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Émile Provendier receives the 2024 Thesis Prize from Université Paris-Est

The 2024 Thesis Prize from the OMI doctoral school (Université Gustave Eiffel) was awarded to Émile Provendier for his thesis on crowd quantification technologies in democracy, supervised by Sylvain Parasie and Jean-Philippe Cointet.

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Every year, the Université Paris-Est organises a thesis award ceremony. These awards recognise the best work by doctoral students from each of its doctoral schools, pre-selected from among the previous year's graduates for their quality, originality and social impact.

This year, the ceremony took place on Thursday, 4 December, on the campus of Université de Créteil. The 2024 Thesis Prize was awarded to Émile Provendier for his thesis completed at the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences, Innovation, Société (LISIS) under the supervision of Sylvain Parasie (director of the medialab) and Jean-Philippe Cointet (researcher at the medialab). The LISIS is an interdisciplinary research laboratory dedicated to analysing science and innovation in their social dimensions. Its work aims to shed light on the social and political transformations linked to scientific and technical innovation, economic globalisation and the digitalisation of social and professional worlds.

Entitled « Le gouvernement numérique de la foule : enquête sur les technologies de quantification de la foule en démocratie » ("Digital crowd governance: investigation into crowd quantification technologies in democracy"), this thesis addresses the issue of crowds based on three areas of research that enable the quantification of crowds to be used as a research subject, a political argument and a democratic tool:

  • A scientometric analysis, supported by interviews with researchers in the field, to understand how knowledge about crowds has been structured and the technologies used today to quantify them;
  • An analysis of the controversy surrounding the counting of demonstrators in France, on the one hand by tracing the history of counting back to its beginnings, and on the other hand by observing a ‘renewal’ of the controversy in the late 2010s with the emergence of counting devices used by citizens or journalists;
  • Ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2021 in a park in the city of Amsterdam, where the municipality is attempting to develop an ‘ethical’ counting system, i.e. one that is transparent and respectful of citizens' personal data.

Congratulations to Émile on this distinction!