SJSCA 32/2025 Arts in public spaces: aesthetic and political issues between the local and the global (Fall 2025), Aurore Dupuy and Magali Sizorn (guest editors)

This special issue explores how the arts, by entering the public sphere, crystallise issues that lie at the intersection between the local and the global. By bringing together contributions based on different fields artistic practices (dance, circus, music, visual arts), their economic models (hatted work, cultural industries, public commissions) and in territories covering multiple geographical areas (Africa, the Americas, Oceania, Asia and Europe), this volume seeks to reconstruct the ways in which the interconnected aesthetic and political issues induced by artistic circulation in public space co-produce transnational art spaces.
The public space we refer to in this issue is the outdoor space, the exterior, in which different forms of art are presented for the enjoyment of city users, passers-by and residents. But this public space is also studied as a political space, from which different forms of inequality (cultural, social, economic, political) are observed and debated, and from which forms of engagement through the arts emerge, such as artivism, a way of linking artistic production and political activism.

 

SJSCA 33/2026 The double consciousness of quantification. Ethnographic approaches to world representation with numbers. (Spring 2026), Etienne Bourel and Frédéric Le Marcis (guest editors)

How are the numbers that circulate and that we access in the contemporary world produced? How is the work of configuring algorithms needed to process Big Data or Machine Learning carried out ? What do we know about the “social life of standards” or about ethnic and discrimination statistics ? This special issue starts from the idea that practicing an anthropology of quantification and statistical sciences is necessary to enrich the understanding of both epistemological positions and political arguments about the contemporary world. In particular, it looks at the “dirty work” of producing numbers and the technical, engineering and scientific practices associated with it.