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Cet article analyse la circulation du mot avatar, de sa première importation européenne à la fin du XVIIe siècle à ses réinterprétations dans la littérature romantique et populaire éprise d'exotisme du XIXe siècle, puis du vocabulaire des nouvelles cultures du numérique aux images d'un cinéma hollywoodien mondialisé. Chaque recyclage du mot et de ses usages, révèle les peurs et les rêves d'un monde occidental littéralement désorienté, c'est-à-dire cherchant ses repères, sinon ses croyances, vers l'Orient ou l'ailleurs.

Sustainable urban development and local democracy – tacit, multipolar areas of transactions.
This contribution examines the repertoire of sustainable urban development from the point of view of local democracy, which is often put forward as the cement between the environmental, economic, social and cultural domains of "sustainable" public action, in particular through inviting citizen participation. Based on the expectations, but also the "expectations of expectations" of all parties, without a sole hierarchical principle, these issues are upheld through tacit transactions between elected representatives and the technical and administrative services of local authorities, with the citizen in the background. The transactions are overlapped with multi-polar transactions with the "civil society" and inhabitants, within the frame of participatory instruments set up as centres of intermediation. Due to this transactional approach, some distance can therefore be taken in relation to the usual discourse on the "sustainable town".

From the border to the border area : some proposals for a sociological analysis.
This contribution returns both to the notion of border and how it is understood in research in human and social sciences through a threefold examination. It starts by examining the polysemy of borders, based on empirical elements with regard to the border regions of eastern France and adjacent areas in neighbouring countries, more broadly set in correlation with contributions from literature. This epistemological approach is continued in the second part of the article which explains how the border as a subject of research is moving towards the border area over a long-term scale, from classical geopolitics to recent analyses of crossborder co-operation, which may be pragmatic or more critical, not forgetting functionalist approaches to borders. This analysis sets the stakes of acknowledging the substantiality of borders in order to understand the processes and the stakeholders. A third section specifically examines the conceptualisation of the border area, within a dialectic of spatial and social aspects with all due regard to a twofold internal (inter-world) and external (original environment) dynamic. The result is the full sweep of how we consider borders in social sciences as a framework, an object and an analyser, especially in relation with the changes in the scale of public action in Europe.

Cet article interroge les processus de construction de l'oubli dans leurs liens directs avec les dynamiques mémorielles, c'est-à-dire la tension entre effacement et conservation, à travers le cas du Reichsland
(Terre d'Empire) d'Alsace-Lorraine. Il questionne plus précisément les politiques de valorisation/dévalorisation de ressources mémorielles en mobilisant deux entrées corrélées : la mémoire collective et les identités nationales. À partir de quelques épisodes saillants, situés en particulier au début du XXe siècle, l'oubli s'analyse comme un processus sélectif et dynamique, qui ne s'oppose pas terme à terme mais s'accompagne de retours en mémoire possibles, fluctuants en fonction de configurations jamais totalement stabilisées et d'acteurs-porteurs en concurrence, ce qui permet d'éclairer l'enjeu plus large des processus territoriaux de production et de revendications identitaires.

The foreigner in the world of trade unions. Some thoughts based on border areas

The way in which trade unions integrate foreign workers has not been studied in depth and often represents a blind spot in terms of the focus of social movements on the one hand, and approaches to migration and how they are handled by public action on the other hand. This text ponders the issue taking into account the border areas in Europe based on north-east France. These unique economic areas carry an identity and political dimension which are currently becoming denser, based on cross-border migrations for work purposes and the transnational social relations that are formed on both sides of the border. In these semi-institutionalised areas, we look in particular at the itineraries of trade union workers in charge of crossborder issues, who appear as stakeholder intermediaries with mixed characteristics. The issue of language fluency and intercultural practice is particularly pertinent when encountering the other in terms of the dialectics of near and far as introduced by Georg Simmel around the figure of the foreigner, incarnated by this pendulum migrant, the crossborder worker, between foreignness and strangeness.