778Area 2. Grey zones and turbulence/en/research-topics/research-topics-2025/778-axe-2-2025-EN
This research area brings together inquiries that resonate with public debate, civil society, and the increased circulation of humans and ideas.
Whether in ordinary or exceptional situations, this research theme explores grey zones, in which indeterminacy and uncertainty prevail, where powers, institutions, norms, values, and beliefs are called into question. The research projects grouped here focus on the modalities that enable low-key political action in areas ranging from religion, kinship, and health to the environment and migration. Unlike the notion of crisis, which refers to a critical but temporary situation, the notion of grey zones covers the situations of unrest that we have begun to explore in recent years—states of agitation, destabilization, and confusion that can be prolonged—but it also differs from it. The grey zone refers to a liminal situation, an in-between, a border zone which, unlike “trouble,” has a beginning and an end and is characterized by a high degree of indeterminacy coupled with uncertainty about what is happening or may happen. This has led to a shift in research towards an anthropology of the infra-political in contexts of social, ecological, and political reconfiguration that individuals inhabit because they find it in their interest to enter, remain, or leave.
The aim will therefore be to consider the interstices in order to envisage the individual and the social, less through institutional frameworks and stable identities, and more by focusing on interactions, margins, and intersections in spaces of adjustment, circumvention, opportunity, and creation.
Alors que les travaux de l’un de nos doctorants sont l’objet de violentes attaques sur internet, le Lesc tient à lui apporter publiquement son complet soutien. Ces attaques anonymes substituent au débat scientifique la manipulation, la malhonnêteté et le mépris. Cette expérience nous oblige dans un horizon proche à un travail collectif de clarification concernant les perspectives et les ambitions des pratiques associant sciences, design, arts et création. Ce travail ouvrira également, nous l’espérons, à la discussion scientifique que ces recherches et pratiques méritent.
Candidatures au concours Cnrs 2027
Le laboratoire d’ethnologie et de sociologie comparative (Lesc–UMR 7186, CNRS/Université Paris Nanterre), propose un dispositif de soutien aux candidat.es au concours 2027 au poste de chargé.es de recherche au CNRS se reconnaissant dans les perspectives scientifiques du laboratoire et souhaitant leur rattachement au Lesc en cas de recrutement.