Abstract
COVID has pervaded all aspects of our lives and we are struggling to continue our activities without health measures rendering them devoid of all their appeal. In certain cases, the situation has exacerbated unwanted developments, sometimes even revealing them. For us, as we finish this 149th issue, COVID reminds us just how indispensable human contact and free discussion are to academic output. This is true not only of classes and seminars, but also of what might seem to be the least sociable of research activities: the editing of texts. We of course require solitude to write, read, comment upon, revise, correct, and format articles. But dialogue and discussion are also necessary to improve the texts sent to a journal such as ours; this is how we can reap all the benefits of the peer reviews we receive and pass on criticism and suggestions to authors without causing offense, thus opening up new perspectives for them to enrich their work. Luckily, we two editors of this journal share the same office and so, for as long as we remain out of lockdown, we can remove our masks and discuss the texts that we publish.
However, our journal functions according to an Anglo-American model, in which, unlike many French journals, we do not have an editorial committee of academics who meet regularly to make publication decisions. Instead, we select articles based solely on double-blind peer reviews and, in this context, the opinions and advice of our editorial board are all the more important. Our board met in Bordeaux last February, when the current affairs of the time, for us, were the social movements sparked by the government’s planned retirement reform and its bill on multi-annual programming for research, against a backdrop of Yellow Vest protests. The special double issue on ‘precarity’ that we put together during this meeting would certainly never have seen the light without that day of discussion. Of course, it was then prepared thanks to considerable email exchanges in the silence of lockdown, but its conception and the assigning of each member of the editorial board to work with one of the authors was decided collectively, the fruit of a dynamic that only discussion can produce. We already know that we will not be able to meet again this year. COVID has also closed borders and our board comprises colleagues in France, Switzerland, Belgium, and Quebec, and our institutions are doing their best to keep us at home. We hope that we will nevertheless manage to keep fanning the flame of our collective work, because this is what inspires the desire (among other things) to produce journal issues and offer them up for discussion; another flame that we also hope to keep alight is that of resistance to the ever increasing demands to remain silent and to stay at home that accompany health measures, making solidarity with colleagues lacking job security ever more difficult.
This editorial was written in the autumn, but it will be published in January. As usual, as a new calendar year begins, we wish to thank our colleagues, whether in permanent or precarious positions, who use their skills to serve their peers and help them improve their work. The BMS owes everything to them. Thank you to Gabriel Alcaras, Talia Bachir-Loopuyt, Gilles Bastin, Ania Beaumatin, Cyril Benoit, Baptiste Besse-Patin, Damien Bol, Yacine Boukhris-Ferré, Dominique Boullier, Julien Boyadjian, Cécile Brousse, Patrick Bruneteaux, Bartoloméo Cappellina, Bruno Cautrès, Jean Chiche, Samy Cohen, Jean-Gabriel Contamin, Martine Court, Isabelle Danic, Guillaume Delalieux, Marc-Olivier Déplaude, Christine Fauvel-Aymar, Frédéric Gonthier, Joël Gombin, Michel Grossetti, Alexandre Jaunait, Sümbül Kaya, Katrin Klingsieck, Iasonas Lamprianou, Stéphane Legleye, Natasha S. Mauthner, Antoine Mazières, David Mensink, David B. Monaghan, Janine Mossuz-Lavau, Marie Plessz, Quentin Ravelli, Tinette Schnatterer, Régine Sirota, Farida Souiah, James Stimson, Anja Thomas, Vera Toepoel, Benoit Tudoux, Louis-André Vallet, Maxime Vanhoenacker, Agnès Villechaise, Antoine Vion, Chan Zhang, as well as our editorial board committee members: Philip Balsiger, Marc-André Bodet, Mathieu Brugidou, Damien Cartron, Margot Delon, Jérémy Dodeigne, Claire Dupuy, Olivier Fillieule, Florent Gougou, Camille Hamidi et Karl M. van Meter.
The content of this issue is varied. It opens with two articles in the ‘Implementation’ series, each one very different from the other. The first article, by Elisabeth Henriet and her colleagues, explains how and why they designed a real game, which people genuinely want to play, in order to try to grasp the emotions experienced in the aftermath of a typhoon that devastated the Philippines, when the inhabitants were expressing a clear sense of weariness towards researchers. In the second article, Mathieu Brugidou and Michèle Moine examine the benefits of asking a question in an unusual format: unusual in medium (an online panel survey), in form (a drawing with a dialogue to complete), and above all in motive (leading participants to take the side of those who transgress social norms on energy saving and who are usually stigmatised in opinion polls). In both cases, the accounts avoid any leniency and clearly emphasise all the difficulties that come with attempts at methodological innovation. The next article is a short text, more of a testimony than an article per se. Temirlan Jailobaev and the colleagues with whom he conducts applied sociological research in the Caucasus region offer an account of their use of WhatsApp to oversee fieldwork, in a way that will be of inspiration to many of us. The issue concludes with a long and fascinating article in which François Dubet revisits the role that methods, and more specifically ‘sociological intervention,’ have played in his career as a sociologist. Happy reading!