Books & ideas

Africanist

Elara Bertho — 2024-01-16T11:08:00Z

In her memoir, the renowned French researcher Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch looks back on her Jewish childhood, her first experience of Africa in the 1960s, the neo-colonialist stance of some academics, and her intellectual and political career, in which anti-racism has played a pivotal role.

How valuable are evaluations?

Coline Soler — 2023-07-06T08:30:00Z

For twenty years, universities and research have been the target of reforms and evaluations. Clémentine Gozlan examines the making of these mechanisms, which are central to the new system of academic governance—in which academics often participate.

Scholars Between Laughter and Tears

Volny Fages — 2019-11-11T08:00:00Z

Scholars are not just thinking machines. They laugh; they are anxious, angry, or afraid; they become friends with their colleagues. Researchers experience many emotions but these are mainly ignored, as though they had nothing to do with the process that produces knowledge.

The Ancestor Seeker

Thomas Grillot — 2016-05-06T07:00:00Z

Michel Brunet, a paleontologist and paleoanthropologist at the Collège de France and the discoverer of the oldest pre-human remains yet to be found, describes to Books & Ideas the obsessive quest for the human family's ancestors and the circumstances in which his field, situated at the crossroads between the natural and human sciences, is practiced.

Serendipity: Expect The Unexpected

Mathilde Poizat-Amar & Nina Rolland — 2014-07-03T08:00:00Z

Horace Walpole's “Serendipity” has become a word commonly used in a wide range of disciplinary fields. Two recent books explore contemporary uses of the concept, in relation both to professional research and to creative processes more generally.

The Collective Identity of a Teaching Body

Vincent Descombes — 2011-03-04T08:20:00Z

How can we explain the breadth of the mobilization of academics against the plan to modify their status? For philosopher Vincent Descombes, it is the collective identity of the teaching body that is being injured by the current reforms, as well as the very definition of the university as a social form.

Inbreeding in Universities: In Favour of Administrative Regulation

Olivier Godechot & Alexandra Louvet — 2010-04-29T08:37:00Z

In response to the reaction of three researchers in Economic Sciences and Sociology published yesterday in La Vie des Idées, Oliver Godechot and Alexandra Louvet here round out and clarify their position regarding academic inbreeding.

How to Find Out How to Do Qualitative Research

Howard S. Becker — 2009-04-30T11:24:48Z

Basing his discussion on a reading of recognized classics in social science, Howard Becker offers a critique of the new ways in which sociological work is to be funded in the United States and calls for the respect of the fundamentally inductive nature of qualitative research.