Récits, imaginaires collectifs et forme d'action protestataire. Une approche constructiviste de la contestation antiraciste

Cet article vise à repenser l'influence de la culture sur les phénomènes contestataires par le biais des récits sociaux et imaginaires collectifs. Les narrations collectives mettent à disposition un stock spécifique de ressources culturelles et symboliques, elles façonnent les identités des acteurs et, finalement, elles dessinent des opportunités discursives qui facilitent ou, au contraire, limitent l'engagement et l'expression politique des acteurs contestataires. En examinant l'action des organisations antiracistes et des acteurs qui se solidarisent au sort des migrants en France et en Suisse, nous verrons que les imaginaires de la nation et les récits collectifs de la citoyenneté nous offrent des outils conceptuels qui nous permettent de comprendre la présence de ces acteurs dans l'espace public, le répertoire d'action qu'ils mobilisent pour porter leurs revendications dans la sphère politique, mais aussi le contenu de leurs interventions publiques.

Variations régionales du recours aux soins: quelques problèmes méthodologiques. [Regional variations in health services: various methodological problems].

Many studies show strong variation of health consumption between regions, suggesting that theses variations are related to the uncertainty of medical practice or to other factors related to health services or patients attitude. However the statistical interpretation of these variations is far from easy: apart from usual and specific information bias, there are statistical problems when observing incidence of events like health care consumption: it is in fact a rare event, which is observed within small population, and among regions with unequal number of person. Therefore, most of the variation reported might be well explained by a purely statistical phenomenon. This paper presents some aspects of this variability for three common indicators of variation, and suggest the use of ad hoc simulation to get statistical criteria.

Regional and hemispheric determinants of language laterality: Implications for preoperative fMRI.

Language is typically a function of the left hemisphere but the right hemisphere is also essential in some healthy individuals and patients. This inter-subject variability necessitates the localization of language function, at the individual level, prior to neurosurgical intervention. Such assessments are typically made by comparing left and right hemisphere language function to determine "language lateralization" using clinical tests or fMRI. Here, we show that language function needs to be assessed at the region and hemisphere specific level, because laterality measures can be misleading. Using fMRI data from 82 healthy participants, we investigated the degree to which activation for a semantic word matching task was lateralized in 50 different brain regions and across the entire cortex. This revealed two novel findings. First, the degree to which language is lateralized across brain regions and between subjects was primarily driven by differences in right hemisphere activation rather than differences in left hemisphere activation. Second, we found that healthy subjects who have relatively high left lateralization in the angular gyrus also have relatively low left lateralization in the ventral precentral gyrus. These findings illustrate spatial heterogeneity in language lateralization that is lost when global laterality measures are considered. It is likely that the complex spatial variability we observed in healthy controls is more exaggerated in patients with brain damage. We therefore highlight the importance of investigating within hemisphere regional variations in fMRI activation, prior to neuro-surgical intervention, to determine how each hemisphere and each region contributes to language processing. Hum Brain Mapp, 2010. © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.