France: Protecting Scientific Freedom from the Common Sense
Résumé
The global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted and universalised a series of problems related to the construction of knowledge about political societies that were previously only felt by researchers conducting ‘difficult’ fieldwork. The range of fields designated as ‘difficult’ has spread, so as the number of social scientists that are required to comply with specific protocols regarding how to ‘protect’ themselves, ‘prevent risks’, and ‘avoid danger’. The division of the world’s areas into red, orange, yellow, and green zones has become familiar to social scientists since societal instability, war, terrorism and natural disasters that the Global North had previously associated with distant and exotic countries — the alleged ‘risk countries’ — has become a global norm.