Colloquium

Knowledge rarely comes from an isolated individual, but is instead the result of concerted work within an educated group with common objectives, as per the structure of an Academy, where conversation remains one of the foundations.

The knowledge allowing mastery and comprehension of the diegetic and extra-diegetic universe, it is by its learning that the protagonists as well as the readers seize their environment. Pushed to the extreme, it is embodied in magic and the mastery of its mysteries or, at the other end of the spectrum, in such a mastery of sciences that the latter appear to belong to the magical. The establishment of literacies specific to these communities, when they study magic or interplanetary travel, gives them access (mirroring our faculties) to the mechanics of these universes.

Thus, speculative fiction offer a great diversity of representation of these communities: very realistic, in the Problem with three bodies; disturbing, in A Deadly Education; while they are distinct castes in Divergent or La Passe-miroir.

I will present here the imbrications between the exogenous element to our reality and the class of scholars, looking first at the figures of the scholar and then at the institution itself.

Theories of the commons thinking about the general good through activist initiatives, and digital possibilities will also serve as a compass and theoretical tool to better understand the propositions and academic utopias/dystopias presented.

The large corpus convened will serve as a starting point to address the diversity of these representations and to identify lines of force. I will focus here only on the research aspect of these institutions, leaving aside the institutions presented only as places of teaching.