Books & ideas

How Can We Talk about Sexual Minorities?

Mathieu Trachman — 2017-06-29T07:00:00Z

Minority sexualities give rise to much discourse, which is more widely ranging than it is broadly disseminated. As much as the question of their actual practice, these sexualities raise the issue of how to talk about them. Halfway between essay and fiction, Marco Vidal offers some potential avenues to explore.

When History Flows Through Us

Ivan Jablonka — 2014-06-12T07:47:32Z

Bodies that are excluded, ill, damaged: this is often the first glimpse that a historian gets of men and women in the past. Philippe Artières talks about the physical and emotional experience that this creates: “Their history flows through my body.” The writing of history is influenced by other people's suffering, but also by our own.

Social Life as Improvisation

Pauline Peretz & Olivier Pilmis & Nadège Vezinat — 2011-01-31T09:59:35Z

American sociologist Howard Becker stands out for his rejection of theory and his attachment to ethnographical observation of worlds in which he is himself an actor. One of his key lessons to sociologists is that they should ask “how” rather than “why”.