Discussion with Quentin Deluermoz and Pierre Singaravélou.
What if history or life had taken a different course? What is called counterfactual reasoning arises spontaneously in conversations in order to develop hypotheses about the possibilities of the past and the untreated future.
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WAS WÄRE, WENN DIE MAUER NICHT GEFALLEN WÄRE?
What would have happened if Cleopatra's nose had been shorter? What if Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo? And what if the Berlin Wall had stayed in place?
Counterfactual analysis, which is often disregarded by historians, is as current as its multiple uses - from the craziest fictions to the most serious hypotheses. Once its logic and mission are grasped, it allows us to return to several essential questions for the social sciences: causality, determinism, imagination, commitment, the relation to fiction ....
Historically, it serves to denature conventional historical trajectories, thereby denaturalizing history, opening the future to the past and revealing a more diverse and comprehensive movement.
This basically participatory and immersive nature of the survey can also lead to an original exchange between historians and audiences, which is more balanced and called "Shared History Workshops". Thus, the method allows the integration of non-academic knowledge into the discussion and encourages people to accept a reflexive definition of history as an open work to whose output readers and listeners contribute. By playing seriously, the participants experience the fundamentally experimental dimension of the story.
CONFERENCE SPEAKERS
- Quentin Deluermoz and Pierre Singaravélou have pour une histoire des possibles. Raisonnement contrefactuel et futurs non advenus en histoire, Paris, Seuil, 2016. Published.
- Quentin Deluermoz, Lecturer in Contemporary History at the University of Paris 13, published Le Crépuscule des Révolutions (Seuil, 2014) and Commune (s), 1870-1871: une traversée des Mondes at XIXe siècle (Seuil, to be published in 2020).
- Pierre Singaravélou, Professor of Contemporary History at King's College London and the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, recently published Tianjin Cosmopolis. Une autre histoire de la mondialisation (Seuil, 2017) and Le Monde vu d'Asie (Seuil, 2018).
- Discussion with Effi Böhlke (Rosa Luxemburg Foundation) and Jérôme Heurtaux (CEFRES, Prague).
