Paper long abstract:

I would like to focus on joint Sino-French engineering schools. Having spent three months of ethnographic immersion there and realised 60 interviews on the field, my presentation will share a global perspective about what it draws for science and technology in China as seen for the future by fieldwork actors. Those schools are presented as elite schools to train some of the best engineers the country would need tomorrow. A precise and systematic analyse of discourses about what could and should the future be like will be projected on the fieldwork data first conclusions.

This way, I will try to show such elite international institutions brings or even embody promises about science and technology, promises that their graduate engineers will meet tomorrow's challendes and that they will be able to shape the world at the advantage of China.

We will highlight the interaction of discourses with everyday constraints and practical issues materiality gives. That's why the key challenge of this presentation will be to observe on the field how actors actually articulate discourses and everyday acting through big and little contrainsts that shape what they actually do. Thus, we will enter the concrete stage of the fabrication of so called 'bicultural elite engineers'. To what extend do promising discourses play an autonomous game? How do they get tranfered and so transformed through material enaction? What effect does it have on the dynamic of promises that preceded and launched such elite engineering schools projects?