Data

Stefan Krebs and Heike Weber historicise the concept of "repairing things" with a view to broadening and redefining the emphasis of current debates on repair as a "new social movement" and the emergence of a "repair society". These current discourses often lack a sense of the long history of repairing things which saw ups and downs in cultures of repair and self-repair. The chapter charts out the heterogeneity and interrelatedness of the actors involved in repair over time.

This article examines the influence of patients' families in the Schaerbeek asylum for the insane between 1853 and 1914. Through the examination of the institution's medico-administrative registers during four periods of psychiatric internment (admissions, establishment of diagnoses, social relations of the patients, and discharges), the central role played by the patients' entourage in the asylums is revealed. Between high economic capital and favorable legal provisions, families are indeed able to influence the possibilities and modalities of psychiatric internment.

Since the beginning of historical writing, historians, philosophers and poets have reflected on the complex relationship between history and its linguistic representation, between the narrative and the reality expressed in it, between the textual formulation of the truth requirement and the stylistic or rhetorical work of persuasion. For centuries, and even for more than two millennia, this debate has always revolved around a major epistemological problem, summed up by the French historian Ivan Jablonka as follows: "How can truth be told in and through a text?

French translation of the article "Technostalgia of the present: from technologies of memory to a memory of technologies" (2015): https://necsus-ejms.org/technostalgia-present-technologies-memory-memory....

Recension de Jérôme Denis, Le Travail invisible des données. Éléments pour une sociologie des infrastructures scripturales, Paris, Presses des Mines, 2018, 206 pages

The history of (Western) European industrial cities is often told as a tragic tale of rise and decline: from rapid industrialisation in the late 19th century and economic prosperity during the Trente glorieuses to the structural changes of the late 1970s and the subsequent deindustrialisation of the 1980s and 1990s – decades in which most mines and steelworks closed down, unemployment rates went up, new social problems emerged, workers’ identities eroded, and once prosperous urban centres became faced with shrinking populations and empty stores in their shopping streets.