This article adduces evidence of the central role played by scientists in the 1970s and "lay persons" in the post-Chernobyl period in the production and legitimation of alternative types of knowledge and expertise on the environmental and health risks of nuclear energy in France. From a constructivist perspective, it argues that this shift in the relationship of "lay persons" to knowledge production is linked not only to the rise of mistrust vis-à-vis scientific institutions but also, and especially, to a change in the way they have reacted to "dependency" on institutions and to "state secrecy". Counterexpertise is constructed as a politics of surveillance where alternative interpretations of risk are buttressed by a permanent critique of the epistemic assumptions of institutional expertise. The identity of "counter-expert" is socially elaborated within this process.

Caesarean sections (C-sections) have become a substitute for vaginal birth in a number of developing and emerging economies. Often in these contexts, the promotion of caesarean delivery as a safe or even zero-risk and zero-pain alternative to vaginal birth continues to serve as a powerful discursive tool in governing childbirth, despite growing international evidence on the iatrogenic effects of C-sections. These caesarean 'epidemics' are often explained in terms of obstetricians' individual preferences for C-sections. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in one private and one public hospital in western Turkey, I argue that there are a wide range of factors influencing obstetricians' risk conceptualisations, discourses and practices. I also contend that the medical justifications for C-sections and their public popularity can best be understood by looking at the ways in which both caesarean and vaginal births are organised. In the settings examined, the processes around caesarean and vaginal births were blurred to such an extent that vaginal delivery was, in its technicised and closely monitored nature, transformed into what I propose to call 'vaginarean' birth. Recent state regulations in Turkey aiming to prevent 'caesarean abuse' had only had limited effects on obstetricians' practices. The notion of risk continued to operate as a major driving force in that an institutional risk colonisation came to compete with medical framings of risk, while deficiencies in the national obstetric care system were made invisible. I conclude that regulations aimed at eradicating a caesarean epidemic, such as those implemented in Turkey since 2012, are unlikely to be effective unless they also aim to combat the vaginarean epidemic.

Résumé -Jusqu'au milieu des années 1970, l'expertise nucléaire en France est réservée à un cercle réduit d'experts étatiques. La mobilisation, en 1975, de milliers de chercheurs contre le programme électronucléaire fait émerger dans le monde de la recherche la première mise en cause massive du nucléaire civil et de sa gestion. Celle-ci se place au centre de deux basculements majeurs dans les mobilisations face au risque nucléaire des années 1950 aux années 1990. On assiste d'abord au passage de l'engagement des « savants » contre la bombe, dans la période de l'après-guerre, à l'engagement des « scientifiques critiques », dans la période post-Mai 68. On repère ensuite la montée, après l'accident de Tchernobyl, des mobilisations associatives de contre-expertise dans la gestion du risque nucléaire. Nous analyserons le rôle central que joue le milieu des physiciens dans ces transformations dans les rapports entre scientifiques, science, expertise et société au cours des dernières décennies. Keywords:nuclear power; scientist commitment; counter-expertise; controversy; forms of knowledge mobilisation Abstract -Nuclear energy: from scientist mobilisation to the rise of counter-expertise. The management of nuclear energy in France was restricted until the mid 1970's to a small circle of government experts. Within the scientific community criticism against nuclear power mostly targeted nuclear weapons while the sphere of civil nuclear energy remained unchallenged. The launch of the French nuclear programme in 1974 led to the first protest against civil nuclear power and its management within the scientific community. The mobilisation of thousands of researchers against the programme, initially through a petition, the so-called "Appeal of the 400", then through the creation of an association, the "Group of Scientists for Information on Nuclear Energy (GSIEN)", beside reflecting a rupture in the relations with science, progress and decision-making processes in the nuclear field, also expressed in the following decades the appropriation of critical knowledge on nuclear risks by the actors of non-governmental organisations. The criticism raised by scientists in 1975 therefore underlies two major shifts between the 1950s to 1990s in collective action vis-à-vis nuclear risk: from the mobilisation of "distinguished scientists" against the atom bomb in the 1950s and 1960s (Joliot, Russell, Einstein, Rostand) to the politicisation of nuclear power by "critical scientists" in the post-May 1968 period (GSIEN) and finally, after the Chernobyl accident, to the rise of associations of counter-expertise on nuclear energy (creation of expert NGOs such as the Commission for Independent Research and Information on Radioactivity-CRIIRAD and the Association for the Control of Radioactivity in the West-ACRO). This paper examines the crucial role that the community of physicists has played in transforming the relations between scientists, science, expertise and society.Le nucléaire est sans doute l'un des domaines scientifico-techniques où le...

No abstract