Sciences and Technologies Studies Laboratory

Fields | Projects and contracts | Collaborations | Events |

Research directions

Théories, images, outils du corps

Concepts historiques et sociologie des techniques d'investigation du corps humain.
Histoire sociale et conceptuelle de la physiologi

La construction sociale et historique de l'objectivité scientifique

Psychiatrie, psychothérapie, neurosciences

Histoire et études sociales de la psychiatrie, de la psychothérapie et des neurosciences aux XIXe-XXe siècles.
Etudes sociales des transformations du savoir dans les neurosciences et en psychiatrie.
Histoire culturelle et conceptuelle de la psychiatrie.

Relation science-society

Her research offers a symmetrical view of the relationship: public attitudes towards science and scientists' engagement to society.

Public understanding of science: longitudinal analysis of Switzerland and international comparaisons.
Animal exerimentation
Nuclear energy
Women' perceptions of science and technology
Science communication
Visitors' perceptions in a science festival, science communication, scientific culture.
Scientists' engagement toward society

ASPU «De l'analyse sociale au projet urbain: exploration d'un champs interdisciplinaire émergent»

1996 Projet conjoint UNIL-EPFL, Institut de Géographie de l'Université de Lausanne (IGUL)

SLIM "Social Learning in Multimedia"

1996- 1998 Projet européen du 4ème programme cadre, TSER "Targeted Socio Economic Research", ESST-EPFL

HAT "Home Automation and Telematics"

1996-1998, Projet COST A4 «Social Shaping of Technologies», ESST-EPFL

«Intermodalité et interfaces: les enjeux d'une méthodologie d'évaluation en matière de transport à grande vitesse," Etude du cas Swissmetro

1998 - 1999, FNRS -PNR 41, ESST-EPFL

PRECEPT, The transformation of Management Concepts: the Social Shaping of Business Process Reenginering programmes

1999 - 2001, Projet européen TSER (Targeted Socio-Economic Research), ESST-EPFL
http://www.its.dtu.dk/faggr/tesoc/precept/default.htm

e-GOV, « An Integrated Plateform for Realising Online One-Stop Governement »

2001 - juin 2003, Projet européen du 5éme programme cadre, ESST/EPFL et IDHEAP et partenaires de Finlande, Allemagne, Gréce et Autriche
http://www.egov-project.org/partners.htm

La fracture numérique: émergence, évolution, enjeux et perspectives

2003 -2005 Projet FNRS - PNR 51 ''Intégration et exclusion'', CEAT / LEM-ILEMT-CDH / EPFL; Office fédéral de la communication

Projet de thèse: «Etude sociale du "sujet cérébral" entre imagerie, neurosciences et psychiatrie»

Since the Decade of the brain, which was proclaimed in the USA in 1990 and in Switzerland in 1993, psychiatry appeared to get closer to somatic medicine and neurosciences, mainly thanks to functional neuroimaging (PET, fMRI, EEG). These techniques record in vivo human brain activity during cognitive tasks and correlate patterns of activity with psychiatric disorders, symptoms or psychological dimensions. They promise the development of interdisciplinary and translational research in biomedicine, resulting in the application of fundamental research to clinical psychiatry.
The aim is to solve the etiology of mental disorders. This dissertation proposes another story of these techniques as used in psychiatry, starting more than a century ago. Relying on interviews, in situ observations and unexploited historical sources belonging mainly to swiss academic psychiatry past, this study shows how functional neuroimaging has contributed to versions of clinical and experimental cerebral subject at
the crossroads between psychopathology, psychopharmacology, and cognitive neuropsychology.

Etudes sociales des sciences

Research and higher education policies

Knowledge transfer in medicine

Cette ligne de recherche est née d'un groupe de recherche interdisciplinaire que nous avions lancé avec M. Grossen et B. Burnand en 2010 pour étudier les principaux aspects de la mise en oeuvre des connaissances médicales (translationnelles types 1 et 2). Elle associe des chercheurs/euses en services de santé, psychologie socioculturelle, études sociales de médecine ainsi que des cliniciens-chercheurs. Cette collaboration a notamment donné lieu au projet FNS "Knowledge Translation through Tool-Supported Practices in Health Care: Production and Use of Self-Management Tools in Chronic Disease".

Gender in Knowledge Production

Inquiry into the scientific effects of gender - in the sense of women's oppression, of a political and knowledge regime, or as a field of metaphors that are socially and scientifically performative - in the production of knowledge and in knowledge-power relations
Fields of inquiry: the life sciences, medicine, and health, but also the humanities and social sciences

Sex, Race and Knowledge-Power Relations

Inquiry into knowledge production and practices of naturalization - denaturalization - renaturalization of sex, race, and of purported natural marks and groups in relation to systems of domination (sexism, racism, colonialism, neo-colonialism/liberalism, etc.), to hegemonic configurations (reproductive heterosexuality, genital sexuality, whiteness, the healthy, beautiful and sexy body, etc.). Our inquiry always seeks to analyze agt the same time the critical modalities of power: such as the rhetoric of (sexual, women's) liberation, of equality, antisexist and antracist politics, anti-naturalism and critiques of the very idea of nature, etc.

A Social and Political History of the Body and of Sexuality

Instance of a current research on intersexuality with an interdisciplinary team : pedopsychiatrists, psychoanalyts, pediatricians, surgeons, endocrinologists, social scientists, feminist researchers and intersex activists confront their views on the clinic of intersexuality, on feminist, gender and queer theory, and social studies of science and medicine
After a research seminar (2005-6), preparation of an issue of the journal, Nouvelles Questions Féministes 27/1 (out by March 2008), and organisation of an international conference on intersexuality, March 2008 in Lausanne
Collaborations: Prof. François Ansermet, pedopsychiatrist, Service de psychiatrie de l'enfant et de l'adolescent (SUPEA-FBM), Hôpital Nestlé; Dr Blaise Julien Meyrat, PD MER, surgeon pediatrician, DMCP, CHUV; Vincent Guillot, Spoke person for French-speaking Europe of the OII (Organisation Intersex International)

The Social in Question: Reflecting on the Social Scientist's Work

A critical inquiry into the analytical power,or powerlessness, the relevance or irrelance, of categories and other tools for sociological and historical work in relation to transformations in the "social" world: of scale and space (local-global, globalization, migrations, etc.); redefinition of life and of the human (with new reproductive technologies, biomedicine, the genome projects on the human and other living beings, etc.), of social relations, citizenship, and of what it means to a subject (biosociality, biocitizenship, etc.) - to name only a few

Statistique

Public awareness of statistics
Size effect
Psychometry study

Philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence

Health Care Evaluation Unit

Tasks

To evaluate quality of healthcare and patient safety;

To develop and evaluate new prevention and coordinated management of care strategies for patients living with chronic diseases;

To promote the transfer of reliable and up-to-date scientific knowledge among healthcare professionals, the general public, patients and decision-makers;

The work of the UES allows notably to check whether the indication for a type of care is in line with the recommended medical intervention. This work also helps to establish whether patients tend to over- or underuse the services available.


https://www.iumsp.ch/en/ues

Science and technology studies

Sociology of science and innovation in the field of digital cultures and digital humanities
Ethnography of research lab
Engineering and infrastructure studies
Analysis of cooperative scientific networks
Analysis of scientific practices (e.g. interdisciplinarity)
Methodology for R&D politics evaluation

Food and drinks purchasing and consumption practices among young people

Commensality, food sharing and sociability among young adults of different political and cultural contexts

Comparison of commensal and sociable forms in different cultural contexts

Food, body and migration

Food, gloabisation and transnationalism

Knowledge Translation through Tool-Supported Practices in Health Care: Production and Use of Self-Management Tools in Chronic Disease. The case of Diabetes

Social Studies of neurosciences

Cette ligne de recherche a été articulée à une série de (co-)supervisions de doctorats sur ce sujet, accompagnés d'un engagement à long terme dans des activités scientifiques connexes (séminaires, colloques, etc.). Depuis 2013, j'ai développé une recherche personnelle sur l'étude sociale du Human Brain Project, les relations entres les neurosciences et les sciences sociales et quelques contributions à une épistémologie historique des sciences du cerveau.

Social studies of epigenetics

Projet FNS (2016-2018) : Panese, F. (Main applicant), Simeoni U. (Co-applicant). PaRED - Parental Responsibility, epigenetics and DOHaD. Emerging sociotechnical imaginaries of reproduction in the age of epigenetics. Chercheur : Chiapperino, L. (Senior researcher) (SNF, Div. 1. N° 162A73)

Digital traces

My research focuses on the epistemological, social and political issues involved in renewing the conditions of access to knowledge of individual and collective practices.
More specifically, a search is carried out on the history of Wikipedia's page views in the ten most important languages in order to better identify the differences between Wikipedia editions, but also to automatically identify global places and events.

Social and Political Issues of The Internet

My research focuses on collaboration (crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, collective intelligence...), Internet governance (algorithms, net neutrality...) and more generally on the renewal of social mediations.

Textual analysis

My research also focuses on textual analysis. This exploratory approach focuses on the publications of the last ten years of eight American and English scientific journals (with the highest impact factor) in order to identify trends in the standardization of themes and references mobilized.
Other research includes the treatment of the Internet by the media (major anglophone media on the subject) or scientific communications (Calenda). Another research project concerns the automatic identification of research themes in the laboratories of the EPFL's ENAC faculty.

Big Data, Social Sciences and Society

The abundance of data significantly renews the practical conditions for scientific research. The massive production of data on individual practices is a remarkable opportunity to better understand contemporary social dynamics. Computer science and physics thus tend to increasingly integrate social issues into their research problems, neglecting all too often the specificities of this type of data and the plurality of contexts in which they are produced. My focus is on the resurgence of the assumptions of nineteenth-century sociology (positiveism, social physics and the laws of imitation), as well as cybernetics and behaviorism.

Data visualization

My research focuses on visualization issues in the social sciences. The powerful renewal of the technical capacities of information processing is changing not only the means of visualizing data, but also the actors who produce such images. My attention is not only focused on the inclusion of these new productions in a broader perspective of visual culture, but also on the potentialities and limitations of this dynamic.