Sociology

• Books and journals
• Personal accounts and audiovisual materials
• Demography

Sociology – personal accounts and audiovisual materials

In addition, the documentary cinema collection (consisting of 30,000 titles) is mostly dedicated to issues affecting society. Many different points of view are covered, many of them very ardent: institutional, political, militant, etc. Many of these materials have only been distributed in video form, and are therefore only available at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Examples include materials produced by the Simone de Beauvoir Audiovisual Center (Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir) (feminist productions from the 1970s onwards) and video productions by the French Democratic Labor Union (Confédération française démocratique du Travail/CFDT).

In oral archives, the Audiovisual Department holds surveys produced directly within the sociology discipline. An example is a survey by the Center for Sociological Research on Law and Penal Institutions (Centre de recherches sociologique sur le droit et les institutions pénales/CESDIP) on the life stories of police officers. Alongside these documents is an entire body of materials which, although not initially produced for sociological purposes, have in practice come to be interpreted in this way. An example is interviews conducted in the 1970s by the EHESS Center for Historical Research (Centre de recherches historiques).