Béatrice Galinon-Mélénec Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

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.

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” (2015), which includes the processes which lead to the perception and interpretation of the trace.

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.

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.

The human being is a human trace (ichnos-anthropos) 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 (2009) which she analyzes using her “theory of General Ichnology” and the health crisis of 2020.

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 and 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).

At Bordeaux, she contributed to the launch in 1992, then to the development of the journal Communication & Organisation. She set up the CDHET (Research Network for Communication and Human Development, Enterprises and Territories), 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 (UMR) of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique CNRS-IDEES 6266 (National Centre for Scientific Research – Identities and Differentiation of the Environment of Spaces and Societies) at Normandie Université, where she supervises the Human Trace programme.

Galinon-Mélénec studied economics at the University of 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 Bordeaux Montaigne University, and in 2002 became a University Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at University of Le Havre, at Le Havre’s Institute of Technology.

Béatrice Galinon-Mélénec (born 1949) is a French semiotician. She is professor emeritus of 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.