Les cadres de l'expertise à l'épreuve des expositions aux faibles doses – FADO

In the deployment of scientific and technologic controversies, as well as in the transformations of scientific expertise modalities, low dose issues have continuously gained in importance. At the source of the conflicts they have given rise to, are to be found the numerous uncertainties linked to their effects and ways these effects are to be evaluated. These uncertainties have not been endogenous to scientific communities but have regularly been questioned within public arenas. In return, the visibility that they have gained through experts disputes has contributed to amplify controversies and install uncertainty in public spheres. Questions that today frame the numerous issues at stake in the low dose problem have a long history, that have greatly contributed to shape the way this problem is now conceived as well as the modalities of its current handling. The ways dossiers exist in expertise circles as well as in public spheres result from sedimentations of actions, responses, configurations and reconfigurations lying in long term dynamics -some of them being already very important just after World War II. These dynamics trace long run trajectories in which, as far as the low dose question is concerned, risks situations as well as ways of analyzing and managing them have been produced. Therefore, in order to understand current ways of dealing with low dose exposure issues as well as their regular coming back in critical mobilizations, it is of utmost importance to find and historicize these “trajectories”. By bringing together historians of sciences as well as sociologists, this is what this research program wish to do. Its three main aims are: 1/ To retrace the history of cognitive tools and political processes that have installed the low dose problematic in experts and decision-makers scientific models and spaces. By studying a set of dossiers, we will follow the ways this question has been formulated and dealt with and will highlight its transformation and reformulation both in time and in its movement from a dossier to another. 2/ To examine, for both expertise and decision and public policy frameworks, public tests this question have generated. Focusing on occupational and environmental exposures, we seek to understand how the attention to low doses have displaced ways of dealing with toxics and pollutants issues and have contributed to reconfigure modalities of expertise related to them. 3/Finally to test a series of tools developed by the sciences studies and the sociology. Mobilizing a set of studies originating from diverse social sciences fields of research, this project is built on the comparative analysis of four dossiers: radioactivity, endocrine disrupters, electromagnetic waves, nanoparticules. These dossiers, in which the low dose problematic is central, cover a long period. Indeed, older cases' modalities of problems formulation and management have had influence on ways new risks have been dealt with. Symetrically, the emergence of new objects of warnings or risks have produced new concepts that have let to rethink older cases. Each dossier will be analyzed historically and sociologically. We will clarify actors and arguments' games and identify what has become established and non questionable, and what remains controversial and uncertain. We will then to undertake a fine tuned comparative study we wish to organize around three axis: 1/ the history of dose-effect models ; 2/ the expertise in view of low doses; 3 /public protests around low doses. The expected results are: 1/to clarify: a/ the epistemic models and political conflicts that have been caused by low doses dossiers; b/ the constraints produced on public decision by controversies between experts and associative mobilizations. 2/ to analyze the ways media have handled low doses dossiers and of their role in the public existence of these dossiers. 3/ through the creation of a cooperative system, to set up a low doses and environmental health issues texts database. It will be possible to interrogate this base dynamically and, will eventually be accessible to the whole research community. 4/ to position in a decisive manner French social sciences researchers in the setting up of an environmental health studies field of research which, for the time being, is mainly carried out by American en British researches.