Agenda de l'ENS de Lyon

In this workshop we will deal with new risks to health, food, floods, the environmental and ecological disasters such as climate change, pollution (fumes, effluent, organic and chemical waste), drought risk, etc. New ecological risks are producing uncertain situations, geographies of care and "community of destiny" produce new social solidarities, inequalities, new moral boundaries and new public spaces. Risks and disasters are social constructions rather than natural events striking societies from the outside. And, as such, they are caused by social and economic vulnerabilities, and they also sustain new forms of participative democracy.

In each place it is impossible to consider risks and disasters as being solely local; quite the opposite, we have to realize that a very deep and active process of dislocation is present everywhere in each country. Although the political, economic and social organization might shatter, we should nevertheless consider that societies are always more or less unstable. Disaster is thus a matter of degree, the point at which fragile social equilibrium makes way for stringent turmoil within societies, and at which the social and political ability to control these continuous processes of dislocation is badly altered by this tremendous shock. Since ecological disasters produce paroxysmal figures of physical and social destruction, they also open spaces for new figures of social restoration and for new processes of reconstruction of societies, and regimes of action. Citizens facing ecological risks and post-disaster consequences develop economies of political judgment by producing regimes of action from the responses of the institutions managing the post-disaster situation; these regimes of action of the victims mark out other moral boundaries linked to citizen spaces which arise out of silence, complaint, consent, indignation or the detachment of institutions.

Although we should not confuse risk society and catastrophe society, we can observe some quite similar processes affecting social vulnerability, inequalities and individual and collective capabilities. In Asia, multiple inequalities are fusing into "high-compressed modernities"—in the sense of Chang Kyung Sup—and in Europe into "low compressed modernity." Urban ecologies assume the presence of multiple and different representations of the nature-urban culture interface, these same urban ecologies may also be studied for inequalities and environmental injustice, multi-governance and biopolitical order, regimes of action and the citizen's competencies, and collective mobilizations. Facing new ecological risks or disasters reveals the maintaining of previous inequalities, the production of new ones and the breaking away from previous ones, but also the intersectionality and fractality between economic, social, ethnic, moral, cultural and environmental inequalities. Sociologists are invited to revise the way of defining inequalities and to conceive their plurality around social and ecological change. Individuals and social groups compete for material and social goods. They produce new social and economic frontiers, new social and moral orders in which individuals and groups have to occupy new positions and statuses.

In recent years in Europe, in China, in Indonesia, in Japan, in Venezuela and Guinea, ecological risks and disasters have caused very significant material, social, economic, moral and symbolic ruptures, and tremendous fragmentations in each society. We would like to compare also how individuals are able to develop life and survival strategies and to build collective mobilizations. In each country we would like to compare also the complexity of institutional arenas, constituted through the involvement of a plurality of local and international actors who struggle to develop governance patterns while facing situations of ecological uncertainty. We will analyze in each cultural context how collective actions and moral economies are producing new forms of citizenship in local and global public spaces, as well as the process of restoration and re-creation of societies. Adaptive learning entails re-socialization and production of new identities. A central issue thus concerns the processes of society recreation. The recreation of society could entail maintaining previous forms of socialization, inventing new ones, breaking away from previous ones or finding compromises between previous and present social, economic and moral patterns.

Speakers

• Laurence Roulleau-Berger, CNRS research director, Triangle ENS Lyon
• Li Yong, post-doctoral fellow Triangle, ENS Lyon
• Wang Xiaoyi, professor at Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing
• Yazawa Shujiro, professor at Seijo University, Tokyo
• Loïs Bastide, associate professor at University of French Polynesia, Papeete
• Hasegawa Koichi, professor at Tohoku University, Sendai
• Paula Vasquez Lezama, CNRS senior researcher, CRESSPA
• Zhang Qian, associate professor at Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing
• Frédéric Le Marcis, professor at ENS Lyon, Triangle and IRD
• Zhang Hao, professor at Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing
• Jean Tassin, Ph. D. candidate, ENS Lyon, Triangle
• Jérôme Michalon, CNRS researcher, Triangle, ENS Lyon
• Doctor Jiang Pei, postdoctoral fellow, Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing
• Julie Le Gall, associate professor at ENS Lyon, CNRS USR 3337 CEMCA (Mexico), University of Lyon
• Guillaume Faburel, professor at University Lyon 2, Triangle, ENS Lyon
• Zhang Jieying, assistant research fellow, Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing