A territorial diagnosis, an evaluation, a master’s dissertation bear on living people, their practices, their words. When such a study claims to follow cultural rights, its method has to bring them to life, not merely describe them. I start again from what an inquiry is for John Dewey, I feed it with practices from cultural urban planning and ecology, and I draw from them eight workable steps, from the initial concern to the moment of giving back.
Inquiry rather than research
When John Dewey published his major book on logic in 1938, he chose as its central concept the word “inquiry”. His French translator, Gérard Deledalle, who published “Logique. La théorie de l’enquête” with the Presses universitaires de France in 1967, explains that he set aside the word “recherche” (research) because it evokes too strongly the experimental technique of laboratories, which in his view is a particular case of inquiry and not its model. This choice of vocabulary carries a fundamental idea. For Dewey, inquiry begins when a person finds themselves in an indeterminate, troubled situation that stands in their way, and it consists in transforming that situation into a determinate one, in which action becomes possible again. Whoever inquires does not look down on the situation from above; they are part of it. And inquiry does not belong to scholars: the gardener facing a plant that is withering, the team facing a project that is stalling, inquire in the full sense of the word. In the article John Dewey : an inspirer of cultural rights ? I presented the kinship between this philosophy and cultural democracy.
Dewey had given inquiry its political dimension eleven years earlier, in “The Public and Its Problems” (1927). A public, he writes there, does not exist in advance; it forms when people realise that an action of which they are not the authors has consequences for their lives, and when they begin to talk about it, to search together for where the trouble comes from and how to answer it. Against Walter Lippmann, who wanted to entrust common affairs to experts, Dewey argues, in his chapter on method, that the man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied. Joëlle Zask, his French translator, sums up this position by speaking of the public as a community of inquirers. I retain three things from this:
- an inquiry begins with a trouble that is felt, and not with a question asked from an office;
- the people whom the situation affects lead it, with the possible help of specialists, and not the other way round;
- what has been learned is brought back to the situation in order to transform it, failing which what took place was a description, not an inquiry.
To Dewey I add a distinction of my own, between the expert and the intellectual. The expert has a commissioning party, and cannot call it into question: the object is given to them, their conclusions have to fit within what the commissioner is able to hear, and the bias is structural, whatever the honesty of the person. The intellectual, by contrast, chooses their object and answers for their conclusions before anyone who wishes to discuss them. Those who inquire for themselves, a gardener, an inhabitant, a team, inquire in a direction that matters to them, which gives them other biases, attachment, anger, fear, hope. But those biases are of a very different kind: they can be named, because they are their own, whereas the expert has to keep quiet about theirs. In the article The Simulacrum of Presence I argued for an assumed subjectivity rather than a façade of objectivity; inquiry led by the people concerned is its collective form.
This idea also has a history in France, tied to the place where the symposium “Transformations of cultural policy” was held, at Cerisy, from 18 to 24 June 2026, from which I drew the lexicon Careful, it’s slippery and several of whose contributions feed this article. Paul Desjardins, the founder of the Décades de Pontigny of which Cerisy is the heir, opened in 1913 the school of Commune culture, intended for adults already at work, with no diploma required. One learned there through contact with the real and through direct inquiry, by going to question those who practise a trade, guided not by professors but by “conductors of studies”. The war put an end to the experiment after a single year. I recall it because Desjardins already held that a common culture is built by exploring the world together, and not by making a culture held by a few flow down towards the people.
The word inquiry (or survey, in French “enquête” covers both) is used today for three things which, in Dewey’s sense, are not inquiries, or not yet:
- The expert’s diagnosis. Someone comes from outside to observe, measure and conclude, then leaves. The trouble is not that of the people but that of the commissioner, and the situation remains the same afterwards as before, with one more document.
- The questionnaire and the opinion poll. In the article Are Polls and Surveys Objective ? I showed how far the questions are decided elsewhere and how far those who write them thereby steer the answers, and in the article Giving Ourselves Permission to Create I recalled, drawing on Dewey and Harold Garfinkel, that a piece of data does not exist outside the process by which it is produced.
- The collection of good practices. It gathers examples deemed transferable, whereas transfer requires a work of translation that the fact sheet leaves out, as we shall see further on.
These three forms have their uses, and they can be employed within an inquiry as tools among others, on condition that they do not stand in for it.
The people concerned are already analysts
In classical sociology, analysis was the researcher’s alone: people were questioned, then their answers were interpreted from a body of knowledge they did not share. Against this stance Harold Garfinkel built ethnomethodology, set out in “Studies in Ethnomethodology” (1967). He refuses there to regard the members of a society as passive executors of rules that would escape them. People constantly deploy fine and largely tacit methods to produce their social situations and make them intelligible, and the researcher’s work consists in describing those methods, instead of imposing their own on lives they know less well than those who live them.
The anthropologist Tim Ingold extends this movement when he defines his discipline as “philosophy with the people in”. In “Anthropology and/as Education” (Routledge, 2018), he opposes to the transmission of content an education understood as attention paid to the world and to others, and in a 2014 article with a deliberately blunt title, “That’s enough about ethnography!”, he distinguishes ethnography, which describes people in order to report their world to others, from anthropology, which learns with them. To inquire with someone, in these terms, is to stand beside them, to look at what they are looking at, and to let what they know shift what one thought one knew, rather than to collect their words in order to analyse them later without them.
This position meets an observation I often make: cultural facts exist with or without cultural policies, with or without funding. People sing, film, dance, tell their stories, pass things on, within instituted frameworks or outside any framework at all. The people who live these practices are their first analysts, in Garfinkel’s sense. The urban planner Maud Le Floc’h, founder of POLAU, the arts and urban planning centre, speaks of a permanent knitting together of expert knowledge, sensitive knowledge and situated knowledge, that of specialists, that of artists and that of the people who inhabit a place, and she sees in the separation of the sensitive from the technical, on which a good part of French cultural policy was founded, what now has to be undone. An inquiry consistent with cultural rights therefore starts from lived situations and from the traces that people keep of them or agree to produce, and those who lead it elaborate with these people, rather than about them.
Yet the questionnaire remains, by far, the most widespread tool. We produce them all the time, on every subject, the cultural practices of a territory, satisfaction after a show, the needs of a network, a master’s dissertation, and we call that an inquiry. I propose asking three questions of each of them:
- Is it an inquiry? In Dewey’s sense, only if a trouble lies at the origin of the questions and if the answers return to the situation to transform it. A questionnaire sent out because a funding scheme requires it, processed, summarised in a report, meets neither of these conditions.
- What place as contributors do we give the people questioned? In most cases, none: they are sources. They did not write the questions, they will not see the other answers, they will not take part in what is drawn from them. Their words are extracted, and then belong to others.
- What does this then produce for their capacity to act? Most often nothing, and sometimes less than nothing. Answering questionnaires whose effect one never sees teaches that speaking is useless, and that is a lesson people remember.
I do not conclude that the questionnaire should be abandoned. It allows one to see in a certain way, on a large scale, and we shall see further on that a questionnaire nobody knew what to do with nevertheless brought to light, in a rural area, a practice from which everything else started again. But this way of seeing has to be chosen knowingly, not out of habit, and if it is used within an inquiry, the people questioned must be able to contribute to writing the questions, to read the results and to discuss their use. Otherwise it is an extraction, and the word inquiry serves as its dressing.
The stone in the shoe
Practitioners of ecology and cultural urban planning have led me to revisit the definition of inquiry on a point that Dewey leaves in shadow, the point of departure. Bruno Latour proposed in “Down to Earth” (“Où atterrir ?”, 2017) an exercise I presented in the article Building Co-Resilience, describing one’s terrain of life, that is, taking stock of what we depend on to subsist and of who depends on us. Latour and those who ran the “Où atterrir ?” workshops with him then gave this exercise the form of a compass, a diagram with two axes that each person fills in from their own place, heritage on one side and the future on the other, allies on one side and threats on the other, placing entities the closer to oneself the more hold one has on them.
Élisabeth Taudière, of Territoires pionniers, the Maison de l’architecture of Normandy, trained in this tool in 2024 and tells the inquiry she conducts with it as a story in four scenes. She begins with her water bill, in Caen, where she reads in large letters that her tap water is of mediocre quality, owing to the presence of metabolites. From this first entity, on which she has no hold, she goes back to the question of where the water comes from, to the syndicate that draws it from the Orne, to the three management schemes that share the river basin and whose periods of application have run out, then to the geology that explains this division, plain, bocage, plain, and to the ways of inhabiting that follow from it. She explains why this story is her own:
“It starts from a concern that is personal and that calls on us, because it is the stone in the shoe, it is something that gnaws at us from the inside and that is what is going to drive commitment. That is why it is a first-person story.”
Élisabeth Taudière, contribution to the symposium “Transformations of cultural policy”, Cerisy, 20 June 2026, translated from the French.
The project Nous sommes Orne (We are Orne) was born from there, together with the river basin’s permanent centres for environmental initiatives. Its first achievement was a map of the river basin, which did not exist in a form readable by the public, and which is now to be found in classrooms, researchers’ offices and bars; the second, an almanac composed by the landscape designer Clémence Mathieu from workshops held in schools, a secondary school, a betting bar in Briouze, in which one finds the inhabitants’ practices of the territory and fictions written from the sources, the meanders and the estuary. I retain two things from this account for method:
- the inquiry starts from a trouble experienced by someone, and this trouble, put into words in the first person, is already knowledge about the situation;
- the people among whom one went to inquire receive in return the objects produced, a map, an almanac, and they use them without those who made them being there.
For this I retained in the lexicon the word “concernment”, which comes from work on collective inquiry and urban planning in Latour’s wake. Whereas in a consultation one starts from a project already tied up, ticks a regulatory box and gathers opinions, concernment means going to find people in what already touches them, starting from their stories and their uses, and giving them a hold on the decision. Maud Le Floc’h puts it from the experience of planning operations, where professionals say that their problem is people, whose legal appeals they fear above all:
“Collective inquiry, inquiring collectively, is a magnificent tool for urban planning, a magnificent tool for concerning, and here again the term is Latour’s, the greatest number. [...] Collective, because the challenges of transition, the challenges of transforming territories, if they are not carried by everyone, it won’t work. [...] It is a matter of taking charge of these subjects collectively. And to take charge of them well, one may as well go back one phase, and inquire together.”
Maud Le Floc’h, contribution to the symposium “Transformations of cultural policy”, Cerisy, 20 June 2026, translated from the French.
A second shift concerns the entities the inquiry takes into account. The Parliament of the Loire, which POLAU has been running since 2019, starts from Bruno Latour’s Parliament of Things, in which non-human entities have the right to be represented in the bodies that decide their fate. The first move was a game: let’s say we set up a parliamentary commission of inquiry, and we would hear jurists, ecologists, fishers, artists, on what the river asks for. Maud Le Floc’h specifies that granting the river legal personality is not what interests her most; she works on what she calls the landing of the inquiry in territorial planning, development schemes, water quality, solidarity between upstream and downstream, urban bathing, everyday subjects that translate into decisions. In the lexicon I proposed moving from the word “territory”, which is carved up and appropriated, to the word “milieu”, that of which we are part. Cultural rights are the rights of persons, and they do not extend to the river. But the dignity of the people who inhabit a river basin depends on the water they drink, and one cannot, if one wishes to respect them, leave the water outside the frame. Inquiring within a milieu obliges one to ask who is missing around the table, including among what does not speak.
Scouting before diagnosing
Maud Le Floc’h describes the classic chain of a planning operation, diagnosis, definition, programming, design, construction, delivery, spread over five to ten years. The cultural approach was most often brought in at the very end, at the inauguration, what Pascal Le Brun-Cordier calls the cherry on the cake. She proposes bringing it in at the very beginning, at the diagnosis phase, which she prefers to call scouting (“repérage”):
“What are artists going to scout out when they put their own work into public space? They are going to look for the invisible, they are going to look for stories, they are going to look for what is buried, they are going to look for the discarded, they are going to look for the dirty, they are going to look for the unfit, they are going to look for values that are not necessarily always indicated in a classic diagnosis. Then, they are going to address people.”
Maud Le Floc’h, contribution to the symposium “Transformations of cultural policy”, Cerisy, 20 June 2026, translated from the French.
The first scheme she designed, in 2003, was in fact called Mission Repérage, one elected official, one artist: in thirteen towns, a mayor or deputy mayor and an artist spend twelve hours together, in the morning the artist looks at the town, in the afternoon the elected official shows it to them, they walk as a pair, without camera or recording. Strict rules, for an encounter nothing else would have produced. This is what I called in the lexicon a protocol, a precise frame that makes possible what could not be ordered directly.
Scouting is not enough, because a well-described problem often remains a problem posed from the very place that produced it. Maud Le Floc’h refers here to the Palo Alto school and to what Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland and Richard Fisch called second-order change in “Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution” (1974). They describe there how most attempted solutions consist in “more of the same”, that is, in an increased effort within the frame in which the problem took shape, and how, by staying within that frame, one maintains the problem one wanted to solve. Second-order change consists in stepping out of the frame, often through a paradoxical move or an inversion, what they call reframing. The Parliament of the Loire belongs to this move, since by making the river speak in a fictional parliamentary chamber, its inquirers no longer pose the question of riverbank development from the planner’s side but from the side of what is being developed. I called this in the lexicon the step aside, and noted that it is not always well received, because it touches on power and on the place from which one speaks. For an inquiry, I draw from this that fiction, the inversion of roles, the hearing of what does not speak, are tools for reformulating the initial question, on a par with the interview or documentary analysis. I described a more modest tool of this kind in the article The moving debate revisited.
The trace that can be mobilised
The people who take part in an inquiry designed in this way take something away from it, independently of its scholarly results. Taking part in formulating the questions, examining the traces, writing the conclusions gives words and tools that each person can then mobilise again in their own professional or civic life. I have experienced this in several ways. In the process I recounted in the article Research-action « Image Education 2.1 », the professionals took part in the very elaboration of what was being studied. In the article An advocacy document written by twelve people in one afternoon I described a co-writing workshop whose participants left with a text they had built together and could each reuse on their own. And for the Collaborative assessment of screen literacy education in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, carried out with ALCA in 2025-2026, some twenty professionals worked for four months around a contribution platform and wrote together a publication in eight chapters; the document counts less than the network that formed in writing it.
The opposite experience exists too, and everyone has had it: consultative arrangements where a great deal is said, in groups, with sticky notes, and of which nothing remains but promised syntheses, sometimes never received, in any case never usable by the people themselves. Something is indeed produced there, discussion, shared reflection, and that product has its value. But the people take nothing away that they could reuse, and the words gathered serve a document that will live its life without them. Marielle Stinès, of the DRAC Normandie, the regional cultural affairs directorate, recounted the case of a community of municipalities in the Perche which, engaged in a regional cultural rights scheme beginning with a diagnosis, had wanted to conduct the inquiry itself rather than entrust it to a consultancy. It had sent a questionnaire to the inhabitants and received 285 answers, which is a lot for a mailing of this kind, then, the inquiry over, it had not known what to do with them, and the regional funding earmarked for what followed had remained untouched. An eight-week residency, in which artists were to gather and give back in a sensitive form the inhabitants’ words, had met a similar fate, since the elected officials, as she tells it, had retained the presence of the artists and the animation they created more than what the inhabitants had said. What was missing, in both cases, was the building, together with the local authority, of the use that would be made of these words. Pascale Labout presented the project Des chemins de culture (Paths of culture), for which she and Marielle Stinès started again from the one thing everyone had retained from the answers to the questionnaire, the widespread practice of hiking, to make it the thread of a process both participatory and artistic. Marielle Stinès borrowed from the cultural centres of Wallonia, whose decree of 21 November 2013 requires every cultural action project to rest on a “shared analysis of the territory”, an expression I find apt:
“The idea was to warm up the cold data of diagnoses with more embodied data that would come from the inhabitants themselves.”
Marielle Stinès, contribution to the symposium “Transformations of cultural policy”, Cerisy, 21 June 2026, translated from the French.
The criterion I propose comes down to one question to be asked from the design stage: at the end of the process, what will the people who took part in it take away, that they can use without us? To this I add two words from the lexicon:
- collecting (“collectage”), that of ethnomusicologists such as Jean-Claude Lemenuel, which presupposes time, trust, acceptance by those whose home one enters, and the principle that one does not cross a territory where one has not been welcomed;
- giving back (“restitution”), which for me bears on the process more than on the result. Giving back the path travelled, with the traces kept of it, allows people to recognise themselves in what was elaborated and to evaluate their own journey, whereas, if only the result is given back, one feels obliged to embellish it so that it flatters everyone.
Without giving back, inquiry becomes extraction again.
Eight steps for inquiring with people
I propose to translate all this into steps that can be kept to in a diagnosis commissioned by a local authority as well as in a master’s dissertation, with the means one has:
- Write your own concern before writing the question. One page in the first person, before any choice of field or method, saying what troubles me in this situation, what I depend on and who depends on me. A student writes it before choosing her subject; an agency writes it before answering a commission, and asks the commissioner to do the same. This page is the starting compass, and one returns to it at the end to measure what has moved.
- Put the commission’s question up for discussion before dealing with it. The first session with the people concerned serves not to ask them questions but to submit to them the one we were asked: is it the right one, and if not, where is the real one? One accepts that it changes. The reformulation of the object, documented, is already a result of the inquiry, often the most useful.
- Take stock of the entities, human and non-human. On the model of the compass, place with the group everything that counts in the situation, people and institutions, but also the river, the building, the budget line, the regulation, noting what one has a hold on and what one does not. One then sees who is missing, and goes to find the absent before going any further.
- Scout before diagnosing, on foot. Before any questionnaire, a scouting phase under a protocol: two people, a set duration, one looks and the other shows, without recording, then one writes down what was seen. An artist, when one can be involved, looks for what the boxes do not provide for. For a dissertation, one gains by replacing the interview in a room with the interview conducted while walking, in the places being talked about.
- Give yourself a step aside. At least once in the process, a fiction or an inversion by which one shifts the frame: hearing what does not speak, asking each person to speak from another’s place, holding a moving debate on the initial question. One expects from it not an answer but a reframing, in Watzlawick’s sense, which makes visible what was taken for granted in the initial frame.
- Collect with people, and leave them the traces. At each meeting, the participants make a trace, a photograph, a recorded sentence, an annotated map, and this trace stays with them, on a medium they can consult and add to, a shared platform or a simple shared folder. The sticky note that leaves in the facilitator’s bag is the counter-model. One asks permission to keep, as in collecting, and says what will be done with it.
- Write with, not after. Conclusions are written in session, in the presence of the people, through co-writing workshops of which I gave, in the article on the advocacy document written by twelve people, a form workable in one afternoon. The final text bears the names of those who wrote it. For a dissertation or a thesis, at least one chapter can be elaborated in this way, and the way it was done forms part of the method set out.
- Put the giving back on the calendar and in the budget before starting. The date of the return to the people is set at the time of the commission, not at the end, because it is the first thing sacrificed when time runs short. What is given back there is the process, with its traces, in a shared language, to the people first and to the commissioner second. And one writes, for those who might want to take up the approach elsewhere, what is transferable in it as a motif to be translated, not as a model to be copied.
Being accountable to the people as much as to the commissioner
These steps hold for a student designing her dissertation as for an agency answering a commission, and there is no reason to set rigour against participation in them. An inquiry conducted with people demands more rigour, not less: situations have to be documented, traces kept, the way conclusions emerge from them made explicit, and who wrote what stated. This rigour also concerns those to whom one is accountable. Jean-Louis Bancel, president of the Cerisy symposia, proposed with regard to public money the word accountability (“redevabilité”), giving an account of one’s mandate to those on whose behalf one acts, which is not the same thing as producing an impact study. When one has conducted an inquiry with people, one is accountable to them at the same time as to the commissioner, and that is another way of answering for public money.
Being accountable does not mean effacing oneself, and I experienced this on my film Droit à la parole ! (The right to speak), a documentary on the democratic organisation of a progressive school. I conducted the editing iteratively with the film’s commissioners, over six months, showing them each successive state. What I did not dare to do at the outset, bring my own point of view into the film, became possible because each version was discussed, and I took my place far better than I would have done alone. The expert cuts their words to the measure of what their commissioner can hear; whoever gives an account along the way discovers what their commissioner can hear, and it is often more than they believed. Then we showed the film to all the people who appear in it, children and adults, before any screening. We had the image rights authorisations; it was not a question of law but of ethics, the same as that of giving back in an inquiry, so that people agree with what is said about them before it circulates without them.
In the article Transmitting cultural rights : a question of coherence I argued that the way one transmits is part of the message. The same requirement holds for the way one studies. When those who inquire put into practice, in the very making of their work, the dignity, the participation and the recognition of persons, they provide practical proof of what their conclusions will then be able to affirm.
