The journal Détours aims to bring together a wide range of disciplinary approaches and research topics centred on the tension between ‘popular culture and high culture’.
The essential approach for any article proposal on the theme “Popularisation of knowledge?” must necessarily be one that traces a trajectory from the popular to the scholarly or from the scholarly to the popular, whilst always questioning established hierarchical models and frameworks of cultural, social and/or scientific legitimacy, in order to free discourse from all prejudice and to engage with lines of thought (some of which are necessarily still work in progress).
In this perspective, contributions involving co-authorship (as in research-action or research-creation approaches) will be encouraged in order to complement this movement with a reflection on the academic nature of university thought in relation to practice, and vice versa.
All cultural areas, all historical periods and all disciplinary fields are welcome, provided they contrast the ‘learned’ with the ‘dismissed’ and question the ways in which cultural realities are represented to different communities (from the ‘layperson’ to the ‘expert’).
Some examples of possible topics:
– movements of rehabilitation or those of ‘disgrace’ or ‘shelving’, particularly the effects of cultural trends and their cyclical nature,
– the relationship between written and oral memory,
– recognition of vernacular languages,
– the professional and scientific recognition of amateurism,
– the scientific nature of knowledge and discourse in the age of fake news, deepfakes and other pseudoscientific approaches,
– the accessibility of knowledge deemed confidential and/or expert through new tools (such as podcasts, social media and other media, TedX talks, etc.),
– effects of (re)appropriation, subversion, recycling, reuse and transfer of scholarly codes through popular culture (pop culture, etc.),
– genres and sub-genres (dark romance, etc.).
Proposals for articles (1,500 characters including spaces + a short bio-bibliography of approximately 200 words), in English or French, are due by June 1, 2026 and should be sent to:
Delphine.robicdiaz@univ-tours.fr
Authors will receive a response by 30 June, along with a style guide to assist with the writing of articles of between 20,000 and 35,000 characters, in English or French, due by November 1, 2026.
The articles will then undergo double-blind peer review, with a view to online publication in the first half of 2027.