Overview of Appropriate Technology Research Organizations in France

The purpose of this paper is to introduce representative appropriate technology research organizations operating in France. Among them, we would like to investigate and introduce five institutions that have acquired a lot of experience due to their long history. Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) is a government-funded institution that strengthens science and technology infrastructure in Africa and overseas territories with the aim of supporting and educating science communities in developing countries, and conducts collaborative research with more diverse developing countries. Antenna France is an NGO organization whose main activity is to improve malnutrition in Africa. Ingénieurs sans frontiers is an NGO organization that sets sustainable development as the main goal of the association's activities and leads various activities such as education. Terre & Humanism is an NGO organization that practices ecological agriculture and carries out a social change movement urging to respect life and land, and to constitute an alternative society. Humanitarian Design Bureau is a corporation concept company that mainly carries out R&D for environmentally friendly products necessary for NGO activities.

Violent Compassions: Humanitarian Design and the Politics of Borders

Based on a critical analysis of the two notions of “crisis” and “compassion,” this article outlines and problematizes the increasing engagement of design practices with refugees and vulnerable communities on the move. By contextualizing different historical and contemporary humanitarian design examples in an analysis of current European border politics, the article questions the ways in which designing in the aftermath of the so-called “refugee crisis” has been mobilized without due consideration of what types of politics it produces and what types of politics it eventually ignores. It suggests that designers instead need to develop a more political understanding of the current border regime that produces and regulates refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants worldwide and to think of practices that support the struggles of racialized people on the move in transgressing and questioning the borders.

Search for methodological benchmarks in humanitarian studies in the context of artistic pedagogy

The article states that post-neoclassical rationalism, which is approved, not only significantly expands, but also complicates the worldview of a modern person, changes his outlook positions, causing the need to develop new methodological approaches and value-purpose objects in scientific knowledge. Today there was a need to rethink the issue of methodological benchmarks in the humanities research, which is actualized by the leading role of humanitarian knowledge in the socio-cultural development of modern society. To study this issue, the following research methods are used: analytical-synthetic, inductive-deductive and generalized, and modelling ones. On the basis of scientific reflection, the essence of methodological approaches in the humanities research, which are diversified and acquire new meaningful characteristics in the conditions of changing the paradigm of humanitarian knowledge, is considered. The theoretical and methodological positions in relation to the value dominant in humanitarian knowledge, which is oriented towards subjectivity and existentialism and provides in-depth reflection on artistic phenomena, are singled out. It is noted that in the humanitarian methodology the following research methods are found: ideographic method (research of individuals, events), methods of hermeneutics (interpretation of meaningful personal actions), qualitative analysis (understanding of the phenomenon, and not its calculation), method of phenomenology (knowledge of the causes and essence of artistic educational phenomena), methods of self-understanding, allowing to understand subjectity and spirituality of a person, humanitarian expertise, humanitarian design, existential dialogues, etc. The article outlines promising vectors of the epistemological environment of artistic pedagogy, which serve as the basis for developing new scientific strategies at the methodological, theoretical and methodical levels.