Conference Program

In recent years, many new forms of funding for research in social sciences have emerged and grown quickly. Those contracts can be with either public or private actors and can sometimes entail the obligation to work part-time for the funding organization, in the case of the so-called “CIFRE” contracts (Gallenga & Pesle, 2023). In the context of a constant slashing of public funding for research and the installation of a management culture (Noûs, 2020), those contracts and the working conditions they imply are to be urgently examined.

I am myself employed through one of those contracts and participate in a group of young PhD candidates working of the question of research under funding from non-academic institution. Expanding on those experiences, I will try to demonstrate that the change in the research conditions for many young researchers can have serious negative consequences on their academic work. Moreover, some topics of research have been particularly prone to tie very close links between the academic and professional worlds. This is the case of research in education, where funding often comes from institutions that are themselves the fields of investigation in scientific studies (Poupeau, 2003).

Our best way out may in fact be to turn the tables on the situation and regard the ordering of research as data documenting the state of the field which is investigated.

Using ethnographical material from my own ongoing investigation in France, I will offer a case study showing that difficulties in doing research due to interference from external actors can be turned into heuristic elements, revealing unsuspected material that could otherwise have been overlooked. This is therefore an attempt to offer a contribution to a sociological analysis of the hindrances of the sociological research (Darmon, 2005).