RÉCITS

Research and Study on Industrial, Technological and Societal Change

Positioning of research in the national environment

Officially founded in 2000 at the Belfort-Montbéliard University of Technology, the RECITS team (Research and Study on Industrial, Technological and Societal Change) presents three specificities with regard of the French landscape of research in human and social sciences (SHS ). Associated with the institution of the Universities of Technology and the place which they reserve for the latter within the technological research and in the training of the student engineers, this triple originality resides in:

• An original research object aimed at apprehending technology as an object in the human and social sciences by placing human and technique in a relationship of co-construction. We can not know human by ignoring the knowledge of the objects and processes he builds, and conversely, we can not understand the technique without studying the interactions of human (as producer or user) with the technical and without taking into account meta-technical issues: political, ethical, philosophical, historical, economic and social.
• A multidisciplinary team composed of skills in history, economics, sociology, philosophy and epistemology. The challenge is to go beyond the juxtaposition of disciplinary glances to increase the understanding of the object whose complexity makes vain the ambition of a real understanding through the prism of a single discipline. Multidisciplinarity contributes to forming an original theoretical framework within the "Sciences, Techniques and Societies" (STS) studies.
• An insertion in a science research environment for the engineer. This singularity in the French academic context is closer to Anglo-Saxon functioning, with a multidisciplinary grouping around the same object of study. The corollary is a research related to major societal issues (energy challenge, sustainable mobility, digital revolution ...).

General philosophy of the team

• The disciplinary deepening presides over the interdisciplinary enlargement
  The added value of a collaboration between SHS and SPI supposes a double positioning aiming first of all at the excellence of the discipline without which there could be no question of interdisciplinarity of quality.
• An original expertise on technical change
  Recits offers scientific expertise on how techniques can "make society", on the principles and modalities that govern technical change. The technique is thus thought of as a societal process, embodied and dynamic.