Senior scientist: Emeritus professor Yorghos Remvikos

Yorghos Remvikos is a transdisciplinary scientist, with an initial training and PhD in biology, and Professor Emeritus at Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, where he was a full member of CEARC, he is now associated to tis research center. His work has long addressed environmental health, risk, complexity and the relationships between science and society. More broadly, he has been interested in what happens when problems exceed the categories and boundaries through which science conventionally approaches them.

Yorghos contributed to PREFER in particular through its conceptual and transdisciplinary reflections, and was an important interlocutor in the development of the Colombian fieldwork. His work has encouraged a critical examination of what is meant by “risk”, and of the limitations of approaches that treat risks primarily as objects to be identified, measured and managed from outside. In his writing on transdisciplinarity, he argues that crossing disciplinary boundaries and opening research to other forms of knowledge is not only an epistemological or methodological choice, but also an ethical one: it raises questions about the responsibility of science towards society.

This perspective resonates strongly with PREFER’s attempt to approach terminal situations through the experiences, knowledge and interpretations of those who live them. His contribution to the project was therefore less a matter of adding another disciplinary perspective than of helping to question the conditions under which different forms of knowledge can meet, and what responsibilities follow from doing so.