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Savoirs Partagés

Ten conversations on the hybridation of knowledge

Jointly funded by INSHS and OpenEdition, with the support of UAR 2276 for the production of a podcast, and benefiting from ongoing research undertaken in ANR Reforms project, the SAPA project aims to observe, in the course of nine public discussions, the open use of science and knowledge sharing in the digital age in a variety of social contexts, involving actors from civil society, doctors, scientists, entrepreneurs, activists, autodidacts, editors, etc., and multiplying exchange and production formats.

Partners

INSHS

Sessions

Coordinators

Centre Internet et Société | Simon Apartis | Simon Apartis is a researcher within the PathOS project, co-coordinator of the SAvoirs PArtagés program and project manager of the “Petite Encyclopédie de la Science Ouverte”. He is the administrator and regular contributor to this scientific blog.

He studied philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. Before that, he worked as an administrator at CIS for one year and as a cook for two years. He is passionate about the intersections of queerness and jewishness and the issue of transmission of the Shoah and the Algerian War. He has also translated Siegfried Kracauer’s early work, Sur l’amitié.

Inno3 | Celya Gruson Daniel | Graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, with a master’s degree in cognitive neuroscience and a doctorate in social sciences (information and communication sciences and science and technology studies), her interdisciplinary background allows her to finely grasp the various conditions of production and use of data and scientific publications in digital knowledge regimes.

She frequently acts as a teacher in various research institutes and higher education institutions, providing training in digital methodologies (data collection, analysis, and management). Today, she leverages her diverse skills in consulting and research project for Inno3, following an open research-action approach.

OpenEdition Lab | Simon Dumas Primbault | Simon is a CNRS junior professor at OpenEdition and Aix-Marseille Université, associate researcher at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and associate research at the Laboratory for the history of science and technology (EPFL).

His research lies at the intersection of science and technology studies, ethnography, and media studies, and endeavours to shed light on the diversity of users and practices on Open Science platforms. More specifically, his current project is on the articulation between navigation practices and the discoverability of data across audiences.

Présentation

The wordings used to describe the redefinition of the relationship between science and society are hesitating between expressions such as science “with”, “in”, “for”, “and” society, “citizen science”, “participatory science” or “co-construction of knowledge”. This hesitation reflects the difficulties we still have thinking through the current process of moving away from the diffusionist – or popularization – model inherited from the 19th century. Many binary oppositions, that have hitherto been taken for granted, are being called into question, such as that between amateur and professional scientists, producers and consumers of science, or the socio-geographical separation between places where knowledge is produced and places where it is displayed. In the context of both structural and conjunctural transformations (global warming, digital transformation, crisis of confidence in science, etc.), the ways in which knowledge is organized and produced – in other words, its governance, financing, and methods – have multiplied, and with them, the ethical and epistemological relationships to the world that are expressed within it. The public power, structuring and structured by knowledge, has been considerably transformed.

In this new configuration of knowledge, open science acts as a boundary object: here, it is envisaged as the free circulation and appropriation of knowledge in an ideal of sharing and universality; there, it is praised as a reaction to the oligopoly of the major scientific publishing houses; there again, it is a watchword for the creation and management of knowledge commons, in particular by including invisibilized or marginalized knowledge. On the question of the relationship between science and society, open science is sometimes seen as a means of amplifying a diffusionist model of ready-made science – granted that opening up access would suffice to democratize knowledge – or sometimes, on the contrary, as a way of co-constructing knowledge with the communities concerned.

Over the past ten years, many academic mediation projects have taken advantage of the lessons learned from STS to go beyond the diffusionist model of science and engage in a genuine dialogue with society, fostering collaborative spaces and practices between researchers and civil society actors. These institutional projects of participatory science – i.e., emanating from the institution and reaching out to society – run the gamut from the outsourcing of menial tasks in the form of gamification to the genuine co-construction of socially relevant knowledge between academia and society. While the “citizen-sensor” model is strongly criticized as emanating from a neoliberal science regime, open science calls for the continued inclusion of extra-academic knowledge and its practitioners within the academic sphere, and its reciprocal reform.

Indeed, a number of citizen science projects – i.e. those emanating directly from the communities concerned outside of academic institutions – have demonstrated the need to take seriously the skills, practices, and places of knowledge of extra-academic actors. In the healthcare field in particular, clinical research can no longer ignore the vital needs, networks, and knowledge expressed, accumulated, and produced by patients’ associations – whose first instances date back to the AIDS epidemic – or, for example, expert patients within psychiatric institutions.

To ensure that research in the social sciences and humanities continues to be socially relevant, both in its practice and in its results, it has therefore become urgent to stop thinking of the relationship between science and society in a diffusionist mode, and to include science once and for all in society by encouraging the co-construction of knowledge even upstream of academic initiatives, i.e. by completing the articulation of participatory science and citizen science into shared science.

In a dialectical approach, we would like to study how national and transnational public institutions capture and organize heterogeneous initiatives, stemming from multiple interests (knowledge, care, activism, production, etc.), led by « civil society » actors, themselves more or less integrated into the institutions (through their training and professional position), and see in return how the institutions allow their structure, norms, and methods to be transformed by the same initiatives that they channel. This raises the question of how citizen, local, and alternative sciences negotiate their relationship with the scientific institution, its opportunities and constraints, and, conversely, how to build an inclusive scientific institution that promotes the diversity of knowledge. How do extra-academic practices relate to and negotiate with the scientific institution, shaping the knowledge produced by citizen science? How do the criticisms, however implicit, levelled by citizen science against the academic world enable it to reform itself in order to welcome, without capturing or formatting it, the “third research sector”?