompany the activities associated with this knowledge. Following Vanessa Manceron, who studies the construction of a sensitive relationship with the territory inhabited by amateur naturalists as they count, list, map and construct ‘objective’ knowledge, we explore a ‘grey area of modernity that is little known and little studied’ (Manceron, 2022).
This call for papers, while grounded in these theoretical considerations, is also a call for our respective fields to resonate with those of other researchers in the field. The architects Léone-Alix Mazaud works with, for instance, use plans, charts and various visualisation tools to build cities in the Anthropocene, all of which help to sensitise people to the state of the world and the need to transform it. In the awareness-raising initiatives that Solène Sarnowski regularly encounters with her respondents, ‘understanding to act’ has become the slogan of ecologisation. But if understanding is essential in order to act, it is also necessary to try to make themselves and others sensitive, which is a daily task for these people.
These study days therefore propose to develop two gestures:
1) To put inquiry back at the centre in order to question the sensitive relationship to objectified knowledge in the environmental field (which engages, enacts, transforms, metamorphoses, etc.).
2) To work on the tension between two easily polarised perspectives: that of a modernity oriented towards the search for objectivity (equipped with forms of quantification, visualisation, etc.) and that of the sensitive, which is still often presented as a kind of exclusive critical alternative to an approach that would precede it.
Contributions are invited to address questions that we propose to group into three nonexclusive axes, detailed below.
1. Working with sensitivity
How is sensitivity worked with? This section looks at the dynamics of an experience that is both active and passive: making something sensitive (and, in mirror image, being made sensitive), but also making oneself sensitive, from a perspective inspired by Antoine Hennion, where sensitivity is not inherited but cultivated by individuals (Hennion, 2008), and where the disturbance created can give rise to investigations (Dewey, 1938).
How do people give themselves the means to be affected by – to perceive in a certain way – the ecological issues at stake? We can look at the use of words, images, data, sounds – in short, all sorts of devices mobilised in this process, their aesthetics and the ways in which they take hold of people and are taken hold of by them. Furthermore, how is the emotional overflow that can result from these activities managed and what does it produce? Are we witnessing the emergence of one or more figures of the sensitive worker, at the heart of the sharing of knowledge and the sparing of people’s emotions, in the image of the awareness-raisers dear to ecological organisations? How then can we overlook the interplay of activity and passivity at the heart of the interaction that links them to the ‘sensitised’? Finally, what exactly does this sensitive work do to people? Is it simply a matter of transforming their practices by giving them a more informed view of the world, as ecological awareness programmes envisage, or can we see it as accompanying real metamorphoses, a profoundly different future, more embedded in Gaia?
Proposals can also address how this sensitive work can be equipped with tools that originate not only from science, but also from different types of organisations, from associations to States and companies. In addition to their political dimension (Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2004), do accounting and management tools also play a role in sensitive work? At the level of organisations, we can point to the law on the “duty of vigilance” or the obligation imposed by the CSRD in Europe to equip themselves with several reporting indicators.
2. Forms of knowledge expression
How do different forms of expressing knowledge contribute to making things meaningful? This axis considers more directly the aesthetic dimension of these forms, where aesthetics is taken “in its old sense of the capacity to ‘perceive’ and ‘be concerned’” (Latour, 2015, p.190).
Working with the sensitive sometimes involves a long, extended or discontinuous period of time, and presupposes the circulation of knowledge equipped with devices for expressing it. The role of writing devices and technologies (Goody, 1979 [1977]), visualisation (Daston and Galison, 2012 [2007]) and, more generally, media (Parikka, 2012) in the formation and circulation of knowledge has been explored in numerous work undertaken in the field of science and technology studies. The study of sensitivity leads us to question in particular the aesthetics of these devices, for example the maps manipulated in the Climate Frescoes, printed with images of open dumps, exponential curves and alarming diagrams, but also the forms mobilised by organisations to count and represent their environmental impacts and actions. How do these different forms of knowledge expression equip the work of the sensitive? How do they contribute to the circulation of knowledge and the way it operates? What role do they play in the cosmogenesis of the people surveyed? How do imaginary elements such as anticipatory fiction and disaster films relate to the forms developed by scientists? And beyond texts and images, what do more experiential media, such as sound immersion or multi-sensory media, produce?
3. Orders of magnitude
This third and final axis is a cross-fertilisation of the other two axis, proposing to question the orders of magnitude often emphasised in the shaping of environmental knowledge.
As measurements are at the centre of many environmental controversies, we propose to extend the classic concern of science and technology studies with the making of numbers to consider the ways in which measurements, but even more so their overstatement, affect people. How do numbers count for the people being studied? Questioning the aesthetics of orders of magnitude takes us into the realm of the effects of excess, the tragic and the sublime, to name but a few of the possibilities opened up by such a perspective. In a short article for the catalogue of the exhibition “Sublime. Les tremblements du monde” at the Centre Pompidou Metz, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz noted that “the concept of the Anthropocene is interesting for art and political ecology as it reactivates the aesthetics of the sublime”, playing on the registers of terror and amazement. Beyond the exhibition halls, the sometimes traumatic experience is also that of people in direct and repeated contact with these Anthropocene data, first and foremost the scientists who produce them. This exploration of the power of orders of magnitude to act should make it possible to go beyond the simple observation of the ‘existential shocks’ regularly identified in studies of pathways to commitment (Hards, 2011) and open the black box. Jean Chamel, for example, highlights the link between the ‘sciences of collapse’ and the emotional and spiritual work involved in an ‘inner’ transition that goes hand in hand with the ‘outer’ transition of the sensitive world (Chamel, 2019). We encourage contributions exploring this aesthetics of numbers and orders of magnitude through forms other than excess and the sublime, if there is such a thing.
Proposals for papers
These study days are aimed at empirical investigations from a variety of social science disciplines – STS, sociology, anthropology, empirical philosophy, but also management sciences, economics and design research, as well as ‘technographic’ investigative approaches (Nova and Léchot Hirt, 2019) using writing processes that complement text (music, film, photography, drawing, multimedia installation, etc.). The research areas will focus on ecological issues.
Proposals for papers not exceeding 5,000 characters should be sent to:
leone-alix.mazaud@minesparis.psl.eu and solene.sarnowski@telecom-paris.fr
by midnight 7 March 2025.
Selected participants will be expected to submit a paper of approximately 5,000 words by 23 May 2025.
These study days are organised with the support of the Interdisciplinary Institute for Innovation (i3).
Références
Bert JF., Lamy J. (2021). Voir les savoirs. Lieux, objets et gestes de la science, Paris, Anamosa.
Blanc, N. (2008). Vers une esthétique environnementale. Paris, Éditions Quae.
Bonneuil, C., Fressoz JB. (2013). L’événement anthropocène. La terre, l’histoire et nous, Paris, Le Seuil.
Brunois, F. (2005). Pour une approche interactive des savoirs locaux : l’ethno-éthologie. Journal de la Société des Océanistes, 120-121, pp.31-40.
Chamel, J, (2019). Faire le deuil d’un monde qui meurt: quand la collapsologie rencontre l’écospiritualité. Terrain, no. 71, pp. 68–85.
Chamois, C., Deluermoz, Q., and Mazurel, H. (2023). Sensibilités : entre histoire et anthropologie, L’Homme, 247-248, pp. 5-40.
Damian, J. et Higgin, M. (2024). « Aux franges du phénoménal ». Terrain. Anthropologie et sciences humaines, N°80.
Daston, L., & Galison, P. (2012 [2007]). Objectivité. Les presses du réel.
Denis J., Pontille D., (2022). Le soin des choses. Politiques de la maintenance, Paris : La Découverte.
Despret, V. (2019). Habiter en oiseau. Actes Sud.
Dewey, J. (1938). Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. Holt.
Fressoz, JB. (2016). L’anthropocène et l’esthétique du sublime. Sublime. Les tremblements du monde, Metz, Centre Pompidou-Metz, pp. 44-49.
Goody, J. (1979 [1977]). La Raison graphique. La domestication de la pensée sauvage, trad. de l’anglais par J. Bazin et A. Bensa, Paris, Éd. de Minuit.
Haraway, D. (2003). The companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. Chicago, Ill.: Bristol: Prickly Paradigm ; University Presses Marketing.
Hards, S. (2011). Careers of Action on Climate Change: The Evolution of Practices throughout the Life-Course. Sociology.
Hennion, H. (2004). Affaires de goût. Se rendre sensible aux choses. In Peroni M., Roux J. Sensibiliser. La sociologie dans le vif du monde. Actes du colloque du CRESAL, Saint-Étienne, 20-22 octobre 2004, Editions de l’Aube, pp.161-174.
Lascoumes, P. et Le Galès, P. (2005). Gouverner par les instruments. Presses de Sciences Po.
Latour, B. (2015). Face à Gaïa. Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique. Paris : La Découverte.
Malbois, F. et Lambelet, A. (2025). « Modalités sensibles du connaître dans le care ». Revue d’Anthropologie des Connaissances.
Manceron, V. (2022). Les Veilleurs du vivant. Avec les naturalistes amateurs. Paris : La Découverte.
Morizot, B. (2020). Manière d’être vivant. Enquêtes sur la vie à travers nous. Actes Sud.
Murphy, M. (2017). The Economization of Life. Duke University Press.
Nova, N., and Léchot Hirt, L. (2019). Ethnographier avec le design. Techniques & Culture, 71(1), pp. 198-201.
Parikka, J. (2012). What Is Media Archaeology? Polity.
Peroni, M. (2008). De la notion de sensibilité au fait de sensibiliser. in Peroni, M. et Roux, J. (dir.) Sensibiliser. La sociologie dans le vif du monde. Actes du colloque du CRESAL, Saint-Étienne, 20-22 octobre 2004, Editions de l’Aube, pp.161-174.
Peroni, M. et Roux, J. (2008). Sensibiliser. La sociologie dans le vif du monde. Actes du colloque du CRESAL, Saint-Étienne, 20-22 octobre 2004, Editions de l’Aube.
Porter, TM. (1995). Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton University Press.
Stengers, I. (2009). Au temps des catastrophes. Résister à la barbarie qui vient. Paris : Paris : La Découverte.
Tasset, C. (2022). L’effondrement et ses usagers : Éclectisme et réception d’une vulgarisation hétérodoxe en écologie scientifique. Zilsel, no. 1, pp. 73–103.
Tsing, A-L. (2021). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.
[1] With this call for papers, we leave the door open to all kinds of actors claiming to be involved in ecology, for example in the field of earth sciences and scientific ecology, or in the efforts of activists to mobilise the general public. The scope of ecology is therefore not defined a priori.
[2] See also the recent call in the Revue d’Anthropologie des Connaissances for ‘Sensitive modalities of knowing in care’, and the dossier ‘Aux franges du phénoménal’ published in the journal Terrain. Anthropologie et sciences humaines, N°80, p. 207, which is part of the ‘SENSIBILIA Sensibilités à l’épreuve de l’Anthropocène’ project.