Mediations in People's History: a Survey on Participation

Abstract

International audienceIn this paper, I propose to enrich the typology of participatory projects by considering scientific and educational projects from the perspective of participation. I investigate two mediation projects in people’s history. One is a people’s history festival, co-created by university historians, secondary school teachers, and community organizations. The other is a website on objects used in the democratization of society in Europe, collected during the revolutionary and republican periods since the 18th century. This website is also co-created by university historians and museum curators who own these objects.The Festival of Popular History (FHP: https://festivalhistoirepopulaire.fr/) involves the public outside the university during its three annual days in May, thanks to a variety of events: carnival, blind test, spectacular conference, rally. It is renewed each year: this year it will focus on the body, and the theme of speech was in the spotlight for its first edition two years ago. The website Objets Politiques au siècle des révolutions (ObjetsPol: https://objetspol.inha.fr/s/objetspol/page/accueil) works more with interactive media: photos, videos, comics, podcasts, and educational games. The two projects contrast in terms of mediation modalities (face-to-face versus remote), types of non-academic partners (professionals versus citizens), and also the positions of participants (learners versus discussants).My contrastive analysis aims to examine the boundaries between mediation and participation, as this type of project is rarely considered in analyses of participatory research. My fieldwork is conducted at the University of Paris-Est Créteil (France), where I work as a project manager on citizen science at the university. I adopt the analytical framework of the common proposed by philosopher Pierre Dardot and sociologist Christian Laval, which is well suited to analyzing collective practices. The results clearly indicate that the involvement of non-academics in the steering committee, co-decision-making in project development, the two-way flow of knowledge, open access to the knowledge produced, and the long-term involvement of non-academics in the appropriation of knowledge are practices that promote participation. I therefore propose that this be considered participatory mediation