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Madeleine Akrich

Madeleine Akrich

Research Director

Center · CSI

Discipline(s)
Sociology

Keywords

Awards & distinctions

  • 2016 2016 CNRS Silver Medal

Team

CSI

Biography

Madeleine Akrich is a French sociologist and research director at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (CSI) at Mines Paris – PSL, renowned for her contributions to science, technology, and innovation studies (Science and Technology Studies, STS). Her work focuses on the interactions between technologies, organizations, and uses, emphasizing how technical objects contribute to the structuring of social practices. In the 1990s, she developed, alongside Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) approach. Her foundational article *The De-Scription of Technical Objects* (1992) introduces the concepts of ‘inscription’ and ‘script,’ which describe how designers embed assumptions about expected user behaviors into artifacts. This perspective highlights that technologies are neither neutral nor deterministic but co-constructed through interactions between human and non-human actors. Madeleine Akrich’s research has also revitalized the understanding of innovation processes by emphasizing the central role of users in the appropriation, adaptation, and sometimes transformation of technical devices. More recently, her work has shifted toward health, patient associations, experiential knowledge, and forms of technical democracy, analyzing the collective production of knowledge and new modalities of citizen participation in the development of scientific and health policies.

Publication(s)

Teaching

FOR 1A - S1

Guest Lecturer

Controversies

Course Director

FORMAT RESOURCES Introduction: Contextualization through viewing and analyzing a 25-minute documentary Participatory class project documentary Bibliographic research: press, websites, reports Project; class project + personalized follow-up poly · Analysis of documents: identifying key players, developing a timeline, identifying main points of controversy Project; PC + personalized support poly Establishing contacts for interviews, conducting interviews Lectures + Flipped Classroom + project poly Bibliographic research using scientific databases Course + Project poly Training in Cortext or an equivalent system (data mining, semantic analysis, network analysis, scientometrics) Course + PC poly Different types of controversy Flipped classroom poly Problem-based learning PC + personalized support Reading social science articles related to the controversy PC Writing assignment independent work + personalized support Preparation for the oral exam independent work + personalized support