Papers by Nicole Dewandre
Digital : parce que le doigt…et le toucher
Études digitales, 2016
The Human Condition and The Black Box Society
Information services & use, Aug 9, 2006
Springer eBooks, Nov 16, 2014
sees philosophy as plumbing, something that nobody notices until it goes wrong: 'Then suddenly we... more sees philosophy as plumbing, something that nobody notices until it goes wrong: 'Then suddenly we become aware of some bad smells, and we have to take up the floorboards and look at the concepts of even the most ordinary piece of thinking. The great philosophers … noticed how badly things were going wrong, and made suggestions about how they could be dealt with.' (Midgley 2001). The bad smells, as I perceive them, concern the proliferation of truisms (including about progress, change and innovation), wrong alternatives ("either/or" framing when the "both/and" would be much more efficient), and fears and delusion when it comes to thinking and speaking about politics and the public space. It would be wrong to say that we are in totalitarian times: fascism and communism have been defeated and democracy is alive, at least in the EU and other parts of the world. However, I feel that we are unconsciously undermining essential elements of the human condition, as set out by Hannah Arendt in her seminal book The human condition (Arendt 1959): the antidotes against the risk of totalitarianism are thereby weakened to a dangerous extent so that it would not take much more than a spark for the public space to collapse, and this even under the cover of the best governance intentions. The digital transition is an opportunity to "fix the pipes", as put by Mary Midgley: it brings about a reality by which some key assumptions underlying our worldview, since Plato, lose ground insofar as they simply stop being efficient. The digital transition projects us into a world where nature is pervasively intertwined with sensors, information devices and machines; we thus increasingly experience a reactive and talkative nature, an animated nature, where it becomes more and more difficult L. Floridi (ed.), The Onlife Manifesto,
L'Europe au soir du siècle, Identité et démocratie
On peut jouer avec son destin, on le trompe rarement. L'Europe en sait quelque chose. De cham... more On peut jouer avec son destin, on le trompe rarement. L'Europe en sait quelque chose. De champ de bataille, elle est devenue, pour une partie d'elle-meme, et sous la protection bienveillante des Americains, un modele d'integration regionale. Aujourd'hui, chacun sent poindre la croisee des chemins. Dans un monde ou les reperes sont chaque jour moins nombreux, ou les incertitudes gagnent sans cesse en intensite, l'Europe deviendra-t-elle acteur de l'histoire ? Ou sera-t-elle au contraire condamnee a l'impuissance par la volonte des Etats-nations de se replier sur leurs particularismes au nom de la preservation de leur identite ? Depuis sa fondation - "plus jamais la guerre entre nous"- la question du sens de la construction europeenne ne s'etaite guere posee avec autant d'acuite qu'en ce soir de siecle. La dimension politique de la construction europeenne refait surface. Tant son role international que son organisation interne sont en question. Le defi est de taille : il s'agit de renouveler nos conceptions de l'identite et de la democratie.
Springer eBooks, 2022
Acquiring transformative literacies calls for a critical review of our underlying conceptual assu... more Acquiring transformative literacies calls for a critical review of our underlying conceptual assumptions, in order to bring new light to old words, such as human, equality, freedom and power. Indeed, the transition towards sustainability requires leaving behind the modern paradigm, and embracing a conceptual framework proposed by Hannah Arendt, notably in the Human Condition. With her reconceptualisation of humanness, focused on relationality instead of rationality, she creates the conditions for cherishing and honouring interdependence, from each other, from artefacts and from nature. With this renewed understanding of what it means to be human and how it entails to rely on nature, Arendt offers a new framework that dissolves misleading beliefs and activates alternative ways to look and engage with reality in a meaningful way. And so she does, by keeping fear and rage away, but instead mobilising trust and …love of the world, as difficult it may be.
Frauen in der Forschung - Fortschritte in Europa
Nachrichten Aus Der Chemie, 2003
Vor vier Jahren hat die Europaische Kommission zum Start des funften Forschungsrahmenprogramms ei... more Vor vier Jahren hat die Europaische Kommission zum Start des funften Forschungsrahmenprogramms einen Aktionsplan verabschiedet, um die Chancengleichheit von Wissenschaftlerinnen durchzusetzen. Wie sieht die Bilanz jetzt zu Beginn des sechsten Rahmenprogramms aus?
The Sustainability Concept: Can We Stand Between Catastrophism and Denial?
Springer eBooks, 2011
The opinions expressed are those of the author only and should not be considered as representativ... more The opinions expressed are those of the author only and should not be considered as representative of the European Commission’s official position.
Humans as relational selves
AI & society, Feb 20, 2017
Instead of wondering about the nature of robots, as if our thinking about humans was stable and s... more Instead of wondering about the nature of robots, as if our thinking about humans was stable and straightforward, we should dig deeper in thinking about how we think about humans. Indeed, the emotions embedded in the ethical approaches to robots and artificial intelligence, are rooted in a long tradition of thinking about humans, either in an instrumental or in a pseudo-divine way. Both perspectives miss humanness, and are misleading when it comes to thinking about robots and their relationships with humans. With the instrumental way to grasp humanness, humans are seen as machines and, by the same token, robots can easily be seen as human, as a matter of fact. With the quasi-divine way to grasp humanness, humans are seen as aspiring omniscient-omnipotent creatures and, by the same token, robots are projected to be, what men will always fail to become. Hence, our way to think about robots is mirroring our way to think about humans…as long as we hold rationality as a distinctive criteria for humanness. The text below flows from a TEDxULB talk that took place in Brussels on May 4, 2016 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcGywYSJlf0). It calls for leaving behind the rational subject as proxy for humanness, and embracing instead the figure of the relational self. The relational self is rooted in the Arendtian concept of plurality. Embracing the relational self, instead of the rational subject, has several advantages: it allows to distinguish humans from artefacts; it allows to grasp the dynamics between control, orientation, and recognition and to understand how human freedom flows from this dynamics; it opens to the foregrounding of vulnerability, as a shared characteristic of humanness, instead of as a defect touching only some; last, and surely not least, it points to a new form of vulnerability: that of our attentional spheres, whose protection may deserve a new fundamental right, in order to ensure our integrity, besides and beyond body and home.
Big Data & Society, Jul 1, 2020
In The Black Box Society, Frank Pasquale develops a critique of asymmetrical power: corporations'... more In The Black Box Society, Frank Pasquale develops a critique of asymmetrical power: corporations' secrecy is highly valued by legal orders, but persons' privacy is continually invaded by these corporations. This response proceeds in three stages. I first highlight important contributions of The Black Box Society to our understanding of political and legal relationships between persons and corporations. I then critique a key metaphor in the book (the one-way mirror, Pasquale's image of asymmetrical surveillance), and the role of transparency and 'watchdogging' in its primary policy prescriptions. I then propose 'relational selfhood' as an important new way of theorizing interdependence in an era of artificial intelligence and Big Data, and promoting optimal policies in these spheres.
Political Agents as Relational Selves
Philosophy Today, 2018
In this article, I argue that Hannah Arendt’s well-known but controversial distinction between la... more In this article, I argue that Hannah Arendt’s well-known but controversial distinction between labour, work, and action provides, perhaps unexpectedly, a conceptual grounding for transforming politics and policy-making at the EU level. Beyond the analysis and critique of modernity, Arendt brings the conceptual resources needed for the EU to move beyond the modern trap it fell into thirty years ago. At that time, the European Commission shifted its purpose away from enhancing interdependence among Member States with a common market towards achieving an internal market in the name of boosting growth and creating jobs. Arendt provides the conceptual tools to transform the conceptualisation of relations and of agents that fuels the growing dissatisfaction among many Europeans with EU policy-making. This argument is made through stretching and re-articulating Arendt’s labour-work-action distinction and taking seriously both the biological and plural dimensions of the human condition, besides its rational one. By applying this shift in an EU context, EU policies could change their priorities and better address the needs and expectations of plural political agents and of European citizens.
Social Science Research Network, 2017
Nicole Dewandre studied applied physics engineering, economics, operations research and philosoph... more Nicole Dewandre studied applied physics engineering, economics, operations research and philosophy. She works at the European Commission since 1983 and has been part of Jacques Delors' think tank, before focusing on science and society issues. She convened the "Onlife Initiative", a collective thought exercise exploring the consequences of the advent of a hyperconnected era on the conceptual frameworks underlying EU policy-making. She is currently researcher in the Joint Research Center, the in-house scientific service of the European Commission. Orsolya Gulyás studied Public Policy at Central European University and Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Combining these backgrounds, she mainly researches issues at the intersection of technology and society. Engaging with media and communication theory, she has studied narrative structures, political communication, and the role of agenda setting in policymaking. She currently works as a researcher and policy advisor at the European Future Innovation System Centre in Brussels.
Sensitive economic personae and functional human beings
Journal of Language and Politics, Dec 14, 2018
This study is aimed at unveiling the implicit assumptions underlying the language of EU policy-ma... more This study is aimed at unveiling the implicit assumptions underlying the language of EU policy-making, drawing on Hannah Arendt’s critique of modernity. It conducts a critical metaphor analysis of strategic EU policy documents from 1985 to 2014 to reveal the extent to which EU policy-making, by relentlessly focusing on the ‘competitiveness, growth, and jobs’ narrative, relies on modern conceptual frameworks. These are characterized by the prominence of rationality and causality, at the expense of sense of purpose, reality and meaning, which is revealed through the validation of four metaphorical keys. These are (i) sensitive inversion, i.e. economic agents are sensitive and humans are functional; (ii) size matters, i.e. big is better than small and one is better than many; (iii) deficit framing, i.e. potential is locked and present is broken/future is bright; and (iv) speed is of the essence, i.e. the world moves fast and we must hurry up.
arXiv (Cornell University), Jun 7, 2018
This publication is a Conference and Workshop report by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the Euro... more This publication is a Conference and Workshop report by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission's science and knowledge service. It aims to provide evidence-based scientific support to the European policymaking process. The scientific output expressed does not imply a policy position of the European Commission. Neither the European Commission nor any person acting on behalf of the Commission is responsible for the use that might be made of this publication.
Proceedings of 1 st HUMAINT workshop, Barcelona, Spain, March 5-6, 2018
[EN]This document contains the outcome of the first Human behaviour and machine intelligence (HUM... more [EN]This document contains the outcome of the first Human behaviour and machine intelligence (HUMAINT) workshop that took place 5-6 March 2018 in Barcelona, Spain. The workshop was organized in the context of a new research programme at the Centre for Advanced Studies, Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, which focuses on studying the potential impact of artificial intelligence on human behaviour. The workshop gathered an interdisciplinary group of experts to establish the state of the art research in the field and a list of future research challenges to be addressed on the topic of human and machine intelligence, algorithm's potential impact on human cognitive capabilities and decision making, and evaluation and regulation needs. The document is made of short position statements and identification of challenges provided by each expert, and incorporates the result of the discussions carried out during the workshop. In the conclusion section, we provide a list of emerging research topics and strategies to be addressed in the near future.Peer reviewe
Sextant
La lecture d'Une chambre à soi de Virginia Woolf au début des années 2000 m'a convaincue que les ... more La lecture d'Une chambre à soi de Virginia Woolf au début des années 2000 m'a convaincue que les femmes avaient besoin de se nourrir à la pensée des autres femmes. En écrivant que « le poids, la démarche, l'allure d'un esprit masculin, sont par trop différents du poids, de la démarche, de l'allure de l'esprit d'une femme pour qu'elle puisse y prendre quelque chose de substantiel » 2 , Virginia Woolf m'a donné la permission qui me manquait, en ce début de xxi e siècle, de faire droit au fait que la pensée des femmes pouvait différer de celle des hommes, et qu'à tout le moins, on pouvait faire cette hypothèse de façon légère, c'est-à-dire sans s'enfermer dans un essentialisme béat 3 et sans jeter aux orties les acquis de la lutte politique pour l'égalité. Grâce à cette permission de Virginia Woolf, je suis retournée vers Hannah Arendt en me plongeant corps et âme dans son oeuvre, en mesurant à quel point la pensée d'une autre femme peut faire peau et fournir les concepts indispensables tant à l'engagement qu'à l'expérience de la liberté, à tout le moins pour les femmes. Le rapport que j'ai développé avec l'oeuvre d'Arendt est à la fois sauvage et intime. Je ne pourrais pas vivre si je n'avais lu son oeuvre. Elle forme mon regard sur le monde. C'est armée par elle que j'exerce mon métier de fonctionnaire à la Commission européenne. Quand j'ai travaillé sur le développement durable, j'ai compris avec Arendt pourquoi il fallait se 1 Les opinions développées dans cet article sont celles de l'auteure et ne reflètent pas nécessairement la position de la Commission européenne. 2 V. wooLF, Une chambre à soi, Paris, Editions Denoël, 1977, p. 113. 3 Sur une approche non dramatique de la différence, voir N. DewanDre, « Penser la différence des sexes en s'appuyant sur la différence des langues », in Ph. büttgen, M. genDreau-MassaLoux et Xavier north (dir.), Les pluriels de Barbara Cassin ou le partage des équivoques, Paris, Le Bord de l'Eau, 2014.
Unveiling a feminine subjectivity in a men's world or shaping our own? An aporetic experience
"The weight, the pace, the stride of a man's mind are too unlike her own for her to lift... more "The weight, the pace, the stride of a man's mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully" : as an educated girl from an uneducated man, it took me 40 years to catch the power of this sentence of Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own. Until then, I strived to build myself as a "naive educated woman", confident that the claim for equality was the alpha and the omega of a woman's existence. As many other women, I was a good performer in the school and academic environments. I got university degrees in applied physics engineering, in operations research and in economics. I started my professional career in a successful way, as what I can now describe as an archetype of a woman in the denial mode. I was a true "parvenue" as remarkably analysed by Hanna Fenichel Pitkin in "Conformism, Housekeeping, and the Attack of the Blob: The Origins of Hannah Arendt's concept of the Social". In this superb text, Hanna Fenichel Pitkin builds on the analysis of Hannah Arendt of the pariah/parvenu divide as applied to the Jews' situation in the XIXth century in her biography of Rahel Varnhagen and subverts it to show how it applies to the man/woman divide.
« Femmes et sciences » : Perspectives personnelles et européennes
Études digitales. 2016 – 1, n° 1. Le texte à venir
Contributeurs : Anne Alombert, Maxime Arnaud, Wilfried Arnaud, Jessica de Bideran, Gilles Bonnet,... more Contributeurs : Anne Alombert, Maxime Arnaud, Wilfried Arnaud, Jessica de Bideran, Gilles Bonnet, Véronique Béghain, Philippe Béraud, Sylvie Catellin, Philippe Chantepie, Claire Clivaz, Franck Cormerais, Nicole Dewandre, Jean-Paul Fourmentraux, Paul-Émile Geoffroy, Jacques Athanase Gilbert, Nathanaël Gilbert, Pierre-Amiel Giraud, Éric Guichard, Florian Harmand, Clémence Jacquot, Armen Khatchatourov, Amar Lakel, Olivier Le Deuff, Laurent Loty, Pierre Maréchaux, Ariane Mayer, Gerald Moore, Serge Proulx, David Pucheu, Olivier Rey, Shinya Shigemi, Emmanuël Souchier, Bernard Stiegler et Daphné Vignon.
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Papers by Nicole Dewandre