13

‪This interview brings together four academics from different disciplinary back- grounds who use a variety of perspectives on popular, working-class, vernacular or ordinary writings: Béatrice Fraenkel, an anthropologist of writing, Martyn Lyons, a historian of ordinary writings, Jacques Rancière, a philosopher of democracy and the “distribution of the sensible”, and Michèle Riot-Sarcey, a historian of utopia and emancipation. They successively answer three central questions: that of the conditions in which popular writings are intellectually and politically produced as objects of knowledge; that of the ever problematic articulation between conformism and emancipation within these writings; and finally, that of the delicate restitution of gestures, practices and scriptural materiality in the 19th century. They underline how diverse the contexts of enunciation of these popular writings are, whether they overflow assigned boundaries or are mere conformist notations, exceptional writings or snippets of laborious daily life, subjective or delegated writings.‪