Lucas Brunet

La vie affective des services écosystémiques : recherche, communication scientifique et protection de la nature.: Habitués à considérer que la science est dépourvue d’émotions et à opposer l’émotion à la raison, les scientifiques n'ont pu reconnaitre la place centrale qu'occupent les affects dans leurs pratiques de recherche. Cette thèse se propose d'appréhender le rôle joué par de multiples affects et émotions dans la diffusion de la notion scientifique de Services Écosystémiques (SE) à partir d’une étude multi-sites informée par des entretiens avec des scientifiques et des praticiens de la conservation de la nature ainsi que par des observations participantes de leur travail et de leurs interactions. Émergeant du contexte apocalyptique d'anxiété suscité par la dégradation de l'environnement, la notion de SE offre un espoir aux protecteurs de la nature par le fait qu'elle combine l'écologie et l'économie et souligne la dépendance des sociétés humaines au fonctionnement des écosystèmes. La thèse montre comment la notion a attiré et même séduit un nombre croissant de scientifiques. Ceux-ci ont élaboré des jeux participatifs, des scénarios et des cartes pour communiquer avec des gestionnaires des espaces naturels et des décideurs politiques en créant des atmosphères émotionnelles spécifiques. Dans le domaine de la protection de la nature, la notion a touché de nouveaux publics, motivés non seulement par un amour de la nature ou par un sens de la responsabilité, mais aussi par de l'espoir et un sens de l’opportunité. Documenter comment la vie affective des SE s'est formée dans les rencontres entre les scientifiques et les praticiens, comment elle a été ciblée par de multiples formes de pouvoir, et comment elle a interagi avec des conditions affectives collectives, met en évidence l’importance méthodologique des affects et des émotions et leurs aptitudes à médier et organiser la vie sociale, y compris dans la science.

How long will you need to read this review? Book reviews are much quicker to ingest than books themselves and they are thus well suited to the increasingly scarce time of researchers. Yet, despite its centrality in the organisation of academic life, researchers' time has been surprisingly neglected in STS. Ulrike Felt's new, open access book offers an essential (and timely) contribution to STS debates on the role of temporalities in academic research. Moving beyond accounts focused on the acceleration of academic work, and those displaying nostalgic imaginaries of slower golden times, Felt demonstrates that researchers inhabit 'epistemic living spaces', a concept emphasising how people perceive the structures in which they work, characterised by multiple and often contradictory temporalities. Time, she argues, should be understood not as linear but as a multilayered configuration of 're-timing' (p. 3). To read this review, you will therefore have to synchronise the heterogeneous temporalities you navigate: the institutional time of funding and evaluation for the projects you applied to, the epistemic temporalities inherent to your objects of study, and your subjective experience of anticipation and waiting, which are strongly shaped by your career stage. Felt's book opens with a vivid anecdote of her early STS work at CERN, conducted at a time when

In response to growing social, ecological and health-related challenges, scientists are increasingly expected to demonstrate the societal relevance of their work. This special issue critically examines the concept of “relevance” in scientific research, exploring how it is defined, enacted and contested across disciplines, institutions and collaborations. We propose a practice-oriented conceptualization of “doing relevance”, understanding it not as an inherent property of knowledge, but as a situated achievement shaped by various practices. To this end, we introduce four distinct modes of relevance: 1) relevance as reorienting research topics and disciplines; 2) relevance as engaging societal actors in user-driven research; 3) relevance as reshaping interactions between science and policy; and 4) relevance as transforming academic institutions. The contributions to this issue analyze how these four modes are enacted through the practices of diverse actors, demonstrating that relevance is not a static or self-evident concept, but is continually redefined in situated and context-specific engagements. Together, the articles illustrate how researchers navigate diverse expectations and institutional demands, leading them to enact relevance through concrete practices instead of following pre-determined criteria. We conclude by calling for future research that further explores how relevance is continually reconfigured in response to specific challenges, and how these reconfigurations enable and constrain science’s capacity to address pressing societal needs.

In the face of enduring environmental decline, ecologists are continuously exploring new ways to improve the relevance of their research and address nature conservation issues. Hoping for more relevant solutions than former species-centered conservation, some ecologists have mapped ecosystems and the services they deliver to human societies. Maps offer crucial, but understudied, relevance-making tools. By proposing a relational conceptualisation of relevance, I demonstrate that maps can make issues simultaneously relevant and irrelevant for conservation. In two mapping projects conducted at the European Union level by the Working Group Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystems and their Services and at the French regional scale by the Laboratoire d’Écologie Alpine, I investigate how the (ir)relevance of ecosystem services maps is enacted through different modes. I successively show that: ecologists employed maps to re-orient their research toward social issues, but were constrained by the available quantified data (mode A); they used maps to implement a biopolitical approach and decide which ecosystems to protect, yet grappled with the imprecision of maps (mode B); and they engaged stakeholders in map development, but had to make excessive adjustments to align with their demands (mode C). I conclude by arguing that ecosystem services maps exemplify an automation of relevance, where relevance is more conditioned by technical feasibility than by the conceptualisation of solutions to conservation issues. Ultimately, the article contributes to the relevance scholarship by advancing the concept of irrelevance, operationalising the study of modes of relevance, and demonstrating that relevance is an inherently relational process.

Punctuated by joy, disappointments, and conflicts, research evaluation constitutes an intense, emotional moment in scientific life. Yet reviewers and research institutions often expect evaluations to be conducted objectively and dispassionately. Inspired by the scholarship describing the role of emotions in scientific practices, we argue instead, that reviewers actively define, display and manage their emotions in response to the structural organization of research evaluation. Our article examines reviewing practices used in the European Research Council’s (ERC) Starting and Consolidator grants and in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action’s (MSCA) Individual Fellowships. These two European funding mechanisms offer different perspectives on the organization of grant evaluation. We conducted interviews with review panel members and analyzed various institutional documents. By drawing on the sociological concepts of feeling rules and emotional work, we demonstrate that reviewers define rules concerning how emotions should be experienced and expressed to ensure the proper functioning of evaluation, and that reviewers experience the need to actively regulate their emotions to comply with these rules. We present four feeling rules concerning the experience and expression of: (1) excitement for novelty during individual evaluation; (2) respect for others’ opinions and the absence of anger in review panels; (3) attentiveness and interest, which are seen as missing in online evaluations. Reviewers also expect ERC candidates to (4) avoid pride and manifest modesty during interviews. These rules demonstrate that proposal peer review is governed by emotional norms, and show the influence of organizational settings and moral requirements on research evaluation.

In contrast to terrifying extinction numbers, the metrics of Ecosystem Services (ES) highlight the positive impacts of the functioning of ecosystems for human societies. In the French national park of Port-Cros, conservationists measured ES to increase the appeal of nature conservation and soothe conflicts generated by the park’s extension. Their actions can be described as a ‘transposition’, an inversion in the logic of conservation policies to turn negative emotions into positive ones. Conservationists used the transposition achieved by the ES metrics to manage their own emotions and elicit specific emotions among decision-makers. Responding to the anxiety generated by the park’s shrinking budget and unstoppable environmental degradation, they attempted to be hopeful by transforming conservation knowledge. To convince mayors of the surrounding municipalities to join the park, they sought to make them trust the parks’ budgeting practices and to induce enthusiasm in protected ecosystems. Yet, decision-makers were relatively indifferent to ES numbers and remained worried about the park’s possible extension. The case of Port-Cros affirms that metrics can be used to govern social changes by transforming emotions, but challenges the assumed optimism of ES promoters for positive emotional politics. Continuing previous STS research on emotions, the concept of transposition documents how the reconceptualisation of knowledge in alternative ways enables scientists to conduct emotional work and manage the emotions generated by their profession. It provides a tool to study how scientists invert the logic of political issues to produce positive emotions and how they use these emotions to facilitate environmental governance.

Cette étude considère les émotions comme un moyen de saisir comment la notion récente de « Services Écosystémiques » (SE) est susceptible de transformer le rapport aux espaces naturels d'acteurs variés. Diverses façons d'appréhender les émotions dans les entretiens de notre enquête sont identifiées. Les résultats illustrent comment les SE amènent à repenser les rapports des hommes aux espaces naturels et aux émotions qu’ils génèrent. Les espaces remarquables et dignes d’intérêt sont ainsi envisagés sous un autre regard. La contrainte d'une protection des espaces par l'homme laisse place à une relation de dépendance entre l'homme et la nature. La compensation et la monétarisation des espaces naturels provoquent des émotions contrastées, où l'amour de la nature comme moteur d'action est remplacé par l'intérêt personnel. La cartographie des espaces par la notion de SE engendre, pour l’instant, des attentes déçues chez des acteurs variés. L’approche par les émotions permet en définitive de mettre en évidence la complexité des positions des acteurs par rapport à une notion qui pourrait paraître de prime abord remporter un large succès.