Abstract
Research in the humanities and social sciences (HSS), which is regularly asked the question of its "usefulness", has been massively mobilized in the first part of the year 2020, both by the media and institutions. It has shown itself to be highly responsive, adapting its schedules and objectives, and modifying its intervention formats (webinars, distance learning courses). It was much present, despite the inequalities generated by the lockdown, particularly in terms of gender. The aim of this work is to offer the reader an analysis mobilizing the work of the SHS as a whole. Without claiming to be exhaustive, it weaves the threads, through the questions it addresses, from one discipline to another, composing a whole in which the social sciences and humanities resonate with one another, deploy their complementarity, and create a common analysis. Its objective is to emphasize the existence of a scientific capital of the HSS as such, to address the various questions raised by the Covid-19 pandemic. Current HSS research on the pandemic, its political management, and its stakes, is not developed ex nihilo. While taking the measure of the specificity of the present times, it is based on a set of theoretical frameworks, methods and analyses elaborated in other contexts, remobilized, updated and enriched in the light of the issues associated with the Covid 19 pandemic. Moreover, this work aims at taking into account from the outset the global dimension of the pandemic, and not just the French situation. Thus, several national and even continental contexts are explored on one point or another and the global dimension of the pandemic is taken into account as such. Finally, this document also looks at the very way in which the humanities and social sciences were mobilized in France in the context of the Covid 19 pandemic, at the collaborative forms and multidisciplinary practices particularly adopted in the face of this pandemic. It is structured in five parts: the first deals with the way in which the HSS make the crisis a question and an object of knowledge (A - From the framing of the crisis in the public space to the crisis as an object of knowledge - the example of France). The second addresses a salient point of the analyses developed over the last few months, which consider the pandemic as a revealer, or even an amplifier of pre-existing issues (B). Then, the third part looks at the societies and governments confronted with the pandemic (C), in other words, the forms of crisis management by the political power, the mobilization of science and the exercise of power, as well as the measures taken and the attitudes of the populations with regard to these measures. The fourth part presents the way in which the time of the pandemic has been characterized by questions about the future, questions which in turn give rise to orientations for HSS research (D. Reinventing ourselves in times of pandemic). Finally, the fifth and last part invites the reader to discover how the HHS involved itself in times of pandemic, how they collaborated together and undertook to document the health crisis in the heat of the moment, while accepting to consider new questions, and adopt new methods under the effect of this crisis (E. When the crisis invites collaboration and reflection on the "transfer" of knowledge).