Conference by Laurent Thévenot "Benefits and harms of the close. A sociology open to the close, benefiting from the experience of the Russian world".
- 28/01/2021
- Local: 5:00 pm
Paris: 3:00 pm 
- Moscow Centre for Franco-Russian Studies 1, Nikoloyamskaya Street, Moscow, UK
- Russia
- French / Russian
- https://www.facebook.com/events/236430347945581/
Laurent Thévenot, French sociologist, honorary director of studies at the EHESS.
The conference will be held online on the Zoom platform. Please register before 28 January 2021, 15:00 (Moscow time, GMT+3) to receive the link to attend the event: https://tsentr-franko-rossiyskih.timepad.ru/event/1527142/ The link to the conference will be sent to registered participants two hours before the session starts.
The presentation will be held in French with simultaneous translation into Russian.
Summary:
The pandemic has kept us confined to the near or kept us distant, making us sensitive to modes of engagement, in our relationship with others and the world, whose differences are more profound than measures of distance. Networked communication equipment had already made various modes of proximity at a distance possible, highlighting the benefits of the openings resulting from these closenesses, as well as the harms of closures on the similar.
The oppositions between the collective and the individual, or between the public and the private, are too dependent on the Western worlds in which they were developed, and do not take into account the variety of ways of relating to our environment, human or otherwise. In order to construct a sociology of commitments and justifications, of their conveniences and conventions, it was necessary to make an original and costly diversions via the most personally close, difficult to access, in order to characterise the transformations it undergoes to construct the common and the disagreement. It was also necessary to develop a transnational comparative approach taking into consideration worlds in which the close is variously recognised and put in common. A long-lasting collaboration between Russian and French social and political sciences has made it possible to shed symmetrical light on the misunderstandings and blind spots of each of the parties from the other.
The dialogue focuses on crucial questions of our time: what kind of community and government does taking into account the bonds of the near and how does it make room for dispute? What kind of extension of the human community does the integration of our proximity to our environment and the recognition of interdependencies that are critically manifested today lead to?