For a few years, we have observed the rise of new collaborative work spaces (NCWSs) remote from major cities. These places of social interaction echo the expectations of a population looking to evolve at the fringe, both geographically (away from great urban centers) and socially speaking (hoping for greater work life balance). This international project aims at studying the part played by these new peripheral centralities for workers. A multidisciplinary team of researchers working on German, Belgian, Canadian and French research fields will detail the impact on mobilities for the territories studied. This research project deepens and reorients another approaching completion on third places (INTIMIDE financed by the GIS M@rsouin and the Région Bretagne). The choices made by a new generation of independent workers, relying mostly on digital technology for their professional activities, could revitalize non metro areas often faced with the loss of economic and social activity and with negative net migration. This possibility depends both on the way these workers insert in a professional, institutional or social network and on the way they might contribute to their territory’s development be it direct or indirect. From this perspective, the emergence of NCWSs outside large metropolises works as part of the great societal trends at work today and notably the blurring between the location of residence and the location of work. The expectations of young workers regarding life and work quality, daily commute and the means of transportation to choose from –and more largely environmental stakes– remap the relationship to the territory and mobilities. Even if this trend remains rather uncommon, the growing part of these workers –among which a large part of independent workers, lonely entrepreneurs and teleworkers– testifies to the evolutions of our society. We postulate for these populations the existence of a larger life project, including not only their professional aspirations and activities but also their expectations in terms of life quality. The approach chosen differs from major explanations of professional mobility and residential choices as it includes non-economical and extra-professional arguments in our analysis model. The problematic is interested in knowing whether NCWs can become nodes of temporary spatial concentration as places of meeting and activity and intermediaries to access physical (face-to-face peer groups) and digital (broadband) networks. We are suggesting that nodes are forming at the margin of metropolises bringing about a relative centrality, far from traditional major actors and yet essential to the career path of independent workers. The objectives of the research follow three lines. The aim is: 1/ to understand the role of NCWSs by studying the geographical and social characteristics and paths of individuals who join them and the interactions between users and founding members within a common space and their external relations; 2/ to observe the various mobilities generated on the territory by these NCWSs and measure their ability to form a node, that is to say to become points of anchorage and territorial adherence; 3/ to analyze how individuals view their future in order to propose a prospective analysis of NCWSs that will be useful to the definition of planning strategies.

In the natural world, nearly all colors that we experience are seen within a context of surrounding light and nearby objects, and this context strongly affects color appearance. In this way, one of the most important mechanisms in color appearance is color assimilation. Color assimilation is a shift in the perceived color of a region toward the chromatic appearance of a nearby inducing stimulus. The Watercolor effect is a new interesting phenomenon for studying such process. Here, color assimilation occurs within an area enclosed by a light chromatic contour (e.g., orange) which in turn is surrounded by a darker chromatic contour (e.g., purple), thus the central area will appear orangish. At the core of the project is the fine investigation of this visual phenomenon. How chromatic assimilation is integrated to generate perceived colors is a cornerstone in color vision. Here, some experiments using psychophysical and fMRI methods are proposed to elucidate such questions. As a result, relatively little is known about color assimilation. Indeed, most studies showed a diversity of patterns producing color or brightness assimilation but quantitative measurements were not systematically reported. Contour parameters producing the coloration effect have been recognized from some previous work and the importance of these changes has recently been emphasized. Data are still lacking, however, that identify specific conditions responsible for color assimilation. To that end, some set of experiments are proposed to determine the strength of the effect depending on contour parameters (widths, waviness and separation) but also as depending of background luminance. Our originality is to determine precisely how parameter modulations change our perception of color using some psychophysical techniques. Thus, observers will report in a cone-based color-space what they perceived precisely using a hue-cancellation method. A set of experiment will be also developed to propose an explanation of this phenomenon. The coloration effect is characterized by a spread of color from the inner contour onto the enclosed surface area, suggesting a global effect from sparse (local) stimulation. The question is how the color diffuses out of the boundary to fill the adjacent area. These phenomena can in principle be explained by two alternative theories. One assumes that color and brightness signals actually spread from the borders into uniform regions at the same cortical level. Other postulates that color is represented at a higher level as attributes of object surfaces, and assumes that the phenomenal color spreading corresponds to a change in this abstract representation. Here, we propose to determine the locus of neural activity of color assimilation and to test these competing hypotheses using an fMRI method. We will also respond to the following question: Does the visual system respond to physically uniform surfaces in the same way as color assimilation? Finally, we will extend previous experiments by characterizing the relationship between parametric variations in color assimilation phenomenon with cortical responses. Moreover, we will display and analyze the results as a function of the retinotopic visual areas. The retinotopic procedure will distinguish the fMRI responses obtained from the contours to those obtained from the inner surface. The proposed experiments will provide an important step to understand the color appearance mechanisms recording behavioral data and by the way of neural correlates of color assimilation that never been explored.

This project aims to identify the inequalities in education between the teenagers from 11 to 15 (junior high-school time in France) years old from different backgrounds. Education can be seen as the acquisitions resulting from the interactions between the individual and his physical and social environment, including the deliberate transmission as well as the imprinting. Our goal is to analyse different backgrounds that influence the educational path of teenagers : school, sports and cultural hobbies, and another background that echoes both school and hobbies, the digital environment. We will specifically focus on the spatial aspect of theses contexts, be it by the analysis of metric distances or by the social and cultural ones. The metric distance analysis is characterised by the identification of the territorial services distribution, of the proximity of these services for the populations, and of the physical constraint inherent to the necessary movements to access these services. The analysis of social and cultural distances includes the study of the characteristics of the families, of the local backgrounds and of the educational policies implemented in always particular administrative and territorial units. These characteristics, by causing different kinds of use of these local resources, create differences in the social histories of the teenagers. Because of the lack of efficient preventive restorative actions, these differences imply inequalities which summed in space and temporal dimensions can endanger social cohesion. Identifying the different mechanisms that construct these inequalities and their consequences can provide useful theoretical tools to promote the development and each teenager's potential so that he can play a role in his personal development as well as in social development. The comparative aspect of this project, which studies quantitatively three regional territories (Aquitaine, Basse-Normandie, Bretagne), and qualitatively, local selected spaces in those regions, all aim to enrich the knowledges about the diversity of educational policies and the different effects on the educational histories of the teenagers. The longitudinal dimension of these histories will be analysed differently according to the three types of educational backgrounds we chose.

The ESTUER project takes the Loire estuary as an 'energy space', i.e. a node crossed by multiple flows of matter and energy (coal, gas, oil, electricity, but also tides, sun and wind), a place where energy infrastructures are projected (networks, power stations, ports) and a territory challenged by various stakeholders, from environmental mobilizations to the European Union, the Nantes metropolis, the Pays de la Loire region and the French state. Our hypothesis is that there is a strong link between material, political and social histories of energy spaces. Our ambition is to shed light on this link in the Loire estuary since the 1980s through an interdisciplinary approach combining geography, history, political science and sociology. Our main field of investigation is the Carnet site in the middle of the estuary where have been intertwined infrastructural changes, innovation policies and social mobilization around energy for 40 years. This place was chosen for two energy infrastructure projects: a nuclear power plant by EDF (1981-1997) and an eco-technology park by the harbor administration since 2019. These two projects were contested by groups of local residents, farmers, students, ecologists and citizens in a context of loss of energy, agricultural and material autonomy in the Loire-Atlantique area. Our study is organised around three research perspectives: 1) The technopolitics of energy examines the energy policies of regional, national and European administrations and the strategies of appropriation of physical, discursive and mental spaces by the actors of the land development; 2) The sociopolitics of environmental mobilizations focuses on the groups mobilized against energy projects for the last 40 years with a sociohistorical approach; 3) metabolism analysis examines the articulation of territorial metabolism and the local conflicts and struggles.