Across academic disciplines, the use of anecdote has received little attention. This despite the fact that they punctuate our professional and social practices : they are the stuff of our writing, our teaching, and our conversations. Present in the many sources, data, and materials that sustain the humanities and social sciences, anecdotes are also often decisive in the choice of our research objects. The freedom of tone that characterizes anecdotes allows overlooked or undervalued subjects to emerge, reshaping disciplines and their objects of study. The rise of research focused on marginalized people, social groups, and issues owes much to a renewed interest in sources once deemed unreliable – reported speech, hearsay, gossip, or indeed anecdote.

Argument

Our attention is often captured by tangents and digressions. Within either the flow of a narrative or the coherence of an argument, the anecdote – “the brief story of a curious event” – stands out, sparks the imagination, surprises us and sets off trains of thought. For all its ability to focus attention or even to fix itself in memory, however, the anecdote is rarely the subject of analysis ; instead, researchers tend to seek to go beyond it, and focus on that towards which it gestures. No sooner does the anecdote emerge from the margins of discourse than it returns to its indistinct fringes.

Across academic disciplines, the use of anecdote has received little attention. This despite the fact that they punctuate our professional and social practices : they are the stuff of our writing, our teaching, and our conversations. Present in the many sources, data, and materials that sustain the humanities and social sciences, anecdotes are also often decisive in the choice of our research objects.

By examining the discreet yet fundamental role they play in our practices, we can distinguish two distinct modalities through which anecdotes convey meaning. The “regime of the anecdote” tends to repeat what is already known, reinforcing dominant positions and narratives : here the anecdote authorizes and upholds the established order, circulating small facts about familiar things, ones which are sometimes true, sometimes false. The “regime of the anecdotal”, by contrast, produces new, original, and hitherto unexplored material : facts which are minor and yet nonetheless true ; facts which are dismissed as negligible, irrelevant, or unimportant. It is in this field, indeed, that the etymological source of the word anecdote can be found. By abjecting both the anecdote and the anecdotal, disciplines and communities reaffirm their boundaries, and define or redefine what counts as knowledge.

And yet : epistemologies, methods, and research practices are changing. The most authorized of anecdotes now often sound stale, while the anecdotal is no longer merely anecdotal. The freedom of tone that characterizes anecdotes allows overlooked or undervalued subjects to emerge, reshaping disciplines and their objects of study. The rise of research focused on marginalized people, social groups, and issues owes much to a renewed interest in sources once deemed unreliable – reported speech, hearsay, gossip, or indeed anecdote. From the standpoint of writing and transmission, the use of anecdote functions almost like Barthes’s punctum : it calls forth emotion, memory, and intimacy, granting them space within scholarly discourse and thought.

This issue of Communications thus proposes to view anecdote and the anecdotal as full-fledged modes of intellectual and creative work – to trace their history and to explore their effects. We aim to highlight the role that these “short tales of curious events” play in renewing disciplinary approaches and boundaries.

This publication project builds on a two-year-long seminar series devoted to anecdote and its uses in art and art history, convened by Emmanuel Guy (Éducation Nationale/treize) and Déborah Laks (CNRS), and hosted by the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris.

For this call for papers, we particularly welcome proposals relating to the history and contemporary practices of non-Western art, as well as to the exact sciences or other fields in the humanities and social sciences : political science, history, philosophy, sociology, history of science, and education. We are interested in disciplinary historiographies that seem to have made a distinctive use of anecdote, for example as studies of migration (from political, historical, or sociological perspectives), philosophy of art, history of philosophy, and the sociology of artistic creation.

In this way, this issue aims to bring reflections first developed in the field of art and art history into dialogue with a broader inquiry into the epistemological, heuristic, and political potential of the stories we tell and the knowledge we share.

Submission guidelines

Proposals on this theme must be submitted by December 31, 2025, in the form of a summary of approximately 3,000 characters (Word document), accompanied by a short bibliography. Submissions must include the author’s name, professional affiliation, and email address, and be sent to revue-communications@ehess.fr with “Anecdotes” as the subject line. Proposals will undergo double-blind review, and authors will be notified no later than January 15, 2026.

Articles must be unpublished and preferably written in French (otherwise in English). Accepted articles (25,000 characters, including spaces) must be submitted by April 30, 2026, formatted according to the journal’s typographic guidelines (https://www.revuecommunications.fr/proposer-un-article/instructions-aux-auteurs/), and accompanied by a 5–6 line abstract in French, English, and Spanish, including the translated title and five keywords in all three languages.

Review Process

Proposals will undergo double-blind review, and authors will be notified no later than January 15, 2026.

Review process is available on the journal’s website : https://www.revue-communications.fr/en/proposing-an-article/review-process/

The Review Panel is composed of members of the Scientific Board and the Editorial Board as well as external experts.

Scientific Board

• Ramon Alvarado (Professor, Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, Mexico)
• Balveer Arora (Director, Centre for Multilevel Federalism, Institute of Social Sciences, India)
• Vincent Barras (Professor, University of Lausanne, Switzerland)
• Maurice Bloch (Professor, London School of Economics, United Kingdom)
• Manthia Diawara (Professor, New York University, United States)
• Carlo Ginzburg (Professor, Ecole Normale Superiore of Pisa, Italy)
• Angela Leung (Professor, Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Hong Kong)
• Olgaria Matos (Professor, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil)
• Masahiro Ogino (Professor, Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan)
• Serge Proulx (Professor, Université du Québec à Montréal, Québec)

Editorial Board

• Michèle Baussant (Research Professor, CEFRES/ISP, CNRS)
• André Burguière (Professor, CRH, EHESS)
• Claude Fischler (Research Professor, LAP/LACI, CNRS)
• Marie Glon (Associate Professor, CEAC, University of Lille)
• Christophe Granger (Associate Professor, CIAMS, Université Paris-Saclay)
• Claudine Haroche (Research Professor, LAP/LACI, CNRS)
• Sylvain Lesage (Associate Professor, IRHiS, University of Lille)
• Sabina Loriga (Professor, CRH, EHESS)
• Bernard Müller (Professor, Avignon art school/IRIS)
• Véronique Nahoum-Grappe (Researcher, LAP/LACI, EHESS)
• Bernard Paillard (Research Professor, TEMOS, CNRS)
• Alfredo Pena-Vega (Researcher, LAP/LACI, CNRS)
• Catherine Perron (Researcher, CERI, CNRS)
• Martyne Perrot (Researcher, LAP/LACI, CNRS)
• Monique Peyrière (Researcher, CPN, University of Évry Paris-Saclay)
• Thierry Pillon (Professor, University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne)
• Philippe Roussin (Research Professor, CRAL, CNRS)