The aim of the 2015 annual Cermes3 conference will be to shed new light on the transformations of occupational health in the past decades. Social scientists, together with trade unionists, health practitioners and activists of various kinds, have long drawn attention on the changes in working conditions since the “post-­Fordist turn” of the 1970s. Both the transformations of work per se (characterized by an increasing reliance on technology, the reorganization of production processes, the growth of the tertiary sector…) and the rise of new styles of management, all in an increasingly globalized word, have been explored at great length. The main purpose of the conference will be to complement these efforts by shifting attention towards another factor of transformation (external to occupational changes, this time), namely the rise of environmental health in the industrialized world, in the past fifty years or so. Coming of age at a time when the management of risk was becoming the lynchpin of public health in general, this new field of expertise proved a testing
ground for new experimental and statistical approaches as much as regulatory policies.

The conference will provide the opportunity to discuss approaches from a wide range of disciplines, from history, to anthropology, to sociology and political science… Three kinds of different, yet partially connected, questions will be of special interest: the identification and assessment of risk factors; differences and similarities in regard to health regulation between the fields of occupational and environmental health; and, more broadly, the politics of health problems arising in and/or out of the workplace.

The presentations will be given either in English or in French.