Research. Commitment?

This issue of Communications aims to understand the stance of social science researchers through three main characteristics: their subjectivity, forms of commitment and relationship to the political process. The term “stance” refers to the position that the researchers take with regard to their objects of research, their interlocutors, their fields, and finally their peers and the institutions which structure their activity. Far from being immutable, this stance continues to evolve in a movement which we call "cheminement" The researchers enter the research world with biographic and geographic links, with social and cultural backgrounds which will influence the process that make them autonomous individuals set within a context and a historical framework. Yet, the richness of the research resides in the plurality of “stances” and "cheminements" and in the diversity of ways of interweaving the ordinary history with the History as illustrated by the contributions compiled here.