Monitoring without knowing. The thwarted fate of an epidemiological cohort of workers exposed to nanomaterials

The "new political sociology of science" calls for an analysis of scientific ignorance that focuses on the institutional conditions of its production. Based on the study of the difficulties encountered by an epidemiological surveillance project on the health of workers exposed to manufactured nanomaterials in France, we propose to follow this intuition, by highlighting the institutional jurisdictional struggles that hindered the project's ability to produce data. We show that, if the identification of occupational risks related to nanomaterials is a challenge because of the uncertainties that characterize them and the reluctance of the employers concerned to play the game, these obstacles are multiplied by the tensions that run through the institutional infrastructure of occupational health surveillance.