Overview

Benjamin Raimbault graduated as an engineer from AgroParisTech (2012) and obtained a PhD in sociology from the Université Paris-Est Marne la Vallée (2018), writing his thesis under the direction of Pierre-Benoît Joly. In 2016, he was a fellow of the Science and Technology Studies program at Harvard University directed by Sheila Jasanoff. Between 2019 and 2021, Benjamin received an IFRIS postdoctoral grant for research carried out at the Cermes2. Since 2021, he has been involved in the Ways-Out project supervised by Bruno Turnheim, which looks at the phenomenon of destabilization and the modalities of governing the discontinuation of established sociotechnical systems, focused specifically on the case of the meat industry since the end of the 1970s.

Benjamin’s thesis looks at the socio-history of bioengineering between France and the United States. The bioengineering industry enabled him to revisit the history and forms of relations between science and industry since the 1980s, in France and the United States. This thesis therefore offers a multilevel socio-history of knowledge production, focusing on the establishment of communities of scholars, academics, or industry stakeholders that have adopted bio-engineering approaches. In doing so, it partially revisits the goal of the sociology of scientific disciplines, by insisting on the transformation of ways of coordinating and regulating scientific work as a part of the so-called ‘knowledge economy’. Attention to social processes over the medium term allows the author to temper the promises of novelty (in particular those of synthetic biology) while describing actual transformations in actors’ practices and institutional agencing.

His current research studies the knowledge and expertise developed in the context of contemporary transformations in industrial activities faced with ecological and environmental crises (industrial biotechnology, life-cycle analysis, methanation). More broadly, he collaborates with other colleagues in the goal of moving beyond industry as a historical period in order to think of industrialization as a set of long-term processes (standardization, optimization, rationalization of work). He co-directs the “(Dé)Faire l’industrie” seminar on these topics at the EHESS.

Main research areas:

• Emerging scientific disciplines
• Science-industry relations
• Science and technology studies (STS) and expertise
• Bioengineering/biotechnology/bioeconomics
• The ecologization of industry
• Transformation of industries and environmental crises

Publications