The SYSPOE project takes place in the renewal of police studies in the field of social sciences. It aims at studying police systems, defined as configurations composed by the various actors of policing in a given space, in Europe and its colonial possessions in the 18th and 19th centuries, in a comparative perspective and at the crossroads of different disciplines. Supported by 4 research units, this project gathers 14 permanent researchers, historians of the 18th and 19th centuries, but also a sociologist and a political scientist. It combines a general, interdisciplinary reflection on police systems through a research seminar, and specific archival research delimited by 5 thematic workpackages : police systems and circulations ; police systems and colonial territories ; plural policing ; military culture and police systems ; police systems, crisis, revolutions and disasters. It aims at building the preliminary fundations for a European history of police forces, contributing to a better comprehension of European societies in the 18th and 19th centuries by observing their forms of regulation, and illuminating by the expertise of historical reflection some issues on the contemporary police systems.

The interdisciplinary debates whose topic is the image, the visuality and the visual practices have increased tremendously in Germany and in German-speaking countries in the last few years. The speeding-up of this movement is developing the problematics structuring the visual set of themes that were outlined about twenty years ago and are still alive in the German-speaking Academic world. The 1990ies have consequently witnessed the birth of a new scope of research called “ Bildwissenschaft” that tries to combine the disciplinary perspectives of art history, public relations and philosophy (Bredekamp, 2003;Belting, 2004). Simultaneously, the Anglo-American sphere sees the development of “Visual studies” whose aim is to decenter the subjects of research in art history into taking the daily cultures into consideration (Mirzoeff, 1999; Evans and hall,1999). These new analytic approaches crystallize around a paradigmatic transformation described as “Pictorial turn” or “Iconic turn” depending on schools of thought (Stiegler,2008;Boehm and Mitchell,2009). In the Anglo-Saxon sphere, the “Pictorial turn” as stated by W.J.T. Mitchell (1994;2009) refers to a reorientation of usual practices linked to a shift in the patterns of semiotic and linguistic analyses. Those observations match with their German counterpart Gottfried Boehm (1994) who advocates the rise of an iconic turn and who emphasizes the pregnance of the images in contemporary western cultures as well as their marginalization as a subject of academic research. Yet, from his point of view, he refers to an ontological definition of the image. He does not mean to take into consideration explicitly the historical and cultural conditions of visual practices. Nevertheless, we have to admit that quite a few German-speaking culturalists support the doctrine of a predominance of hybrid forms between images and texts, mainly within the context of research on the internet and television. G. Boehm’s theory is therefore controversial when trying to understand the inequality of social distribution between social circles and societies charaterizing the social practices concerning the making, using and viewing of images (Burri,2008; Schnettler and Pöetzsch,2007). Those different points of view have all contributed to different approaches that remain to be spread and confronted with the theoretical positions in human and social sciences in the French-speaking world. The pregnance of a hermeneutic tradition is the foundation of controversy in German social sciences. The importance of the new approach by Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960), then the approach developed at the beginning of the 1970ies by Ulrich Oeverman (1993) led to the development of a Videohermeneutik by Dirk Tänzler and Jürgen Raab (2006). The tension between visuality and text can also be found in the analysis of segment (Segmentanalyse)promoted by Roswitha Breckner (2012) and inspired by the work of the art historian Max Imdahl (1996). Likewise, the works of Michel Foucault getting to be known in the German academic world means the birth of a new visual analysis of discourse (visuelle Diskursanalyse) that questions again the links between the systems of utterance and those of visibility (Maasen, Mayerhauser and Renggli, 2006). To conclude, the importance given to the place of the image as a medium of meanings in our societies leads to various terminologies, methodologies and epistemologies. Bringing them closer is a capital issue if one wants to study the visual objects that resist epistemological segmentation. It becomes necessary to delimit the development, the paradigmatic relations and transformations, the epistemological foundations and the systems that led to this situation. That is why this project aims at identifying the current debates and contexts of analyses to spread them and discuss them in the French-speaking academic world.

The cause of Crohn's disease (CD) is unknown and there is no cure. The ambition of this project is to contribute to understanding the cause. We will investigate whether the presence of pollutants in the external environment is a risk factor for CD. Is there a link between environmental quality (air, water and soil) and MC space clusters? Is there a difference in contamination between high and low incidence clusters of CD? Is the environment more degraded in high-impact clusters? If so, what pollutants cause these differences? The influence of social inequalities will be integrated into the interpretation of the results. We will diagnose each high/low incidence spatial cluster and then investigate the link with disease incidence within the clusters to determine if pollutants can be risk factors. A transdisciplinary consortium is the major asset of the project.

The PSYGNAL project focuses on the practice of reporting for mental disorders as they suspected by relatives, neighbours, doctors, social workers or police officers in the late twentieth-century France. Reporting enabled the identification and surveillance of individuals who were deemed likely to undermine public order and to be a danger to themselves or others owing to their mental state. This little-known procedure is all at once administrative, police-related, socio-sanitary and medical. It has led to the production of a unique and unexplored body of archives which considerably renews the history of madness by taking it beyond the walls of the psychiatric institution. The project will be based on the study of individual records deposited between 1940 and 1980. This will allow PSYGNAL to address three research objectives. The first objective is to contribute to the history of the social experience of mental illness by observing, from the many voices in the sources, procedures of identification and labelling, the articulation of lay and learned symptoms of madness, the range of possible adjustments with the disease, and delineations of tolerance thresholds. The second objective is to examine the work of the police, who often found themselves in the front line of handling madness, an ill-defined category of deviance. The third objective is to consider the history of the social bond through the lens of madness. Because they uncover complex interpersonal and collective relationships, archives of mental illness reporting cast light on histories of everyday solidarity and dependence as they were built or broken to pieces, from the Second World War to the post-war economic boom.

Thanks to a collective and transversal analysis, the objective of FONDASCIENCE is to study the role of philanthropic foundations in the development of scientific research from 1910 to 1956, by exploiting archives that have been little questioned or even totally unpublished until now. The starting hypothesis is that the structuring of current French public research was born of the close association between a few foundations/funds/associations and a handful of influential scientists. Numerous works in the field of social history or art history have been devoted to the patronage and philanthropy of financial, commercial or industrial dynasties in the 19th and 20th centuries. On the other hand, few studies exist on philanthropic foundations dedicated to science. Similarly, while the question of the weight of provincial scientific institutions in relation to Paris has been reassessed since the 1980s, the question of Paris/province patronage remains unexplored. Numerous foundations and their achievements, such as the IBPC, constitute a blind spot in the history of research, just as there are still grey areas for the period of the Second World War. The project is structured along three lines: 1) a cross-analysis of scientific philanthropic foundations (1910-1939) in France and Belgium to sketch out a map of philanthropic regimes and to identify, if possible, some "models"; 2) a study of the period 1927-1939 of the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique (IBPC), which was created by Jean Perrin and Edmond James de Rothschild. This study will question the interdisciplinarity promoted by an innovative methodology based on an unpublished corpus, as well as the insertion of the institute into its scientific, institutional and geographical environment (Montagne Sainte-Geneviève); 3) the positioning of the foundations in a new context where public scientific research is emerging and being structured (1939-1956, -colloque de Caen-). In addition to the exploitation of original sources (Rothschild bank archive (Roubaix), The Rothschild Archive (London), Rockefeller Archive Center (New York State), Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (Brussels), Institut Henri Poincaré, IBPC, Instituts Pasteur of Lille and Paris, etc.), the project is characterized by a resolutely cross-cutting approach, and by varying the scales from the local to the national and international. It relies on the constitution of prosopographic databases. Moreover, the specific study of the IBPC will be part of the historiographic current of the "material turn" by combining written, visual and material sources (and not their simple juxtaposition). The project will also ensure the permanent protection of these unpublished archives (digitization) and their valorization in an open science approach: publications in French and international journals, a reference book, a research notebook, prosopographical databases, an online exhibition, and a conference. Coordinated by the Director of the IBPC, three complementary teams bring together specialists in the history of interactions between science, industry and states, the history of innovation, public and private finance, public research, patronage and philanthropy, scientific institutions, architecture, and visual and material studies. Beyond the originality of its subject, scientific philanthropy, FONDASCIENCE is innovative in that it posits that, alongside the State and scientists, philanthropy has played a decisive role in the evolution and structuring of public research. It will also allow for a better understanding of the driving forces behind the organization of French research over the long term and thus contribute to its current evolution and debates.