This volume dedicated to the "contactless worlds" aims to reflect upon the social uses and functions of proximity and distance, relationships with others and on the breakdown of these relationships in social and historical contexts.

This issue of Tracés revisits the classic question of the social life of words and seeks to understand how the appearance of a term and its various potential meanings are socially produced and reproduced. it looks at the controversies surrounding the meaning of words and what they reveal about our societies and the functioning of language.