L'ethnographie comme engagement : enquêter en terrain militant

Abstract

Résumé Une expérience d’enquête au sein de l’association de lutte contre le sida Act Up-Paris permet de reposer la question classique du lien entre recherche scientifique et engagement, dans le cas précis de l’enquête ethnographique en terrain militant. La tâche de l’ethnographe se trouve ici conditionnée par une proximité d’habitus avec les acteurs, qui facilite son immersion tout en l’exposant à de fortes incitations à l’action. Loin de faire figure d’exception, la posture d’observation participante s’avère emblématique des tensions entre distance et engagement qui façonnent l’expérience militante.

Brazil, Belgium, and France: Avenues for Comparison Work

“…Building intercultural groups for comparative research is a temporal, relational, scientific, and political commitment. This commitment forces the researcher to perform an activity that could have an effect on the social world, both on the world of the observed actors (Broqua, 2009), and on the scientific world itself.…”

For a public sociology on participatory democracy. Reflexive feedback on research conducted in an association

“…This specificity of the thematic of participatory democracy can be understood not only in terms of the profile and the trajectory of the researchers who choose to work on this question by combining a scientific approach with a political reflection and even an activist commitment, but in terms of the interest which the actors show towards the research conducted on this theme by reading the work of the researchers and seeking expertise within the framework of their activities. Thus, here as in militant fields, the distance to the object and the place the researcher occupies within the environment studied are chosen not only by the researcher, but also co-built by the group (Broqua 2009). …”

“…Rather than approaching all the works on participation and deliberation, we chose to focus on this object of study because the researchers analyzing local participatory practices often maintain a more direct relationship with the action and pay particular attention to the impact of their studies on the transformation of participatory policies. As regards this aspect, research on participatory democracy bears a closer relationship to the militant fields (for example, research on an association or a social movement) insofar as they raise suspicions regarding the researcher's position at the same time in the academic sphere (which often accuses researchers of a lack of distance with their object of study) and with regard to those investigated (who can, on the contrary, blame researchers for a lack of commitment to action) (Broqua 2009). This question arises all the more when researchers share an affinity with the mobilizations or the participatory policies they observe.…”

Une géographe engagée face aux rapports de pouvoir autour de l’eau : retour réflexif sur les situations d’enquête au Chili

“…Ces deux formes d'engagement sont liées et s'alimentent l'une et l'autre. Si mon degré de politisation et de celui autour du « modèle » néolibéral de l'eau chilien a influencé le choix de mon cadre théorique (Bauer, 2002), il ne peut se comprendre sans considérer ma trajectoire d'engagement militant dans ce pays et en France (Broqua, 2009 ;Prieur, 2015).…”