Half a Century of Actes

Non-Francophone readers now have access, by way of translation, to a large number of Pierre Bourdieu’s books. This number varies, of course, depending on the language. At the same time, certain aspects of Bourdieu’s scholarly work remain invisible and inaccessible even to Francophone readers. This applies particularly to the important work he executed as the director of the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales.

This journal is published in Paris, where it was founded in 1975 by Bourdieu and a team of researchers he assembled. He led the journal until his passing in 2002, for over 25 years. Issues of the journal can be consulted in any country in the world, on the websites persee.fr and cairn.info.

Published in French, the journal retains a strong international dimension. In certain periods, more than half of its articles were written by researchers working outside of France: in North America or in Western Europe, but also in countries like Brazil, Hungary, and Algeria, with whom Bourdieu and researchers at his center had established close bonds. There also came, as the result of varied and incidental collaborations, articles from a number of other countries: Norway, Sweden, Greece, Israel, Argentina, Japan, South Korea… At the same time, the journal had a Francophone readership that spanned the globe.

Bourdieu’s work always had a collective dimension. Starting in 1975, Actes de la recherche became the subject of significant investment from the collective surrounding him. The journal aspired to be the expression of an international network of researchers, with shared principles on what the social sciences should be. Bourdieu himself regularly published his latest work in Actes de la recherche. And, though not reducible to it, the journal was also an extension of his work. It published all sorts of research that was, though inspired by his work in many ways, also a means to develop Bourdieu’s tools and apply them to fields and social universes he couldn’t address, due to a lack of time and specific expertise.

Actes de la recherche also deserves to be well known because it was so unique. It’s difficult to find a true equivalent elsewhere, in other countries. The journal became famous in France because of its ubiquitous usage of images, unprecedented in social science journals. More generally, it tried to invent new ways to present research: interviews and annotated documents, programmatic notes, publishing work in progress, interviews with researchers on current affairs, more classic scientific articles… The journal tried to liberate itself from the constraints that researchers habitually impose on themselves in scientific journals. Another defining feature: while still committed to a high level of scientific rigor, the journal also wanted to reach a readership outside the university who were nonetheless interested in social sciences. In publishing issues often focused on a single theme, it innovated new forms of collaborative work. Also inventive was the way it approached the imperative to construct an object of study through the melding of complementary approaches — taking into account their disciplinary origins (sociology, history, anthropology, linguistics…), the methods used, and even the countries studied.

The objective of this issue is to make this original undertaking led by Bourdieu, which doesn’t yet enjoy the recognition it merits outside the French academy, better known. A thematic dossier contains the introduction to the first issue of Actes de la recherche, a presentation of the journal by Loïc Wacquant, an article on its use of images by Franz Schultheis, Charlotte Hüser, and Lilli Kim Schreiber, two international perspectives from Yves Gingras and Gustavo Sorá, as well as a review of the journal’s latest issue by Annick Prieur.

This issue also contains regular sections. In “Recent Books,” Anna Boschetti reviews Christophe Charle’s book, L’Europe des intellectuels. The “Events” section reports back on three recent events held in Toulouse, Vienna and Stockholm.

In preparation for a forthcoming issue of Practical Sense focused on the theme of reflexivity, this issue includes a call for proposals. We welcome short articles, interviews, notes, and reading suggestions related to this theme.

The editorial team