Béatrice Galinon-Mélénec


Béatrice Galinon-Mélénec is emeritus professor in Communication Studies, specializing in the fields of anthropology of communication and the analysis of the non-verbal dimension of interpersonal communication situations. Her approach to the interpretation of signs is based on the new wave of semiotics, known as anthroposemiotics where embodied semiotics takes a central position.

Biography

Professor Galinon-Mélénec studied Economics at Toulouse, obtaining a doctorate from the University of Paris V-Sorbonne University of Sorbonne in Education Sciences in 1988 under the supervision of the sociologist, Gabriel Langouët. She was appointed Associate Professor at the Institut des Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication in 1989 at the University of Bordeaux-Montaigne University of Bordeaux, and in 2002 became a University Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at University of Le Havre, at Le Havre's Institute of Technology.
At Bordeaux, she contributed to the launch in 1992, then to the development of the journal Communication & Organisation. She set up the CDHET , a research group which in 2000 opened up to interdisciplinary and inter-university research into the relationship between animal behavior and human behavior. Since 2008, she has been a permanent member of the joint research unit of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique CNRS-IDEES 6266 at Normandie Université, where she supervises the Human Trace programme.
In 2011, she founded the International Research Group: Human Traces. Since 2014, a network of researchers from various scientific backgrounds has been working on traces as part of the e. laboratory on Human Trace Complex System Digital Campus UNESCO which she founded.
Since 2011, she has directed the Homme Trace series for CNRS éditions. This is a collection of works regularly publishing articles by research scientists contributing to the emergence of “The new French school of thinking with respect to trace”

Research work

Deconstruction of the concept of "trace"

Béatrice Galinon-Mélénec denounces the simplification of the use of the notion of trace which, contrary to appearances, needs to be analyzed in all its complexity. In her publications, she unveils the processes at work in human interpretation of the trace and, in line with the works of Jacques Derrida, encourages scientists who are concerned with epistemology to proceed with a systematic "deconstruction" of the term. In order to communicate more effectively, she describes the different uses of the term "trace" in plain language, shows that the "trace does not speak", that it is human beings who interpret a part of reality, calling it trace in terms of semiotic dynamics issuing from their relationship that is aware of the reality of their history. She reveals to the wider public, therefore, the existence of “the making of the trace”, which includes the processes which lead to the perception and interpretation of the trace.

Sign-Traces, relational embodied semiotics, anthroposemiotics

With the observation that everything that is potentially visible cannot necessarily be seen, Béatrice Galinon-Mélénec starts from the hypothesis that signs only appear to individuals who are predisposed to receive them; this depends on their body-traces, i.e. a body in which is recorded every consequence of the individuals' interactions with the environments they have passed through over time. For the author, a human being’s body-trace, possesses a plasticity which is the result of the interactions with the surroundings in which he/she lives
The interactions of a body with its surroundings, being specific to each individual, the resulting body-trace is recorded in a difference, which modulates the reception of what is perceptible. To signify that the perception and interpretation of the sign are the consequences, the author suggests the term sign-trace. The interpretation that each human makes of the real arises from anthroposemiotics in which the signs appear as the result of an interaction between an individual’s body-trace and reality. This is assumed to exist in itself and is only accessible to humans through their body and a human’s interpretation can therefore only be an "anthropo-centred reality”.
“Relational embodied semiotics”, which analyzes bodies’ interaction of sign-traces, has been used by researchers or professionals to analyze interpersonal communication situations where the body is present. In this context, the interpretation of signs emitted by bodies appears as if recorded in a systemic dynamic linking the body-trace of the interpreted and the body-trace of the interpretant within a complex where bodies in co-presence are moved by permanent interactions of traces.
This approach finds its applications in various domains – internal business communication, recruitment, doctor-patient relationships – and puts into perspective the biases introduced by remote communication.

Ichnos-Anthropos (Human-Trace) at the heart of general ichnology

The human being is a human trace whose body traces carry the “consequence-traces” of interactions of inside-outside dualism. According to the author, body-trace and environment-trace have been retro-acting in a systemic dynamic since the beginning of humanity, which explains the co-evolution of species and the environment which she analyzes using her "theory of General Ichnology". She demonstrates the interest of her applications by analyzing dangerous situations experienced by her contemporaries in the context of the digital society which she analyzes using her "theory of General Ichnology" and the health crisis of 2020.
The interpretation that the Ichnos-Anthropos makes of the real comes from anthroposemiotics, where signs appear as the result of an interaction between the body-trace of Ichnos-Anthropos and the reality-trace of the world. With the anthropological Human-Trace paradigm, Béatrice Galinon-Mélénec sets the figurative stage of homo from any era whose body carries traces of the past and whose present relationship with the world participates permanently in the production of a future integrating the "consequence-traces" of his present actions. As the "Human-Trace" term was circulated and appropriated by other authors, it lost the paradigmatic dimension initially sought by the author. The effect of this being a preference for the Greek translation of "Ichnos-Anthropos" for instances referring to it in the strict sense of the paradigm.

Influence

There has been a growing interest in the terms "human trace", "body-trace" and "sign-trace". Nevertheless, if reference is made to certain indexing tools like Google Scholar, citations lead us to conclude that their uses in French articles in the humanities between 2008-2018 were more often linked to the evocative power of the words that form them than the systemic, dynamic and multi-scale perspective that they encompass for their author. The traces of digital consultations of the works and publications reveal a 60% readership in academia and various geographical horizons: The United States, Canada, Brazil, The United Kingdom, Italy, Romania, Spain, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, India, The Philippines, Turkey, Mauritius, Burkina Faso, Cameroun, Gabon, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger, Switzerland).
In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, observations of the consequence-traces of human confinement on the drop in pollution, widens the author’s influence which had repeatedly warned about the pragmatic interest of the ecosystem present in the Human-Trace paradigm. The modelling of the semiotic emergence of the "sign-trace" via the "body-trace" – which highlights the specific relationship between a human-trace in constant evolution and a reality-trace constantly evolutionary – acts as a support to psychological, sociological, cognitive and ecological analysis of the observations.

Main publications

In French