Online Permanent Seminar with Philippe Zawieja

Phillippe Zawieja

(University of Strasbourg)

Towards Fatigue Studies ? Promoting a transdisciplinary approach to study fatigues

Fatigue encompasses a vast panorama of very common experiences, ranging from a delicious sensation or a temporary inconvenience to existential suffering, and likely to have its contrasting effects in the private life as well as in the collective, productive or political arena, from apathy to agitation, from resignation-prostration to revolt and violence.

Although the fatigue literature is overabundant in certain disciplines, only few systematic or integrative approaches have been developed, mainly by Physiology and Medicine, through a positivist paradigm. Hence this communication advocating for Fatigue Studies as a transdisciplinary effort hypothesizing that fatigues – no matter they have been named (acedia, melancholy, neurasthenia, burnout, etc.) or not - are also part of a process of social-historical production.

Understanding such processes requires the study of all the materials conveying the social representations linked to fatigue, its causes, its determinisms, its manifestations and its consequences, not only because they explain these representations (myths, oral and written literature, arts…) but also because they contribute, in return, to shape them, to disseminate them (social institutions like media, work…), sometimes to transform them into public and political issues, under conditions that remain to clarify. In this perspective, expert (particularly medical and psychological) discourse themselves become materials for a potentially critical socio-anthropological study of fatigue.

This communication will suggest the main questions Fatigue Studies will have to address, and the 5 research areas they will have to investigate.

Chaired by Maria de Jesus Cabral

This seminar will tke place online via Zoom, on May 12th 2022, starting at 6 p.m. (GMT +1). The event will be open to the public, and can be accessed using the following data:

LINK: https://zoom.us/j/94371089236?pwd=YUUyaXQ1aHZVQ3RRdGJMQ093NlA4UT09

ID: 943 7108 9236

Senha: HRM4a8

We hope to see you there!