In France and in Europe, a debate is currently raging around the restitution of African works of art. In this context, ReTurns, a comparative, diachronic and multi-scalar research program, seeks to shift the focus of inquiry: (1) from Europe and North America toward the African countries concerned; (2) from the topic of restitution toward the fact of return; (3) from museum-centered approaches to approaches centered on the role of diasporic communities and tourism; (4) from official patrimonial oversight to sites and to modes of discourse and transmission typically considered to be marginal, secondary or informal. Designed with the Sarr-Savoy (2018) restitution timetable in mind and structured around an international, multidisciplinary consortium of researchers working in and on four African countries – Benin, Cameroon, Mali, Senegal – as well as their diasporas, ReTurns is an innovative program in terms of its critical research goals, its methodological stance and the cultural collaborations it entails. International and multidisciplinary consortium of 14 researchers, ReTours will work from Benin, Cameroon, Mali and Senegal and on their diasporas. The objective is to understand the political stakes, the economic roles and the social uses of return. It is organized around three axes which are as many ways of designating objects: 1) Geopolitics of heritage, around mobilizations for or against the restitution of "works of art", 2) Return economies and tourism imaginaries, concerning facilities and welcoming of "museum pieces"; 3) Appropriations and resocializations around social memories, the agency of returned "things", transformations of meanings and contemporary creations. The ReTours program thus proposes to work according to methods inspired by collaborative anthropology and research-action, which imply a reflexivity attentive to both the stakes of power and the risks of interlocking. Workshops will associate the actors of the return (traditional authorities, cultural institutions, artists, associated partner associations). In terms of results, ReTours will combine field, archive and digital surveys to propose maps of mobilisations, networks and objects, comparative and multisite analyses, social biographies of objects, analyses of artistic interventions. ReTours is engaged in an ambitious programme of conferences, publications and seminars, on its own or co-designed with other international research programs. The major scientific impact expected from ReTours is the change of the research paradigm on the circulation of works of art and their appropriation: new knowledge, but also new ways of doing research, with collective, reflexive and attentive enquiries into the effects of asymmetry linked to status, gender and origin. ReTours responds to the research objectives of the "Culture, heritage creations" axis, by working on real cultural cooperation with a large number of institutional, museum, cultural and artistic partners : virtual exhibitions, digital applications, catalogues, educational tools, etc. In terms of social and economic spin-offs, ReTours aims to document good practices in each of the countries, to provide the institutions in charge of the return with useful tools for decision-making, but also to show and hear the memories of often ignored social groups, especially women, and thus participate in the recognition of their own knowledge. ReTours will thus enrich the knowledge on restitution which, focused on historical, legal, political and museum issues, has hardly taken into account the tourism argument of the African countries requesting assistance, nor developed the role of the diasporas in the mobilisations and the geopolitical dimensions of restitution.

DiasCo-Tib proposes to analyse various patterns of linguistic, spatial and social convergence at a “diasporic moment,” i.e. a critical juncture of reactivation and reconfiguration of a diaspora, as it is unfolding. The research will be based on the case of Tibetan refugees, who are currently undergoing such a “diasporic moment” with the anticipated demise of their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama (b. 1935). Recent and fast-growing on-migratory trends, from South Asia towards Europe and North America, already lead to a large-scale spatial reconfiguration, with France becoming a major hub in the multipolar Tibetan diasporic network. The project’s central hypothesis is that in the context of a diasporic moment, increased spatial dispersion, paradoxically, triggers enhanced processes of social convergence. In order to produce a comprehensive analysis of diasporic convergence processes, DiasCo-Tib will mobilise an interdisciplinary team to study concomitant social phenomena and evaluate their degree of interrelatedness in the domains of language(s) and linguistic practices; social and economic translocal networks; forms of collective representation (in political, civic or artistic spheres); changing gender roles; and religious practices. Multi-sited research will account for the circulation of norms and social practices, taking into account local and cross-border forms of integration and differentiation as well as ongoing shifts in Tibetan refugees’ inscriptions in host societies. Along expected convergences, lines of segmentation will be observed and analysed as they crystallise to reconfigure the common yet plural linguistic and social practices of the Tibetan diaspora. The chosen case study will thus shed light on multi-dimensional processes of diasporisation as they are experienced and enacted by individuals and communities in their everyday lives and particular biographical trajectories.

Air pollution is a global environmental and health problem. Although it has become a major concern in the large cities of the Global South, few of them manage to tackle this pollution effectively. This multidisciplinary project proposes to better understand what causes such hindrance by analyzing the perceptions of this public health problem, the orientations of public action and the obstacles to its implementation in ten African and Asian cities. Bringing together specialists in urban societies, health policies and territorial governance, this project investigates the transnational circulation of global health issues and models of public policy and interventions, the place of scientific knowledge in the framing of issues and solutions, and the modes of governance of urban systems and territorialization that accompany the management of this issue. The chosen approach proposes to analyse together the technical processes that produce knowledge on air quality and health (monitoring, epidemiology, norms and standards of risk assessment) and their societal appropriation at the local level. To this end, the methodology of the project relies on the production of ethnographic data, acquired through long fieldworks, and with the assistance of multiple local partners. This approach makes it possible to grasp in detail the interplay of actors involved in the production of data and the interfaces between science and public action. It also allows for taking a close and informed perspective on the way in which scientific knowledge, but also collective representations and power relations, influence governance processes on a problem made complex by the fact that it intersects with a diversity of economic sectors (mobility, industry, energy, agriculture) and levels of government (from local to international). To account for these processes, the project proposes a reasoned comparison between ten cities particularly impacted by air pollution, in Africa, South Asia and South-East Asia. These ten case studies are subjected to the same interpretative grid, constructed jointly in a multidisciplinary framework. The expected results are to deepen knowledge of the governance processes of urban issues associated with health and the environment. This project will allow for a better understanding of the difficulties encountered by cities in the Global South in governing this major problem for their development and the well-being of their population, and to develop more appropriate modes of action.

The ArchIFAN project aims to revisit the history of scientific knowledge in a colonial context, based on the case of the Institut français d'Afrique noire (IFAN), a multidisciplinary institute founded in Dakar (Senegal) in 1936, with local centers set up in various West African colonies from 1942 onwards. This project brings together researchers from different disciplines (anthropology, history, art history) as well as curators and archivists from several institutions holding collections linked to IFAN (Institut fondamental d'Afrique noire-Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris, Musée d'Aquitaine in Bordeaux) to identify dispersed bodies of archives, documentary resources and publications, to study their production, circulation and materiality, and then to examine their current legacies. The aim is to examine how IFAN's colonial status generated and maintained its subaltern status in the scientific context of the time, and affected both its documentary policy and the careers of its staff and their publications. This research will help to bring to light the logic of long-invisible actors, whether African auxiliaries or women - researchers, technicians or wives - who contributed in various ways to the production of knowledge about and from Africa. They will also enable us to retrace the editorial history of IFAN and the role played by its many journals in the creation of networks of scholarly sociability and in the emergence of African research professionals. The aim is to examine the extent to which these alternative spaces for the production of knowledge about Africa and in Africa, operating within the framework of networks at different scales, were marked by processes of invisibilization in the imperial, trans-imperial and international scientific fields. ArchIFAN is therefore proposing, in collaboration with its African colleagues and the Persée portal team, to digitalize IFAN's two main journals and to analyze their textual and iconographic content. Some of the knowledge produced by IFAN researchers during the colonial period will thus be made freely available on Persée, consistently with the values of Open Science. With this in mind, an important part of the project will be concerned, in a transversal and reflexive way, with the ethical issues and the consideration of the societal impacts of such a re-circulation of historical sources and scientific data produced in a colonial situation, likely to be the subject of numerous reappropriations today, at a time when the question of the digital return of knowledge is being raised crucially and has echoes well beyond the scientific and academic field.

This project aims at theorizing the relationship that subaltern women establish with “nature”; and the role that this relationship plays in their involvement in practice and mobilisation against discrimination. This issue is part of the controversy over women’s relationship to nature that divides feminists, especially Western ones, for whom the renaturalisation of women is the main lever for gender inequality, and those, especially in the Global South, for whom this relationship is instead a springboard for action. The enhancement of a singular relationship with nature is also part of the debate on the formation of identities in mobilisations for the protection of territories and on the possibility of emancipatory or oppressive forms of such protection. The originality of this project is to start from the observation that these contradictory trends are inextricably linked: they constitute the very experience of subaltern women, intertwined in their daily practices. To account for this interweaving, this project builds theory based on an in-depth, multi-level qualitative survey. The survey focuses on women farmers involved in agroecology and the feminist movement in two forest areas of Brazil, a country where the question of the relationship between equality, democracy and ecology arises in a sharp and revealing manner. The data collection includes: agroecological practices, based on an original method of joint observation with agronomists and forest engineers, aimed at informing social theory; the socioeconomic conditions of valorisation of women farmers’ work; and broader spaces of mobilisation and the political fabric of the relationship with nature. In addition, the theory building is based on a close dialogue with the Brazilian and French partners of the project, in order to refine the results and to increase the level of generality. This project connects three fields of literature that are generally separate: critical theory, which draws attention to the role of lifeworld, counter-publics and the plural economy in democratization, and reflexively questions the role of theorists; the sociology of rural women’s organisations, ecofeminism and care theory, which show the potential of reclaiming the relationship with nature to fuel mobilisation for gender equality; and different approaches (anthropology of nature, pragmatic sociology, agroecology) of the subjective and material interactions between humans and non-humans. The project aims at testing and qualifying three main hypotheses: (H1) The subjective and material relationship with different elements of “nature” (plants, insects, animals, soils, waters, etc.) reflects gender and other power relations present in the division of agricultural and care work and knowledge. (H2) The relationship with nature constitutes an essential part of lifeworld and the source of a subjectivity shared by these women farmers which can, under certain conditions, develop into common identity, committed practice and mobilisation against discrimination. These conditions include collective organisation, the valorisation of their work, adequate technical and political knowledge and contact with the political agenda of sustainability. (H3) However, the lives of these women are permeated by tensions originating from gender hierarchies in peasant institutions, external threats to their livelihoods, and the pervasive effects of financialisation and commodification. These tensions contradictorily shape their relationship to nature, generating practices and mobilisations against discriminations, as much as individual strategies of integration into the market and the search for protections that may be oppressive.