Guillaume Levrier

Guillaume Levrier is a political scientist. He earned his PhD from Sciences Po in 2022, where he worked on genome editing under the supervision of Virginie Tournay at CEVIPOF. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at CNRS (the French state agency for research) and is affiliated with LISIS (UMR 1326 –Gustave Eiffel University), working on the ERC project Nanobubbles. He is also an associate researcher at the National Library of France (BnF) where he works on the French web archive.

His work is focused on the political questions raised by the representations of life. His work on nucleases (and particularly CRISPR-Cas systems) has brought to light a phenomenon of expectation of ungovernability by which some questions are neutralized in public debates. His core case study is the obfuscation of the debate over what should be at stake with a capacity to intervene on the genomes of entire sections of the biosphere. He also works on the concept of political epistemologies, that is the ways in which political leaders can intoxicate public debates over what is taken as true in a society with discourses they know to be invalid to serve their conquest or retaining of power.

He is also the lead developer of PANDORÆ, a free and open-source software on GitHub that helps researchers retrieve, curate, and visualize data.