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Madeleine Akrich is one of the sixteen 2016 prize-winners to whom the CNRS has awarded a silver medal. The silver medal “honors a researcher for the originality, the quality and the importance of her-his nationally and internationally recognized work”.
During the period 2003-2013, Madeleine Akrich served as director of the CSI. Her research focuses on two main themes: on one side, she is concentrating on the anthropology of techniques, on the other side, she is working on the issue of lay knowledges. The same question runs across these two themes: which place the development of sciences and techniques gives to the non-specialist.
In a first set of studies, she focuses on how innovative work incorporates the usage and the user, and reciprocally how the user contributes to innovation: actually, the objective is to report on the continuous and joint making of the techniques and of the social world.
In the second set of studies, centered on medicine, she investigated, along with Cécile Méadel, the role of information and communication technologies in the possible constitution of forms of profane expertise. More recently, her research carried out with Vololona Rabeharisoa focused on users-and patients’ movements: the approach consisted in describing how these movements mobilize experiential knowledge as well as expert knowledge in their activism and how they contribute to the production of these knowledges.