Gender, health and the construction of public problems

The ‘Gender, health and the construction of public problems’ research group seeks to build on the accomplishments of two projects conducted within Arènes (one on ordinary gender relations, the other on the construction and mediatisation of public problems). Its aim is to offer innovative, cross-disciplinary research that raises powerful contemporary issues, linked to historical events likely to disrupt gender-based social arrangements – such as the COVID-19 epidemic, analysis of which has already revealed the differentiated impact of the disease and its social effects according to sex and gender.

One of this research unit’s strengths lies in its ability to mobilise both gender specialists and researchers invested in objects that are located in a range of arenas and forums such as social movements, the media, expertise – even public policy.

The challenge facing this group is to bring these scientific assets together so as to build bridges between different research traditions, methods and approaches.

The propaedeutic component driving the research dynamics of this group is considered its organisation of an international conference (scheduled for late 2021) entitled “Scientific ignorance, gender ignorance? The gendered construction of public health problems”. This conference will have an international, comparative dimension and (supported by work on epistemic injustices) intends to take an interest in using the tools of gender to get to grips with how knowledge and ignorance are produced within the various social spaces in which speech on health is delivered: scientific, media and political spaces. The organisation of this event will benefit the research group set up in its honour in two ways, within Arènes.

First, it will make it possible to capitalise on and enrich the knowledge already built up in the above-mentioned fields of research, by causing them to converge towards a common problem.

Second, it will give group participants an opportunity to establish working collaborations with researchers from beyond the unit, both in France and abroad. These expected benefits of the conference (in terms of both knowledge and the construction of scientific networks) must be capable of constituting the foundation on which the drafting of the group’s own problematic is to be based – and this could feed into a group research project.