Research in the humanities: giving a voice to the invisible

In the humanities, it is common practice to interview people to gather life stories, short sentences or sometimes just a few words, to complement quantitative data.

So what might these off-the-cuff remarks – spoken in everyday language and punctuated by silences or onomatopoeia – reveal? What is the value of collecting this raw material?

Precisely because it is raw material that expresses a feeling, a thought that springs forth spontaneously and offers a fresh, unprocessed insight. The aim is to minimise, as far as possible, any scholarly manipulation that would distort the speech and cloak the information in an acceptable, standardised sugar coating.

In the humanities, and particularly in educational sciences, research is more often based on data from small cohorts, which lend themselves to revealing the innermost self within a group and to showing what unfolds between its members. This research sheds light on those subtle moments of transformation that can prove decisive in the course of a lifetime.

A single word within a speech is enough to reveal a tipping point, a held-back emotion, the sigh of a person seeking balance and gathering the momentum to take the next step.

The time devoted to these liminal moments is therefore essential for capturing the subtlety of living beings as they transform, withdraw, pause, unfold and alter their course in a constantly renewing dynamism that questions both the meaning of existence and the changes within society.

At a time when the Senate is refusing to publish a report on psychological suffering in the workplace, led by Senator Annick Girardin, the social sciences community is patiently continuing its work to disseminate its research – carried out with increasingly limited resources – giving a voice to the invisible and the anonymous who form the bedrock of any society.