There is what is highlighted in funding applications, which must convince people of the importance of the research programme they are proposing to carry out. There’s also what you present at a conference, or in an article, to show the relevance of the results you’ve obtained. Not to mention what we say in front of a poster, which justifies to our peers the research method we propose to follow. Finally, there’s what we share during a brainstorm, which confirms or refutes the intuitions that guide us.

There’s what we talk about officially, the obvious, eminently scientific subjects. And then there’s the rest. There is what surrounds them, what gives them meaning beyond the walls of the laboratory, what is shared in the interstices, off the record, perhaps in front of the coffee machine, on a sofa, or over a drink, when we step outside our roles as scientists to embody the richer and more ambiguous roles of people.

There are the values that carry us forward, but also, and above all, the way in which we carry them forward and try to embody them in our daily practices. There is also the way in which we collectively negotiate these practices, and the way in which we organise and manage the production and dissemination of knowledge. Not to mention our representations of the present, past and future world, the meanings they convey and the ways in which they influence us. Finally, there is the question: on which table can we place these issues? Or, formulated from an open perspective: where can we collectively question the worlds in which we participate?

* Mallory Carlu-Gérémie obtained is PhD in Physics at the University of Aberdeen (UK) under the direction of Pr. Politi and Dr Ginelli. He worked in the field of chaos theory and studied more particularly Lyapunov exponents and vectors in collective and extended systems. He then worked for nearly three years at the laboratory of Neuroscience of Paris-Saclay (NeuroPsi) under the Human Brain Project, studying and developing mathematical models for collective dynamics in neuronal networks.