Basile segalen biography
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Introduction
Notes
Especially historians of the Soviet Union increasingly question the analytical framework, dividing Soviet gender policies into a “progressive” (the 1920s) and a “reactionary” period (the Stalin era). See, for instance, Anna Krylova, “Bolshevik Feminism and Gender Agendas of Communism,” in The Cambridge History of Communism, Volume 1: World Revolution and Socialism in One Country 1917–1941, ed. Silvio Pons and Stephen A. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 424–448; Amy Randall, “Gender and Sexuality,” in Life in Stalin's Soviet Union, ed. Kees Boterbloem (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 139–166. For East-Central europe under communist rule, this view of a “revolutionary” approach to gender, which was, in the post-Stalin era, replaced by more “traditional” policies, is still very dominant. See, among many others, Kateřina Lišková, Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Des
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A first Timescope virtual reality terminal installed in Paris
Adrien Sadaka and Basile Segalen have just invented with Timescope a real time travel machine. This self-service virtual reality terminal offers to observe a place at different times in the past or even in a possible future. The first terminal of this start-up has just been installed in Paris on the Place de la Bastille and allows you to view this place as it was in 1416 and 1789.
After four years of reflection and one year of manufacturing, the first terminal of Adrien and Basile is finally installed and the experience is visibly pleasing. Many curious people were able to try this immersion experience and contemplate the fortress of the Bastille as if it still existed.
Back to the past in 1416
"We proposed this project to Bastille because, living in the neighborhood since always, we realized that many tourists wonder why there is no bastille on the Place de la Bastille! The square is named after a missing monu
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1. Why study scientific autobiography?
1In his introduction to La Vie de laboratoire, Bruno Latour is dismissive of accounts of the practices of the scientific community found in the writing of scientists themselves. For him, their works lack inquiry, direct observation and contradiction:
Pour donner un peu d’indépendance aux analyses de la science, il est donc nécessaire de ne pas se reposer uniquement sur ce que les savants et chercheurs disent d’eux-mêmes. Ils doivent devenir ce que l’ethnologie nomme un « informateur », un informateur certes privilégié, mais enfin un informateur dont on doute. (Latour 1996: 17)1
2Certainly, Latour is defending his own position as the non-participant observer of the scientific process, but his final analysis is inevitably just as unreliable as that of the participant-analyst he relegates to the position of a mere ethnologist’s “informer”. Scientists are rarely dupes: many have a better working knowledge of current theories in the sociology