[Portrait] Gaël Depoorter, Senior Lecturer in Political Science (-JPEG)

What is your research about?

My work focuses on the socio-political issues surrounding digital technology. The most common cliché is that these tools revolutionise everything they touch. I'm much more interested in what they maintain and renew. After a thesis that aimed to make visible and sociologise a world that is often kept obscure and exotic, that of the 'hackers', I decided to tackle two new areas of research with the same approach: 'data' (based on open data in tourism) and 'cryptocurrencies' (in particular Bitcoin).

What are your current scientific activities?

Initially, with Yannick Hascoët, we are finalising a scientific article looking at the 'little hands' involved in data production, who are often left out of the grandiloquent accounts of the Start-up nation and yet they are the essential cogs in the wheel. At the same time, as part of a European partnership (Emildai), I am taking part in the publication later this year of a book in which I make a contribution on Bitcoin and which aims to explain the technical and political issues involved, in particular by offering a critical analysis of the often virulent debate on its energy consumption.

Why did you choose to work in academic research?

What do we 'choose' and what inclines us to take this or that path? I'm not going to do my own self-analysis here, so if I have to give in to the siren song of 'narcissistic confessions' I'd say that I needed to give myself the tools to grasp the exuberant folklore of the world around us, to give it meaning. I wanted time to develop a framework in which to think, read, write and meet. Since then, I've come to realise that time is sorely lacking.

What advice would you give to students who want to do research?

Research in my discipline is first and foremost an exciting and unsettling process of problematising the social world, in constant relation with fieldwork. So you have to be curious, slightly monomaniacal, able to tame the sparkling chaos left behind by the arbitrariness that our research helps to unveil, and motivated by the challenges of reflexivity without allowing yourself to be subjugated by a form of 'cabinet intellectualism' that magically operates weightlessly in the social world. I believe that you also need to be driven by a personal commitment, to know for and against what you are conducting your research, and to be able to subsume it under a methodological and scientific approach.