Acknowledgements
This special issue has greatly benefited from the help of Isabelle Bourdeaux, research engineer at the CNRS (MSH‐Alpes), who has read the different versions of each text, organized their translation and more generally coordinated the work of the authors. We hare very much in her debt. We also wish to thank Liz Libbrecht for her translation or corrections of the four contributions along with the general introduction.