The SAiNTé@Lyon project
This project is based on a multidisciplinary approach centred on placing current issues relating to socio-health and socio-environmental risks in a historical context. The project fosters collaboration between various disciplines that have not necessarily had the opportunity to intersect in health research: political and legal sciences, geography, planning and urban development, the history of health sciences, information and communication sciences, and contemporary history.
SAiNTÉ@LYON is aligned with the objectives of the SHAPE-Med@Lyon programme, which focuses on an integrated approach to health (both individual and collective), addressing prevention policies and initiatives as well as practices more geared towards care and treatment. It aims to focus on a very specific research area: the Lyon and Saint-Étienne metropolitan areas, which will serve as ‘laboratories’ for a transdisciplinary study of the recent history (since the Second World War) of prevention and environmental health.
Three priority areas have been identified:
- an examination of the slow pace at which public health prevention strategies are put in place to tackle pollution or past and emerging risks, and the difficulties involved in building a culture of public health at a regional level (that of the current Greater Lyon Metropolis);
- the potentially toxic legacies of past or ongoing extractive and industrial activities, whose effluents or physical traces continue to raise concerns (as in the case of the mining and metallurgical spoil heaps in the Saint-Étienne conurbation);
- the divergent narratives, depending on the media and communications stakeholders, regarding the controversial relationship between the state of the environment and health risks.
Project leaders:
Isabelle GARCIN-MARROU
Isabelle Garcin-Marrou is a professor of information and communication sciences at Sciences Po Lyon and a member of the ELICO research laboratory. Her research topics are shaped by a key scientific perspective: the analysis of media representations as a means of understanding social and political issues.
Alongside her research into violent socio-political processes, she studies the mediation of the local public sphere, focusing on the media’s construction of territorial identities, the portrayal of local executives, and territorialised representations of industrial risk.
Stéphane FRIOUX
Stéphane Frioux is a senior lecturer authorised to supervise research in contemporary history. He teaches at the Université Lyon 2 and is a researcher at the Laboratoire de recherche historique Rhône-Alpes (LAHRA). A specialist in environmental, urban and public policy history, he has recently been working on the history of air pollution in France from the 19th century to the early 1980s.
He led the ANR TRANSENVIR project (A Historical Approach to Environmental Transition: Political and Social Innovations in Response to Environmental Risks in Urban Areas, 1950s–2000s), and the resulting publication: Une France en transition (Champ Vallon, 2021).
Virginie CHASLES
Virginie Chasles is a professor of geography at Université Jean Monnet in Saint-Étienne. As a member of the UMR Environnement Ville Société research unit, her most recent work examines the links between health and environmental injustices, and more specifically the health and social impact of inequalities in exposure to environmental degradation. Her main areas of research are in France and India. She co-edited the book Ce que les injustices font à la santé (EAC, 2024).