School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

About: School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences is a facility organization based out in Villejuif, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Politics & Context (language use). The organization has 1230 authors who have published 2084 publications receiving 57740 citations. The organization is also known as: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales & EHESS.

Socio-semantic frameworks

Abstract: Socio-technical systems involve agents who create and process knowledge, exchange information and create ties between ideas in a distributed and networked manner: webloggers, communities of scientists, software developers and wiki contributors are, among others, examples of such networks. The state-of-the-art in this regard focuses on two main issues which are generally addressed in an independent manner: the description of content dynamics and the study of social network characteristics and evolution. This paper relies on recent endeavors to merge both types of dynamics into co-evolutionary, multi-level modeling frameworks, where social and semantic aspects are being jointly appraised. Case studies featuring socio-semantic graphs, socio-semantic hypergraphs and socio-semantic lattices are notably discussed.

From visual-motor anticipation to conceptualization: Reaction to solid and hollow objects and knowledge of the function of containment

Abstract: This research investigates the development of visual-manual coordination during infancy with respect to the spatial property of concavity and the development of the capacity to expect or understand that a hollow object affords specific manual behaviors. Tumblers closed at the top by a plexiglas plate were used: They seemed to be open but resisted introduction of the hand. Infants' behavior towards these deceptive objects was compared with their behavior towards identical objects that looked and felt closed or open. The results show that from the 8th month infants exhibit to the deceptive objects an anticipatory visuomotor behavior and from ninth month they exhibit exploratory behavior that suggests that they are trying to understand the discrepancy between the objects' visual and tactile properties. It can therefore be concluded that a rudimentary conceptualization of containment appears to be elaborated by infants from ninth month.

Enchantment and solidarity: Which dream does `fair tourism' sell?

Abstract: This article studies the mechanisms of `enchantment' at work in the provision of tourist services, especially in one of its more modern forms: `fair' tourism, linked more broadly to the imaginative world and practices of fair trade. The French associations that promote and put into practice this type of tourism construct a context for meeting the `other' by presenting the consumption of this service as an act of solidarity. This shaping of the relation helps to create states of `enchantment' of tourists, an enchantment that draws power from the participation in a collective project to change the world (related to fair trade) and from the connection with a small producer of the South. However, the creation of this enchantment constitutes a fragile balance between what is hidden and what is revealed, and also depends on the protagonists of the encounter in situ. Here, we study the representations and reactions of tourists through a case study from Burkina Faso. Situations of disenchantment show that the dou...

Découverte d'un Néolithique précéramique ancien chypriote (fin 9e, début 8e millénaires cal. BC), apparenté au PPNB ancien/moyen du Levant nord

Abstract: The recent discovery of Parekklisha–Shillourokambos, an Aceramic Neolithic settlement dating to the late 9th and the 8th millennia cal. BC, pushes back the appearance of the Neolithic in Cyprus by a millennium. This insular early Aceramic Neolithic culture has much in common with the PPNB in the northern Levant, which now appears to have spread from its point of origin earlier than previously supposed, and it occurred even before animal husbandry had brought about morphological changes in hearded caprovids. From the middle of the 8th to the early 7th millennium BC, the Cypriot Neolithic slowly evolved into what would become known as the Aceramic Neolithic Khirokitia culture.