The Covid-19 pandemic : what the HSS say
Résumé
A brief presentation 9
Introductory remarks 11
authorities, media or institutions in charge of crisis management. Moreover, contemporary health surveillance tends to render crises 'chronic' by definition by detecting threats and anticipating them increasingly earlier. Health crises are thus not characterised by the scale or urgency of the risk and what remains as a criterion is chaos. A crisis creates disorder in society and, indeed, part of crisis 20 management involves maintaining or restoring a certain social order. This is probably the most relevant aspect of how health crises are commonly understood and reminds us that these crises are never 'just' health crises -they also represent economic, social and political upheavals. Health crises are not a new research topic for the HSS. Health and environmental risks and crises have been a canonical subject for the HSS for at least three decades. 4 HSS research has accompanied changes in governmental risk management with research programmes initially focused on major industrial or natural risks and then on health risks (AIDS, mad cow disease, heat waves, etc.), particularly following the French infected blood affair scandal. At the end of the last century, the CNRS initiated a vast interdisciplinary research programme in France devoted to collective risks and crisis situations led in particular by the political scientist Claude Gilbert. Gilbert was asked to lead work on this subject and launched the Risques Collectifs et Situations de Crise (Collective Risks and Crisis Situations) programme led by the CNRS. 5 This enabled knowledge from existing research to circulate and also helped aliment such research with disciplinary input from other research fields. The variety of disciplines and researchers who participated in the project helped build a diverse research community in France, at least in sociology, political science, anthropology, contemporary history and law. The multiplication of crises, their social and political impact and the transnational circulation of risks did the 4 -For example, on the subject of modern societies' relation to risks, we may cite a work which played an important role in this movement, namely Ulrich Beck's book published shortly after the Tchernobyl catastrophe in 1986 and translated into English in 1992 under the title 'Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity' by M. Ritter. 5 -See the work published under his direction in 2003: 'Risques collectifs et situations de crise -Apports de la recherche en sciences humaines et sociale' (Collective risks and crisis situations -the contributions of humanities and social sciences research) Paris, L'Harmattan, as well as Claude Gilbert (dir.) 'Les crises sanitaires de grande ampleur: un nouveau défi ?' (Large-scale health crises: a new challenge) La Documentation française, Paris 2007.
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Est traduit par halshs-03036192 Rapport Marie Gaille, Philippe Terral, Philippe Askenazy, Regis Aubry, Henri Bergeron, et al.. Les sciences humaines et sociales face à la première vague de la pandémie de Covid-19 -Enjeux et formes de la recherche. [Rapport de recherche] Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier. 2020, 111 p. ⟨halshs-03036192v2⟩