Philippe Dujardin

Philippe Dujardin is a graduate of the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (1967), holds a law degree (Besançon, 1970) and a doctorate in political science (Lyon, 1977).

Teaching and research activities

He was assistant professor of political science at the Institut d’études politiques de Lyon (1971-1980), then senior lecturer at the Institut d’études politiques de Grenoble (1980-1983), before joining the CNRS research corps in 1983.

Research activities

Critical movement of law.

Philippe Dujardin wrote his doctoral thesis on constitutional history and theory and was one of the founders of the Mouvement Critique du Droit in 1974. In 1978 he became secretary of the journal Procès, Cahiers d’analyse politique et juridique, which published 19 issues between 1978 and 1990.

Historical Political Science Team.

Philippe Dujardin was seconded to the Institut d’Études Politiques de Lyon (Université Lumière Lyon2) in 1983 as a research fellow, where he taught 2nd and 3rd cycle seminars on the relationship between civic space and symbolic space. He set up a research team called the Historical Political Science Team. The name chosen is an explicit tribute to Maurice Agulhon’s pioneering work on pre-partisan forms of sociability in nineteenth-century France. It reflects the desire to combine the protocols for investigating ‘public affairs’ on contrasting and combined temporal scales, that of the ‘present’ and that of the ‘historical’. But very quickly, another time scale was added to that of the present and that of the long historical period. This is the scale opened up by anthropology.

Understood in this way, the research had two aims. Firstly, to identify the features of European political modernity and the configuration it produced: it is from this angle that the themes of secrecy, networks, image, commemoration and division are approached in a multidisciplinary and comparative manner. Secondly, to highlight the properties of the history of the city of Lyon and its conurbation. This history is then examined from the angle of the conditions of construction of the public space, such as the telling of stories, festive and commemorative rituals, and heritage practices.

Research and consultancy activities

Scientific adviser to the Forward Studies and Urban Strategy Department of the Lyon Urban Community (Greater Lyon).

In 2005, Philippe Dujardin was seconded to the Greater Lyon Urban Community’s Department of Foresight and Urban Strategy to act as scientific advisor, putting the established research protocol to the test in situ. From 2004 onwards, the Lyon 2020 programme, which followed on from the Millénaire 3 project carried out during a previous term of office, enabled the concept of the ‘metropolitan emblem’ to be implemented and applied to different themes.

The ‘representation’ of a territorial entity in the form of an emblem is the first step in a major project: the creation of a ‘conurbation narrative’ drawing on written, visual and audio-visual archives, as well as oral memory. The material collected will be made available to the public throughout 2009, the fortieth anniversary of the creation of the Lyon urban community. Once completed and organised, this material will be used in a variety of formats to contribute to the ‘agglomeration narrative’ that has been initiated.

Synthesis work

Philippe Dujardin’s 2009 essay in the journal Sens Public, entitled ‘De quoi sommes-nous contemporains’ (‘What are we contemporaries of?’), is an opportunity for him to draw lessons from the research he has conducted in an academic mode and then in an ‘involved’ mode. By questioning the notion of contemporaneity from the angle of the ‘what’ rather than the ‘who’, he endeavours to make thinkable the singular and paradoxical time of the advent of the public sphere. It is an advent in which the time of the actors’ aims, the time of the resonance of the lineages in which they are inscribed, the time of the quasi-invariant assembly procedures that their condition as humans sets for them, are engaged. It is not so much the ‘actuality’ as the ‘actualisation’ of what is going on that the political scientist is invited to reflect upon. And it is in this transition from ‘topicality’ to ‘actualisation’ that Philippe Dujardin intends to tie together the relationship between historical political science and political anthropology.

Source : Philippe Dujardin’s website