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Louis Debersaques

Louis Debersaques

Louis Debersaques is a historian who was trained at the University of Ghent (2022, MA History, summa cum laude). His master’s thesis focused on common sensical knowledge and historical expertise as used within the societal British “culture war”. This rhetorical-epistemological research was theoretically based on mythical speech (Roland Barthes), therapeutic/populist retrospection (Aviezer Tucker; Hakkı Taş) and metahistory (Hayden White).

Soon after graduating, he worked as researcher on the EU funded project on the professionalization process of interior architecture (as part of the European BSCP program) at the University of Antwerp (2022-2023). This process was predominantly determined by the legislative framework of (interior) architecture in 15 different European countries. The project was commissioned by the European Council of Interior Architects (ECIA) and funded by the European Commission. This year of research and analysis culminated into a keynote lecture at the 31st ECIA General Assembly Conference in Stockholm (September 2023) where he presented the main points of the eventual European report.

To further follow his passion for (meta)history and his personal interest for both architectonic research and legal embeddedness/diffusion in general, he works since 2023 on the EOS project: Construction History, Above and Beyond. What History Can Do for Construction History at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. This doctoral research focuses on practical/normative knowledge and expertise in historical construction litigation in Belgium (19th-20th century) - supervised by prof. Dave De ruysscher and prof. Stephanie Van de Voorde.

Projects

PhD research

Expertise and normative practice in discourse: liability allocation in the Belgian construction sector (1880-1970)

Date2023 - 2027
SupervisorsDave De ruysscher and Stephanie Van de Voorde

It is widely acknowledged that 19th and 20th century Belgium is characterized by vast industrialization, enhancing cultural and technical developments. Essential to these advancements, and central in its realization and continuation, the building sector is challenged to adjust. Since the organization of the Belgian building sector was infamously informal, it is hard to determine to what extent professions were delineated and how responsibilities were distributed – especially at a time when legal title protections were not yet in force. To approach this obscurity, this research approaches the construction sector through a legal lens by looking at formal court settlements between building actors regarding supervision and negligence crimes, in order to make professional relations and normative practice explicit. The tension between the 'rules of the trade' and 'the word of the law' will be scrutinized through the examination of expertise in construction litigation and the identification of the construction expert.

To analyze conflict between professional building partners, this research suggests and argues that it is essential to scrutinize criminal court records. Accordingly, this investigation mainly focuses on building accidents that occurred through a lack of supervision, resulting in involuntary injuries or even death. The focus on construction site accidents allows us to engage with richly bundled court files within Belgian State Archives, Belgian jurisprudence, and legal doctrine works that are preserved in specialized libraries.

To challenge the anecdotal essence of these cases, and to address the often-overrated convenience of interrogation files as to ‘give a voice to the otherwise voiceless in history’, this investigation will be done through critical discourse analysis. Here, textual examination – or the analyses of used argumentative tropes – of interrogations and expert reports will be nuanced with intertextual (e.g. verbal references to legal texts) and contextual data. Ultimately it becomes possible to make a comparative analysis through space (local differences) and time (before, during, and after legal embeddedness and certain socio-economical events).

In doing so, this research aims to shed light on the historical construction sector through contextual legal history research by unveiling the distribution of responsibilities, and thus: normative practice on the construction site.