Scientific outposts, with or without social sciences? How the presence of social sciences to study ecosystems transforms knowledge production in Human-Environment Observatories

Abstract

International audienceScientific outposts are scientific infrastructures (field stations, laboratories, etc.) located in peripheral territories, away from conventional networks. The choice of their location is guided by the scientific interest of the ecosystems to study, presenting themselves as separate from local human societies and their history (Kervran, Lamy, Verlin, 2021).The International Human-Environment Observatories (OHM-I), a territorialized scientific policy tool of the CNRS (France), distribute small research funding through project calls. Five OHM-I are located in the Americas. Their epistemological framework is partly similar to the knowledge derived from the scientific outposts: they are situated on the margins of (post-)colonial empires; scientific work is constrained by geopolitical issues of strong circulation with a distant center, difficulty of the fieldwork, tension between producing circulable and standardized datas (characteristics of experimental ex-situ sciences) and their extremely situated nature (characteristics of in situ collecting sciences) (Kohler, 2002). However, unlike scientific outposts, OHM-I don't have physical infrastructures and focus on human-environment interactions.Based on a socio-history made of interviews with the founders of these OHM-I, ethnography of scientific seminars and documentary analysis, this proposal explores the criterias that guided the choice of locations to establish these OHM-I, as well as the controversies and boundary-work (Gieryn, 1993) engaged in the tension between constructing transversal knowledge from a diversity of places and disciplines. We will characterize their knowledge production regime related to this hybrid definition of ecosystem that involve an interdisciplinary work between nature and social sciences and its consequences on the relationship between sciences and places. This approach allows us to more generally characterize the specificity of the French "territorialized environmental sciences" (Beurier, 2025, Forthcoming)