No. 18 (2016): L’amour en sciences sociales, les sciences sociales en amour

Coordinated by Isabelle Jabiot, Maïté Maskens and Carine Plancke. Edited by (for Émulations) François Romijn.

This issue of Émulations intends to do its bit towards the young research linking love and social sciences. Love has been long ignored as a research topic, mostly because it was associated with irrationality, the feminine, the ineffable or even with a mystery too unfathomable to be approached by science, but it slowly becomes a legitimate research subject. This is why, in this issue, we honor love by placing it at the heart of social sciences, by considering it not only as a research subject, but also as a stance or as an approach. Two main focuses underline the structure of this issue.

On one side, the declinations and specificities of the experience of love in a diversity of contexts are explored, and particularly the importance of romantic love today. Its emergence, persistence and evolution in many societies (Belgian, Swiss, Omani, Canadian and French), as well as the tensions and exclusions that it causes and its articulation to local practices and imaginaries are questioned. At a time when social science questions the diversity of beings and their existence, the reader will have a glimpse of what love can be, beyond  The idea of close proximity between human beings.

On the other side, understanding how researchers’ love towards their own research, their field, ortheir interlocutors can be be a driving force of the knowledge produced in social sciences constitutes this issue’s other challenge. To answer this interrogation, four interviews with researchers who have been working on this subject for a long time through a variety of approaches (Michèle Pagès, Jennifer Cole, Charles Lindholm and Catherine Besteman) are proposed.