Sandra Laugier (http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Sandra_Laugier), Professor of Philosophy, Université de Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne and Scientific deputy director at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (INSHS, Institut des sciences humaines et sociales) at the French National Centre for Scientific Research.  Professor at the University of Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens, France (until 2010)). Laugier has written extensively on J. L. Austin and L. Wittgenstein, as well as several aspects of American philosophy translated into a context for French readers (Emerson, Thoreau, Quine, ordinary language philosophy, above all Stanley Cavell). She writes a column for Libération (http://www.liberation.fr/auteur/6377-sandra-laugier). Her recent work focuses on moral philosophy, the ethics of care and everyday life, feminism and aesthetics, especially the themes of scepticism, popular culture, and ordinary life in and out of cinema and in popular culture (especially television) and social media.  She has also stressed the leading role that the humanities and social sciences should take on issues of gender, humanism, and the ethics of care with the platform of the CNRS.

 

Results: This meeting was co-sponsored the French Consulate of Boston and the Center for the Study of Europe at Boston University, as well as the Center for the Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. Sixty-five people attended the public lecture.  Discussions sparked a plan to develop a network of research into social media and popular culture from both sociological and a philosophical perspectives, thereby pioneering a branch of “experimental” philosophy in which social theory will be developed and the humanities will be regarded as foundational.  The envisioned research collaboration will include researchers at UCLA, Québec, Boston and Paris.  Participating are Professors Juliet Floyd and James E. Katz (Boston University), Marie-Hélène Parizeau (Québec (Laval/Unesco), and Estelle Ferrarese (University of Amiens), as well as Professor Sandra Laugier (Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) and François Berger (Inserm, neuroscientist).

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Several follow-up meetings have been planned, all interdisciplinary.  The first will be held at Boston University February 5, 2018, a “Day of Apparatgeist” (https://www.mellonphilemerge.com/events/day-of-apparatgeist), sponsored by the Feld Family Professorship and the Boston University Center for Mobile Communication Studies, as well as the Boston University Philosophy Department.  The idea will be to critically examine the theory developed by Katz and Aakus, that of Apparatgeist, which stimulated early research into mobile communications in the early 2000s (cf. Katz and Aakhus, eds. Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance (Cambridge University Press 2004)). A special journal issue is planned. The second follow-up meeting will be held on philosophy and new media at UCLA February 9-10, 2018.  This will serve as a meeting with exchange of research to aid in the development of the collaborative research network around the theme of popular culture.  Organizers will be Vanessa Nurock (Paris), Davide Panagia (Associate Professor & Vice Chair for Alumni Outreach, Department of Political Science, UCLA) and participants will come from Québec, Paris and Boston.  A grant has been made to L’Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) headed by Prof. Sandra Laugier to convene a meeting in Paris with this network.

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A further scientific planning meeting was held November 30, 2017 with Minh-Hà Pham, Counselor for Science and Technology at the Embassy of France to the United States, and her colleague in the Office for Science and Technology, Pierre Michel.The meeting coincided with a pair of panels on philosophy and anthropology run by Prof. Laugier at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.We discussed the possibility of the French Embassy supporting research collaboration among anthropologists and philosophers focussing on the theme of “forms of life”.Here too the idea is to grant the humanities and “softer” sides of social science a leading, foundational role in research.