CIREC Workshops
CIREC (Centre de Recherche-Création sur les mondes sociaux) workshops are a time for exchanging ideas on work-in-progress by members and friends. The format is intended to be open, welcoming the trial and error, obstacles and sometimes dead-ends that the work entails.
This session features five women who combine research and creation in their work.
Maaï Youssef, Franco-Egyptian author, PhD in political science Indigenous writing. From the scientific narrative to the sensitive account of inquiry in constrained terrain
“Between 2012 and 2022, I researched the contemporary history of protest in Egypt and Syria. During this period, I kept two notebooks: a field notebook, the traditional tool of researchers in the humanities and social sciences, and a more personal notebook, a kind of black notebook, a night diary, in which I wrote about my way, intimate and political, of being made and undone by my investigation. As a Franco-Egyptian researcher, I had a fierce need to write in native language, to speak my language, a dissident language that distances itself from academic praxis and its way of producing knowledge. I propose to revisit these processes of investigative writing, in order to question what is at stake at the boundaries between intellectual commitment and scientific neutrality.”
Maria-Elena Buslacchi and Elisa Ullaury, sociologists of arts and culture (Mesopolhis) Neighborhood voices through the prism of creative methods
“Our intervention hinges on a corpus of 60 sensitive maps collected between 2023 and 2024 to complement other quantitative and qualitative survey methodologies in the Joliette district of Marseille. The cartographic representations given by its inhabitants and users during the various workshops become the source of a spatial analysis at the crossroads of sociology, visual anthropology and geography, enabling us to observe the issues at stake in the transformations that the Marseilles waterfront has undergone over the last thirty years, and the way in which they have been apprehended by the various publics and populations concerned.
Based on these maps and the associated collection of words, we asked artists to give their interpretation of the corpus in order to synthesize these results in the form of creations. These creations, some of which have already been produced and others in progress, draw on various techniques and materials that can also be salvaged from the neighborhood itself, with the help of local residents.”
Lila Neutre, artist and social science researcher, and Clara Ruby, performing arts researcher Twerking: between sexualization and emancipation
The workshop is based on a dialogue between two perspectives on the practice of twerking. Clara Ruby is the author of an analysis of gender representations in American rap videos, and Lila Neutre has produced a series of works entitled Twerk Nation, recently acquired by the Centre national des arts plastiques.
Using images, text and sound, Clara and Lila each, in their own way, question the uses of this movement (in music videos for one, in the dance world for the other) and propose to show how it can both manifest the sexualization of a body and embody the empowerment of its practitioners.
CIREC (Centre de Recherche-Création sur les mondes sociaux) workshops are a time for exchanging ideas on work-in-progress by members and friends. The format is intended to be open, welcoming the trial and error, obstacles and sometimes dead-ends that the work entails.
This session features five women who combine research and creation in their work.
Maaï Youssef, Franco-Egyptian author, PhD in political science Indigenous writing. From the scientific narrative to the sensitive account of inquiry in constrained terrain
“Between 2012 and 2022, I researched the contemporary history of protest in Egypt and Syria. During this period, I kept two notebooks: a field notebook, the traditional tool of researchers in the humanities and social sciences, and a more personal notebook, a kind of black notebook, a night diary, in which I wrote about my way, intimate and political, of being made and undone by my investigation. As a Franco-Egyptian researcher, I had a fierce need to write in native language, to speak my language, a dissident language that distances itself from academic praxis and its way of producing knowledge. I propose to revisit these processes of investigative writing, in order to question what is at stake at the boundaries between intellectual commitment and scientific neutrality.”
Maria-Elena Buslacchi and Elisa Ullaury, sociologists of arts and culture (Mesopolhis) Neighborhood voices through the prism of creative methods
“Our intervention hinges on a corpus of 60 sensitive maps collected between 2023 and 2024 to complement other quantitative and qualitative survey methodologies in the Joliette district of Marseille. The cartographic representations given by its inhabitants and users during the various workshops become the source of a spatial analysis at the crossroads of sociology, visual anthropology and geography, enabling us to observe the issues at stake in the transformations that the Marseilles waterfront has undergone over the last thirty years, and the way in which they have been apprehended by the various publics and populations concerned.
Based on these maps and the associated collection of words, we asked artists to give their interpretation of the corpus in order to synthesize these results in the form of creations. These creations, some of which have already been produced and others in progress, draw on various techniques and materials that can also be salvaged from the neighborhood itself, with the help of local residents.”
Lila Neutre, artist and social science researcher, and Clara Ruby, performing arts researcher Twerking: between sexualization and emancipation
The workshop is based on a dialogue between two perspectives on the practice of twerking. Clara Ruby is the author of an analysis of gender representations in American rap videos, and Lila Neutre has produced a series of works entitled Twerk Nation, recently acquired by the Centre national des arts plastiques.
Using images, text and sound, Clara and Lila each, in their own way, question the uses of this movement (in music videos for one, in the dance world for the other) and propose to show how it can both manifest the sexualization of a body and embody the empowerment of its practitioners.