Pour une histoire élargie des milieux universitaires au Québec : bilan exploratoire et perspectives de recherche

Abstract

This exploratory review seeks to identify key themes, trends, blind spots, and potential horizons in the history of Quebec’s university settings at large, which have never been explicitly stated or treated as a whole in historiography. After discussing this historiography’s three founding subfields (the history of science, the history of institutions, and the history of students), we invite readers to adopt a broad view of university settings at large, which are not limited to the physical locations typically associated with them, particularly administrative offices, departments, schools, and faculties. This would in fact be one of the features of this history, characterized by a considerable expansion of its scope, with university settings at large finding themselves in a favorable light when taken out of their own context and approached from different perspectives (urban, national, international). This approach invites exploring of university milieux actors (institutional or individual) and their ideas, projects or initiatives in relation to the spaces, entities or groups they are connected to outside the university. This exploratory review ultimately seeks to inspire further work by suggesting new avenues of research.