SJSCA 33/2026 Portraits of Queerness: Methodological and Ethical Challenges of Narrating Queer Lives (Spring 2026), Anne Lavanchy, Jos Mendélez Duarte, Pere Morelli i Torra (guest editors)

How to narrate queer lives without reproducing the epistemic violence of abstraction? This special features address several tensions between portraying, as necessarily reductive process of description and representation, and Queerness, as performance of self-representation blurring cis-heteronormative categories, and therefore generating disciplinary processes. Drawing on these reflections, we also mobilize the flexibility of Queerness to highlight the articulations and assemblages between SOGIESC diversity and indigenous and/or racialized categorizations. Therefore, this special feature focusses on three key methodological challenges: is it possible—and even desirable—to translate Queer lives to make them intelligible? What is at stake when making visible some experiences and trajectories that somehow pursue the banality of invisibility? And finally, which kinds of light is shed on the knowledge production itself—through reflexivity and the elucidation of ethical dilemmas?

 

SJSCA 34/2026 The double consciousness of quantification. Ethnographic approaches to world representation with numbers. (autumn 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.