Abstract
As we wrap up this issue, we are following the latest news on negotiations between US and Iranian officials to bring an end to a war that has plunged the global economy into panic and left millions of people in dire straits, starting with those killed and injured by the bombs, but also all those who are suffering directly from the consequences of rising oil prices, shortages and inflation. Not to mention that this conflict overshadows all the other armed conflicts continuing elsewhere than in the Gulf states - in Gaza, in Sudan, in Ukraine, in Venezuela, in the DRC, and in other parts of the world. These events also distract attention from the deaths of so many migrants on the road to exile, fleeing war or famine, leaving their homes and neighbourhoods behind in the hope of survival.
Amidst news reports on the increasingly nonsensical remarks made by the US president, newspapers are reporting on the global race to rearm, particularly in European countries, where governments are increasing military budgets at the expense of other areas of the state budget that were once considered essential: social welfare, healthcare, culture, the environment, education, and, of course, research. In universities, our colleagues are struggling with ever-increasing teaching and administrative burdens – more and more paperwork – and our younger colleagues fight for years to obtain the holy grail: tenure, a secure job. For the former, publication has become the icing on the cake, the source of pleasure – even selfish pleasure, as they are often led to believe – whilst for the latter it is one of the keys to escaping precariousness. In such a context, can a small journal like ours continue as if nothing were amiss, playing the game of scholarly discourse, imploring reviewers to spend hours reading and commenting anonymously and for free on articles of differing degrees of completion, exchanging correspondence with authors whose time is unpaid, for articles that may only reach a few hundred readers?
Yet this is precisely what we do. In this instance, it took over three years of work to bring about the publication of an issue such as this one, devoted to what we are not in the habit of saying – or rather, writing – in academic journals about our research. Born out of a study day organised at the Centre Emile Durkheim as part of the ‘methods workshop’, this project has gone through numerous stages: acceptance of the issue by the BMS scientific advisory board; an international call for papers and selection of articles by the guest editor, Clément Reversé, in collaboration with Daniel Bizeul; revision of the first drafts prior to submission to the BMS; external evaluation organised by the journal and peer review by Camille Hamidi and Sophie Duchesne, who oversaw this issue; one, two, or even three rounds of revisions with the authors to arrive at the versions you are about to read. At the same time – and we congratulate them all – half of the authors in this issue have successfully defended their theses, whilst its coordinator, Clément Reversé, has become a senior lecturer and published his PhD. We shall let him introduce the articles in his foreword. We would like to thank him for this fine issue, as well as Daniel Bizeul, a companion of the BMS, who has believed in this project from day one and participated in every stage of it, as well as contributing a text that offers a masterful reflection on his life in research.
How does this issue of the BMS relate to the madness of the world in which it appears, if not through the same burden we feel – we, the authors of this editorial, as well as those of the articles we publish – to pretend that everything is normal, to keep silent about what matters to us on the grounds that it is not something one speaks of? How can we continue to ‘do science’ in a world where we are constantly being informed and misinformed about everything, where truth is more relative than ever, where it is no longer really possible to believe in the benefits that knowledge can or has brought to humanity? We remain convinced that, on our own small scale, the BMS is one of the spaces where science continues to be produced in line with our values and our choices.
Enjoy your reading nonetheless.