Asbestos has become a thing of the past. The subject of social struggles in the 1970s, expert battles in the following decade, then media scandals at the end of the 20th century (Henry, 2007), asbestos was for a long time approached in reassuring terms. The fiction maintained by industrialists of a “controlled use” of these fibers was then replaced by the belief that banning laws could settle the issue once and for all. A number of studies in environmental history and the sociology of science have already shown how, in the case of asbestos and other toxic substances, the story of the sudden “awareness” of their harmful effects was in fact a fiction, and that many actors were aware of the pathogenic effects of asbestos from the early 20th century. The circulation and appropriation of this knowledge did not take place in a linear fashion, in a general context of doubt, giving rise to very different “regimes of perceptibility” depending on the territory and the players involved. In France, as elsewhere, the mobilization of victims played an essential role, first in obtaining exposure limit values, then in obtaining a ban on all new uses. But what are the possible trajectories of a toxic substance once it has been banned? This is the question this conference sets out to answer.

This international conference will be held in French and English: headsets will be provided for simultaneous translation.