FIFAS . A*MIDEX Incubator

From fiction to science.

Duration: 2018-2022

Financemement: Pépinière d'excellence 2017 from the A*Midex foundation

Project coordinators

Pierre FournierProfessor at the University of Aix-Marseille, MESOPOLHIS, pierre.fournier@univ-amu.fr

Pascal CesaroSenior Lecturer in Film Studies, Prism

Partners

Institut national de l'audiovisuel Méditerranée

Mesopolhis laboratoryUMR 7064

Presentation

The "From Fiction to Science" programme was conceived as a space for interdisciplinary research between the social sciences, the arts and the professional world of audiovisual and film archives.
It is based on the shared desire of researchers, artists and professionals to explore and question the possibilities offered by digital technologies for renewing research methodologies involving the use of archives. The aim is to clarify the new possibilities for research using fictional images in ethnographic surveys. The aim is to move on from analysing a research opportunity to formalising an approach that is both methodological (enriching scientific practices) and didactic (creating resources that can be re-used by researchers and doctoral students in other fields). The aim is to encourage synergy with socio-economic players and to propose an economically and legally viable model that can be applied to various scientific fields.

The FIFAS programme is being run by the PRISM and LAMES laboratories as part of the A*Midex 'Pépinière' projects, and is an extension of a collaboration between two researchers, one in sociology and the other in film. They began by conducting an experiment to design an ethnographic survey based on archive footage from French television, a 1960s soap opera about the nuclear world. This first phase of research was carried out between 2013 and 2016 as part of the Nucléaire et société locale (NUXOLO) programme, led by LAMES and LESA in a partnership between AMU, CNRS and INA, with funding from the Needs Challenge of the CNRS's Mission à l'interdisciplinarité. By showing extracts from a soap opera depicting the lives of nuclear workers to people now living near the research and development centre where the fiction is set, we elicited stories from them that help them understand what it means to come and work in this civil and military industry and live nearby. We took advantage of reminiscences provoked by the emotional closeness of these people's experience to one or other aspect of the reality presented in the soap opera, in particular with particularly precise images of the work. And given that it's fiction, the respondents are free to describe them as well-intentioned or fanciful. In this way, the survey system makes it possible to go beyond the abstract representations of the public debate on this controversial subject or the silence behind which people living near nuclear power stations sometimes prefer to hide when they are convinced that they cannot be understood by the people they talk to.

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Publications

The main publications associated with this research are available here.

The aim of the FIFAS programme is to examine the conditions under which this innovative research approach, which uses fictional images as part of an ethnographic interview survey, can be replicated to investigate configurations of speech that are prevented by a highly polarised public debate, as in the case of nuclear power.

The programme includes :
- A seminar identifying the heuristic potential of this approach and the problems likely to arise in its implementation, as well as ways of overcoming them, leading to the publication of an issue of the journal Images du travail / Travail des images.

- The construction of an interactive documentary to encourage and support researchers in this direction, based on the example of research using the soap opera Les Atomistes. The specifications became clearer as the initial seminar progressed.

- These practical workshops were designed to give interested parties a clear idea of the work to be done before testing the approach on their object. They were also used to fine-tune the interactive documentary.