valerie.poirier1 [at] gmail.com (Valérie Poirier) is a postdoctoral fellow (FRQSC). Her research interests include social movements, politics, health, environment, expertise, and senses.
Valérie recently defended her doctoral dissertation in history at UQAM, entitled « Savoirs, mobilisations et la construction du risque environnemental de l’automobile durant les long sixties à Montréal ». Her thesis draws on interdisciplinary literature on risk to shed light on the ways different social actors participated to construct the automobile as a risk for the health of the urban population and for the environment. Valérie also uses social movement theory to analyze citizen-led mobilizations against car pollution. Her thesis reveals how environmental groups tried to politicize this risk by anchoring their critique of car pollution in an ideological and a democratic discourse that focused on citizenship and on the need to rethink the relationship between citizens and the State.
Her current research explores the new ways of conceptualizing noise in the after-war period in Montreal, from 1945 to 1980. It seeks to understand why the meanings associated with noise shifted and how noise was gradually conceptualized as the fourth type of pollution, following water, air and soil pollution. With Stéphane Savard (UQAM), she co-edited a special issue of the Bulletin d’histoire politique on environmental activism in Quebec, in which she also published an article focusing on the citizen-led opposition to the construction of the Ville-Marie expressway in Montreal in the early 1970s.