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A Euroasian project on Capitalisms, Technologies, Society and Health (CTSH)

Triennial International Team

EHESS has launched a new programme for 2021, offering its research centres the possibility of creating a “Triennial International Team (TIT)”. Supported by several EHESS centres, this temporary structure, designed for a period of three years, aims to provide a framework, both sufficiently permanent and flexible, for conducting research in collaboration with foreign colleagues. Within this framework, the FFJ project, which aims to constitute and consolidate a Eurasian research team around the issues of capitalisms, technologies, societies and health, is the result of a meeting between several research projects that have developed in parallel until now and that we are carrying out respectively with our colleagues:

  • A first line of convergence is the Europe-Asia dialogue in “Science, technology studies” (STS). As stated in the project, we are convinced of the considerable contribution of the dialogue with Asian colleagues and specialists. This dialogue has the potential to change the trajectory of this field of research.
  • A second line of convergence strongly linked to the first refers to the analysis of the links between technologies and societies, to which the book Innovation beyond technology – edited by Sébastien Lechevalier and to which Jean-Paul Gaudillière contributed, along with several colleagues from EHESS and Japanese colleagues – has crystallised the research agenda by putting at its centre the issues of health, biotechnologies and pharmaceutical companies.
  • A third line starts from a result of regulation theory on the ‘anthropogenetic’ regime, the importance of which the current crisis reveals. This regime does not only concern health, but health is one of its cornerstones, which justifies the importance it is given in the project, including from the point of view of the analysis of Asian capitalisms.

In total, this project involves three EHESS research centres (CCJ, Cermes3 and CAK) as well as the Fondation France-Japon, which is committed to coordinating and financially supporting the project. We have taken care to involve young researchers and we hope to be able to make colleagues and students at EHESS benefit from our initiative, beyond our team. Indeed, if the core of our team is already established, we hope that other colleagues will be able to join us on the Condorcet Campus, which will allow us to structure a new research axis within the latter.

 

A Euroasian project on Capitalisms, Technologies, Society and Health (CTSH)

The general goal of this project is to revisit the relations between technologies and societies by focusing on health issues. This is in partial continuity with our previous research agendas but is also characterized by strong discontinuities, which require to build a new and international team based at the EHESS.

On the side of the partial continuity is the book edited by S. Lechevalier in 2019, Innovation beyond technology. Science for Society and Interdisciplinary Approaches, and to which Jean-Paul Gaudillière contributed, together with 13 other Japanese and French (mostly from the EHESS) colleagues. In a critical context of crisis and loss of confidence in science and technology, a group of colleagues decided to gather to discuss in an interdisciplinary manner about the ways, we, as social scientists, should criticize and rethink the concept of innovation, in order to rethink the relations between technologies and societies. The research agenda has been developed in dealing primarily with two fields of inquiry, which constitute two distinct parts of the book: environment and health.

The present project is going several steps further in proposing to build a temporary international laboratory, to extend our research team and to focus on health issues, with an original approach that goes beyond traditional segmented disciplinary approaches of health such as economics (of health), sociology (of health), anthropology (of health) of history of (medicine and health).

The rising doubts about the pertinence of the innovation model

Our premise is the recognition of the paradoxes of innovation in troubled times. For a few decades now, innovation – mainly derived from technological advances – has been considered a driving force of economic and societal development and prosperity. However, during the last decades, which can be considered as the Golden Age of innovation, from an ideological viewpoint, there have been rising doubts about the pertinence of this model, as it is obvious from the following facts:

  • Gap between the increasing resources dedicated to innovation and decreasing well-being observed in many cases (see the evolution of well-being in hospitals for example);
  • Contribution of innovation to rising inequalities in different dimensions (e.g. health, as emphasized by the contributions of Sarah A. Burgard, among others);
  • Various technology related scandals (e.g. in pharmaceutical industries);
  • Some problems related to the use of technologies (g. use of personal data related to health in order to build algorithms.)

Our conviction is that the crisis of innovation is the crisis of the relationship between technological innovation and society. In this context, the goal of the proposed team is twofold:

  • To analyze the conditions of a shift from a techno-centric society to a human-centric society, one where technology’s potential is not disregarded, but where social and human wellbeing is central.
  • To discuss non-technological aspects of innovation and their importance in dealing with complex contemporary societal issues, while making a critical assessment of the relationship between science, technology, innovation, and society.

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Sébastien Lechevalier (March 25, 2021). A Euroasian project on Capitalisms, Technologies, Society and Health (CTSH). INNOVCARE. Retrieved February 13, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12oxw


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