Contenu du sommaire : Le procès des données

This text introduces and discusses the articles published by Shamus Khan and Jack Katz regarding the legal summons served against the former of these two sociologists. This affair provides an opportunity to update the terms of the debate surrounding ethics committees and in particular to consider the role played by publishing houses and the evolution of the publishing context as part of the public exposure of researchers. It is also a fresh opportunity to reconsider the value of conserving ethnographers' notebooks given the risk of personal data being revealed in the case of a legal seizure of field records.

This article outlines the author's experience of having his ethnographic data subpoenaed. It outlines the challenges of subpoena's to research, and suggests four solutions: (1) Apply for and utilize the National Institutes of Health certificate of confidentiality by asking health-related questions over the course of one's research; (2) Establish a task force that articulates clear ethical guidelines for ethnographic research; (3) Demand that institutions (institutional review boards) to defend confidentiality of researches; (4) Socialize the cost of subpoenas, wherein scholars can be part of an insurance pool that will defend them.

Ethnographic fieldworkers are unusually exposed to pressures to both make and break promises of confidentiality to subjects because they work to expose subjects to readers in a relatively transparent way. Tracking the schizophrenia that now threatens to pervade ethnographic work, I describe overlooked risks that all practitioners face and point to an as-yet unexplored collective strategy for resisting pressures to breach promises of confidentiality. I then switch from a collective to an individual focus and review ethnography as a multiphased research act, suggesting ways to minimize personal and ethical risks at each stage.

The worlds of organized crime are characterized by specific risks that put researchers in a difficult spot, between the internal dynamics of these spaces and the pressure of law enforcement agencies. This tension, which is inherent to any immersion in spaces where violence is structural, is approached here through a reflection on the feeling of insecurity and the fear that this risk generates. This risk has an impact on the data collection process and its protection, and the researcher's apprehension of the risk is inseparable from his or her social dispositions and, more specifically, his or her “reputational capital”.

Today, the social sciences are confronted by a series of injunctions and regulations put in place in the name of ethics, open science and data protection. Despite the declared good intentions, these sometimes very different developments, because they work in combination, ultimately restrain the autonomy of research in terms of its methods and give rise to paradoxes or even double binds with regard to what is expected of researchers. This development impacts upon the content of social science studies by generating forms of censorship that threaten the potential for high quality, inventive research.

This study examines how the tensions inherent in a research partnership can be used, in certain strategic sectors such as the nuclear industry, to systematically orientate public research to favor the interests of certain institutional partners. Through a reflexive ethnographic approach, this article analyzes the interactions and written outputs of a collaborative project organized in the post-Fukushima context in France. It shows how institutional control operates via an integrated approach that combines expert knowledge and research activities, an approach that researchers attempt to resist by differentiating these activities using various strategies.

The potential destruction by sociologists and ethnologists of their research notes in order to remove any risk of their being requisitioned, thereby protecting the anonymity of interviewees, raises for historians the question of the verifiability of the findings, which is supposed to rest on systematic referencing to notes (either as footnotes or end notes). But instead of considering the current anonymization procedures used in the social sciences as a weakening of verifiability and an obstacle to the replicability of investigations, the confrontation between the historian and such procedures leads to a reconsideration of the genetic link that has established itself between historical science and the truth, separate from other sciences and for ideological ends.

This interview comes just a few months after the release of Roland Marchal from Iranian prisons and while our colleague Fariba Adelkhah is still being detained. The interview is an opportunity to return to the way in which research institutions –through some of their institutional collaborations (army, diplomacy, international donors, etc.)– may not only lose their scientific autonomy, but may also endanger researchers, by casting doubt on the autonomy of their work. The interview goes beyond the Iranian case and addresses the delicate position of researchers working in certain fields that are considered difficult and whose expertise is regularly solicited or censored by the institutions that provide funding.

Following an inquiry conducted over almost twenty years on the experience of love in late adolescence, this article proposes a reflexive analysis of the work carried out on three contrasting spaces within French society, and also considers the treatment that these have been subjected to over time. In order to do this, it identifies four temporalities (historical time, ethnographic time, comparative time and biographical time) which have impacted, in an intertwined way, on the make-up and analysis of the material –just as they are also prone to impact on any investigation utilizing ethnographic comparison.