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The contributions of this issue are the written versions of oral presentations made in Jean COPANS’seminar at EHESS in 2004 and 2005. Researchers from four different disciplinary fields (geography, economics, sociology and anthropology) and from agronomy describe their personal encounter so to speak with development in the Third World countries they have visited and studied since the 1960’. These very personal itineraries are exposed at the intellectual, scientific and professional level and reveal a diversity of experience and questions which constitute the basis of contemporary French research in development studies. Several of them reflect upon the autonomy of such a domain in social sciences. This collection of papers is a contribution to the sociology of knowledge.