Subjects and concepts

The aim is to address both the construction of collective identities and the formation of social groups, and to understand the processes of individulisation throughout history through the concept of subjectivity, whilst also examining personal trajectories, lived experiences and the strategies individuals employ to navigate their place within society and across various networks. Archives, particularly when they form part of a narrative of the self – for example, through the practices of genealogy and ‘généanautie’ – can be viewed as an intermediary space between society and the individual, conducive to the individual’s self-affirmation and social construction.

Given that age and gender are both fields of research and conceptual tools for understanding the formation of subjectivities, this research brings together social history, cultural history and political history. Conducting this analysis over long periods naturally requires us to resist any teleological temptation, so that the social, political and cultural expressions of these emerging subjectivities, rooted in specific discursive contexts and particular socio-economic realities, can be explored in all their singularity and diversity. Thus, it is also possible to understand how, throughout history, processes of subjectivation – that is, the subject’s awareness of their own individuality – have enabled certain social, cultural and political movements to take shape, whether these be feminism, children’s rights, youth movements or LGBT organisations. All these movements are also characterised by their ability to forge their own relationship with archives and to devise specific ways of recording collective and individual traces, in terms of both the uses and the constitution of archival holdings and library collections, as well as in publishing. We also explore the paradoxes of subjectivation throughout modernity, between the emancipation of the subject and new forms of social discipline.