Vanille Ecrement

I'm doing a PhD in sociology of science at ITE and at GRIPIC, in which I'm investigating the construction of EU climate mitigation scenarios. I was initially trained in design at ENSCI, then in information and communication sciences at CELSA.

I'm the maintainer and main contributor of Science against capital, an eco-marxist STS research blog.

My main research topics so far:

Get in contact: victor[dot]ecrement[at]etu[dot]sorbonne[dash]universite[dot]fr

PhD research

Reproduction and transformation of capitalism in EU climate mitigation scenarios

In my thesis, I study how climate change mitigation scenarios are produced for the EU. These are reports and papers that explore how GHG might be reduced in the future. The consequences of the projected changes are assessed using computer programs called "models", which represent the economy, the energy system and the environment. Once a report has been published, it helps various actors to make decisions, and can be used to design public policies.

My aim is to explain (1) why, despite the accumulation of research showing the unsustainability of the current economic organization, very few climate change mitigation scenarios project post-capitalist futures. This also leads me to investigate (2) how certain actors manage to advance their interests in the production of these futures, and how this is transforming European capitalism.

To understand these phenomena, I study the organizations that produce the scenarios underpinning climate and energy policies (European Commission, ENTSOs), the actors that support them (EU agencies), and those that seek to assert their expertise and interests (lobbies, NGOs, scientific associations, etc.).

My approach stems mainly from sociology of science: I try to explain how and why certain scientific results are produced and disseminated. I study the many factors that condition the conduct of research and its results: national and international law, work processes, funding sources, relations between organizations, digital tools, calculation methods, phenomena studied, data available, epistemic cultures, etc.

Professional

Research

Role and context Period Activities
PhD researcher in sociology and communication sciences — ITE - GRIPIC Since 10/2023 Topic: Reproduction and transformation of capitalism in EU climate mitigation scenarios. Directors: Virginie Julliard and Diego Landivar.
Research engineer — CERES 09/2022 - 07/2023, half time Design of a software for annotating and exploring large image corpora, survey of image analysis practices in the social sciences. Courses and training in digital methods for the social sciences. Design and development of the editorial chain and website.
Research and data visualization intern — CERES 02-07/2022 Support in improving documentary practices. Visualization of media circulation dynamics. Contribution to a survey on digital methods at the Sorbonne Faculty of Arts.
Research and design intern — Origens Media Lab 09/2020 - 02/2021 Collective investigation on the future of old public infrastructures. Design of a democratic process for the ecological planning of a city.

Other professional experiences

Role and context Period Activities
Public policy designer — Où sont les dragons 10/2021 - 01/2022, half time Design of tools to represent the circulation of legal documents. Design of an educational platform. Redesign of a legal information website.
Social and urban design intern — Les Saprophytes 07/2021 Participatory construction and subjective cartography.
Designer and facilitator — La fresque du renoncement 02/2021 - 11/2022 Design of a workshop to project the dismantling of unsustainable activities. Facilitation and dissemination of the tool in events, conferences and courses.
Public policy design intern — Où sont les dragons 08-09/2020 Documentary research on regulatory urban planning and digital design policies. Creation of a contributory platform for action research. Design of creativity tools.
Graphic designer — Fédération des récupérathèques 11/2018 - 03/2019 Creation of a graphic charter for an association that runs a community of reuse centers.

Training

Training and context Period Courses
Master in information and communication sciences — CELSA 09/2021 - 06/2022 Training in the scientific study of communication through a variety of methods: ethnography, corpus analysis, archival work, questionnaires, etc. Specialization in the study of documentary systems.
Master in design — ENSCI-les-Ateliers 09/2017 - 10/2023 General design training: services, public policies, digital, graphics, objects, spaces, territories. Specialization in socio-ecological issues, design for research and support for activist groups.
Bachelor Product design — Glasgow School of Arts 09/2019 - 01/2020 Academic exchange. Service design and design survey methods.
Piscine — École 42 08/2019 A month of learning C programming.
Prépa Intermédia — Atelier de Sèvres 09/2016 - 06/2017

Scientific publications

Peer-reviewed papers

Bouté, É., Julliard, V., Alié, F., Gödicke, D., Pailler, F., & Ecrement, V. (2024). Panoptic, un outil d’exploration par similarité de vastes corpus d’images. Humanistica 2024. https://hal.science/hal-04687627/

Tores, J., Sassatelli, L., Wu, H.-Y., Bergman, C., Andolfi, L., Ecrement, V., Precioso, F., Devars, T., Guaresi, M., Julliard, V., & Lecossais, S. (2024). Visual Objectification in Films: Towards a New AI Task for Video Interpretation (arXiv:2401.13296). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2401.13296

Grison, T., Julliard, V., Alié, F., & Ecrement, V. (2023). La modération abusive sur Twitter. Étude de cas sur l’invisibilisation des contenus LGBT et TDS en ligne. Réseaux, 237(1), 119–149. https://doi.org/10.3917/res.237.0119

Other papers

Ecrement, V. (2025). All models are wrong and most are harmful. Part 3. Possible explanations. Science against Capital. https://science-against-capital.club1.fr/papers/all-models-are-wrong-and-most-are-criminal-part-3-possible-explanations

Ecrement, V. (2025). All models are wrong and most are harmful. Part 2. Economic institutions in climate mitigation scenarios. Science against Capital. https://science-against-capital.club1.fr/papers/all-models-are-wrong-and-most-are-criminal-part-2-economic-institutions-in-climate-mitigation-scenarios

Ecrement, V. (2025). All models are wrong and most are harmful. Part 1. Unsustainable economic institutions. Science against Capital. https://science-against-capital.club1.fr/papers/all-models-are-wrong-and-most-are-criminal-part-1-unsustainable-economic-institutions

Book chapters

Ecrement, V. (2025). Modélisation et idéologies. In Coop des Milieux, Petit manuel de démocratie énergétique. Faire communautés comme mode de réappropriation politique. Éditions du commun.

Julliard, V., Pailler, F., Alié, F., & Écrement, V. (2024). The Womb, the Banknote and the Trolley. Online Virality: Spread and Influence, 9, 207. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111311371

Communications and presentations

Ecrement, V. (2024). Assurer le futur du capitalisme. Comment l’objectif climatique pour 2040 de l’UE a été construit. Mythologies de la transition, Université de Liège.

Ecrement, V. (2024). Rendre dicible la décroissance. Remplacer les modèles pour changer les politiques climatiques en Union Européenne. La question du pouvoir : concepts et langages, Versailles.

Ecrement, V. (2024). Unsustainable economic institutions in climate mitigation scenarios. OpenMod 2024 workshop, Grenoble.

Alié, F., Bouté, É., & Ecrement, V. (2023). Génèse, création et fonctionnement de l’outil de visualisation Panoptic. Metsem, Séminaire méthodologie de Sciences Po, Paris. https://metsem.hypotheses.org/1416

Alié, F. & Ecrement, V. (2023) Explorer de grands corpus d’images en SHS avec Panoptic, Journée d'études Travailler avec les images, Paris.

Ecrement, V. (2023) Écritures calculées et catégorisation inductive. L’intérêt de la structuration informatique des écrits intermédiaires de recherche en sciences sociales, Séminaire doctoral CERES, Paris.

Julliard, V., Benabdelouhab, K., Alié, F., & Ecrement, V. (2022), Analyser la circulation et la reprise des images dans les RSN pour étudier la formation d’un mouvement anti-genre, Journée d'études Travailler avec les images, Paris.

Book reviews

Ecrement, V. (2024). Sans transition: Une nouvelle histoire de l’énergie, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2024, 416p. e-Phaïstos. Revue d’histoire des techniques / Journal of the history of technology, XII(1), Article 1. https://journals.openedition.org/ephaistos/12222

Theses

Ecrement, V. (2023). Interroger la technosphère. Une étude des pratiques et techniques d’investigation militante sur les aménagements et les infrastructures. mémoire de master en design, ENSCI.

Ecrement, V. (2022). Le contexte et l’hypertexte. Tentative de transposition des pratiques documentaires contributives d’un tiers-lieu aux enjeux des sciences participatives, mémoire de master recherche en sciences de l’information et de la communication, CELSA. https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-03878265

Involvment in research projects

Program and context Period Description and personal contributions
SEMIOSIS - Meaning, Methodological Experimentation, Interpretation: Scientific and Computing Tools for SSH — CERES 02/2022 - 07/2023 Design and development of digital tools for annotating, exploring and visualizing multimedia corpora. Development of methods for visualizing image and text flows. Design of Panoptic, a software program for annotating and exploring large image corpora.
ANR TRACTIVE - Towards a computational multimodal analysis of film discursive aesthetics — CERES 05 - 10/2022 Assessing the value of deep learning techniques for studying the objectification of women in video content. Development of a thesaurus of concepts to be annotated, in order to build a dataset usable by machine learning algorithms. Contribution to the design of video annotation software for research.
Faire dire, faire taire. La modération (algorithmique) de contenus au prisme des sexualités, PhD research of Thibault Grison — CERES 05 - 09/2022 Study of the role played by AI in moderating online publications and its impact on LGBT communities. Development of interactive visualizations to explore large corpora of moderated tweets.
Closing Worlds Initiative — Origens media lab 09/2020 - 02/2021 Surveys and interventions in local areas to help communities think about the dismantling of unsustainable activities. Coordination of a collective survey on the future of public infrastructures in Grenoble. Design of a consultation process for Grenoble city council. Prepared and contributed to a collective survey on adapting mountainous regions to global warming.

Teaching

Year Title Context Description
2023 Tableau Public workshop Contract at CERES Introductory workshop on using Tableau Public software for social science research.
2023 Introduction to digital methods for the social sciences Course designed collectively during my contract at CERES, for the Master in information and communication sciences at CELSA. Practical course on collecting, cleaning, processing and visualizing digital data.
2022 Notion workshop Internship at CERES Introductory workshop on the use of Notion software for social science research. Drafting and distribution of a detailed guide.
2021-2022 Fresque du renoncement workshops Self-employed professional activity. Regular workshops to project the closure of unsustainable activities, for administrations, higher education establishments and associations.

Know-hows

Digital tools