Home>Valérie November
Valérie November
CNRS Research Professor
Center for International Studies (CERI)
Senior researcher (CNRS) attached to the CERI (2025-2027)
Research Interest(s): Risks and crises, very long-term storage, seed banks, endangered and threatened species
Discipline(s): Geography
Subdiscipline(s): International Relations
Research Group(s): Art, humanities, and international research; Environmental risks and planetary limits
Geographical Area(s): North America, Arctic / Antarctica, Global realm , Western Europe, Oceania
Country(ies): United States of America, Norway, France, Switzerland
Language(s): French, Hungarian, English, German
Biography
Valérie November is a CNRS research professor and joined the CERI on 1 September 2025 for a two-year term. A geographer by training, she holds a PhD from the University of Geneva (2000) and an MA from Laval University in Quebec (1994). After conducting research abroad for several years, she was appointed a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) with a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) from 2006 to 2011. In 2011, she became a CNRS research professor and joined the Techniques, Territories and Society Laboratory (LATTS UMR 8134 CNRS, École des Ponts, Gustave Eiffel University).
Following a span of over 25 years dedicated to research in the domain of risk and crisis management, complemented by studies in anticipation and decision-making in collaboration with French and international authorities, she has, since 2024, redirected her focus towards threats and risks that have been identified over an extended timeframe. Consequently, her research endeavors center on the domain of very long-term storage infrastructures and practices, conceptualized as responses to the aforementioned risks and threats. These practices are particularly focused in five distinct areas: museum reserves, seed banks, data archives, environmental specimen banks, and radioactive waste storage.
publications
Main publications
Borraz O., November, V. (2025), Le temps des crises. Une histoire de la gestion des crises en France, L’Année sociologique. Numéro thématique Les catastrophes, questions sociologiques.
November V., Landström C. (2025) Studying long-term storage as material visions of the future. Futures.
Fassert C., November V., Rey-Thibault C., (2023), Facing nonscalability: are risks still ‘risks’ when compound and catastrophic?, Journal of Risk Research.
November, V., Winter, T., Azémar, A.,Canovas, I., Chevillot‐Miot, E., & Lecacheux, S. (2023). A new approach for crisis management analysis: Considering the anticipation/decision making pair as a continuum. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 31, 289–299.
November V., Leanza Y. (2015) Risk, Disaster and Crisis Reduction : Mobilizing, Collecting and Sharing Information, Springer.
November V., Penelas M., Viot P. (2011) (eds). Habiter les territoires à risques. Lausanne, PPUR.
November V, Camacho-Hübner E., Latour B. (2010), Entering in a Risky Territory – Space in the Age of Digital Navigation, Environment and Planning D, 28(4):581-599.
November V. (2008), Spatiality of risks, Environment and Planning A, vol. 40, pp. 1523-1527.
November V. (2002) Les territoires du risque : le risque comme objet de réflexion géographique, Berne : Ed. Peter Lang, 339 p.