While France benefits from abundant and cheap food, and purchasing power is steadily increasing according to public statistics, food poverty has been increasing in this country as well as in other European countries for the last 10 years. To elucidate this paradox, this project implements research on food poverty in France. First, it develops an original statistical survey in general population, in partnership with Crédoc, in order to characterize and measure food poverty. In addition to this survey, ethnographic surveys are conducted at a territorial level, linking household budget adjustment strategies, material and temporal supply practices, solidarity and social protection issues. This project aims at renewing the view on the poor and their living conditions in rich countries by identifying the conditions for a transition to healthy and sustainable diets. By proposing a sociology of poverty based on living conditions, it contributes to the current debates on social solidarity, particularly around the establishment of a social security of food.

The themes of the “disappearance” of “the Working Class”, the generalization of a middle class and “the end of social class” in European and North-American societies were widely diffused during the 1980’s and 1990’s. But we have witnessed since a “return of social class”. Notably, we see a regained interest in “le populaire”, that is in the working class condition and experience. This recent attention arises from the visible destitution of populations at the bottom of the social hierarchy, but also from renewed discourses on “the people” as a major political question. The socio-economic data available reveals presently rising social inequality between working class categories and middle and upper class categories. Still, these statistics shed no light on the concrete living conditions and experiences, nor the social and cultural recompositions of the working classes. In fact, we do not always know how to name these groups whose way of life, cultural practices, and representations have profoundly evolved. Our project intends to respond to the challenging tasks of grasping “le populaire”. We believe that the working class condition cannot be apprehended solely by looking at its margins or by fragmenting it in a variety of objects of study (politics, family, culture, work, education, etc.). Our approach proves hence to be original in a twofold manner. First, it focuses on a segment of the working classes that has been understudied in France, Europe and the United States. We designate this segment as “the working classes of the middle.” Certainly a loose term, but purposefully chosen for this reason: the research will eventually render it more precise. Frequently, only the “lower” and “upper” segments are distinguished by the scholarship on the working classes: the “lower” being composed of groups lacking economic resources, access to social protections and cultural capital; and the “upper” designating those who by their employment stability, general well being and participation in selective social practices, are often close to the middle class. While this distinction highlights established hierarchies within this social group, it also conceals an essential “middle” where a crossroads for internal mobility actively operates. By focusing on “the working classes of the middle” we take on as object of study particular working class groups, which have paradoxically been left aside by sociology and, moreover, have been analyzed in political science largely as a “repressive” group on the verge of turning to the extreme right. The originality of this project lies also in its methodological approach. It emphasizes a procedure that articulates fieldwork and ethnography with rigorous statistical work throughout the research process. While our fieldwork will focus on cultural recompositions of working class worlds (leisure activities, norms dictating the formation of couples or the education of children, of relationships to local space, to migrations, etc.) and will collectively produce 50 household monographs, we will also revise and reprocess censuses and surveys (on employment, cultural practices, among others) from the INSEE (the National Institute for Statistics of France). Further, the project will stress the necessary combination of national and regional data in order to take into account important territorial disparities. This research program - which gathers 26 researchers specializing on the working class and coming from a variety of research traditions, perspectives and generations - will therefore go beyond the usual monographic approach so often used to study underprivileged groups by analyzing “the working classes of the middle” in a comprehensive manner: be they urban or rural, “feminine” or “masculine”, at the workplace and outside, or in their struggle to make a respectable place for themselves in the present world of precarious employment.

MUSICOVID is an interdisciplinary research project that places at its centre the analysis of the modes of adaptation, resistance and innovation of musicians and their audiences in times of Covid, when the question of a brighter tomorrow is so acute. It aims to question the new place of live music in a society in crisis, both from the point of view of restrictions and prohibitions ("non-essential" or potentially dangerous practices), and from the point of view of the factors that seem to express an irrepressible need to live and to ensure that music lives on (adaptation, resistance, innovation), thereby endowing the musical experience – declared to be "non-essential" – with essential virtues (for physical and emotional well-being, for sociability). This study, which sheds light on the link between pandemics and music, between biopolitics and musical life, and the analysis of the stakes attached to prohibitions and practice, goes beyond a simple academic framework to open up concrete results, available to social, political and economic actors and citizens. The team, with its strong experiential capital in terms of surveys on musical practices and cultural situations of great crisis, will mobilise partners representing the richness of the worlds of music. By articulating five areas (memory, resilience, constraint, pedagogy, representations), MUSICOVID seeks to meet a fourfold challenge: (1) To document a crisis, to collect material (musical experiences) and to conserve/preserve the memory of the health crisis in order to analyse it in the light of several theoretical approaches; to constitute this memory as a resource; (2) To understand which individual or collective strategies social actors adopt to get through the ordeal of a pandemic, from the threefold lens of adaptation (adjusting practices to the constraints of the situation), resistance ( to resist the repressive models of an accepted imaginary, imposed actions and political decisions) and innovation (choosing or being forced to introduce something new into something that is well established); to characterise a society's relationship to music in terms of a benefit/risk cursor; to understand how a society faced with a crisis organises and ensures the survival of its members and the maintenance of social cohesion; (3) To supervise and organise, on the basis of these scientific results, a common reflection between researchers, the different actors of the music worlds, policy-makers and public authorities, favouring the dynamisms of collective intelligence; to provide concrete solutions and tools in the cultural and socio-economic fields aimed at solving the challenge of arbitration between bare life and social life; to strengthen the place of humanities and social sciences in the expertise serving society; 4) To equip citizens with the knowledge and tools required to imagine alternative ways to fight the pandemic and to realise that music is a cultural asset essential to life (Freiburg Declaration on Cultural Rights, 1993 and 2007) and more broadly a springboard capable of "recreating the participatory experience of democracy" (Honneth 2020); By preserving the memory of musical experiences in times of Covid, by analysing the strategies of the actors (adaptation, resistance, innovation), by making collective intelligence a source of shared profit to prepare for the aftermath, by proposing a global model likely to be duplicated in other fields of culture, MUSICOVID aims to respond to a social need in a strong ontological reading: can we build ourselves without music?

The Haspear (Social Fragmentations: HAte SPEech And Resistances) project is based on the observation that European societies are facing various forms of social fragmentation, resulting in oppositions between ideological groups, a breach of trust between citizens and politics, and a rising of radicalities and hatred. Haspear aims to analyze these social fragmentations to propose ways for remediation. The project is based on the study of hate speech, regarded as visible and analyzable marks of fragmentations, both products and producing these fragmentations. The project proposes 1) to identify places of social struggles and, within these places, to analyze the circulation of hate speech, 2) to collect and analyze the resistance strategies that respond to hate speech and to the processes of social domination, 3) to measure the performativity of these strategies and to develop alternative discourses, 4) to initiate prevention and awareness-raising measures once informed, by the previous stages, of the conditions of effectiveness of these strategies, and 5) to initiate work to widely disseminate our solutions. Haspear is targeting one of the future AAPs of the Horizon Europe program, and more specifically, the topic "The impact of inequalities on democracy" of the call "Protecting and nurturing democracies" of cluster 2 "Culture, Creativity and Inclusive Society". Supported by Julien Longhi (Professor of Universities, CY Cergy Paris University). Haspear is backed by the international research group Draine (“Hatred and social breakdown: discourse and performativity”), which, for 3 years, have been analyzing hate speech from the point of view of Language Sciences, Information and Communication Sciences, and Education Sciences. Draine is already used to work in European consortia (H2020 Practicies), with partners from civil society. In addition, some of its members have already led European projects. However, to respond to the work approach outlined above, we need to develop in other disciplines: economics, politics, civilization, sociology. We also need to integrate more broadly the actors of civil society from the European countries of our partners. The ANR MRSEI would allow us to bring together, online and face-to-face, the partners envisaged to refine our lines of work, and collectively write the future work package proposals of the Horizon Europe project. The ANR MRSEI would also allow us to organize a study day to expand the network to other potential partners from the scientific community, and to call upon, if necessary, a consulting firm for the final drafting of the Horizon Europe project.

Western societies seem to have built themselves "against nature", as Serge Moscovici (1972) put it. According to a growing number of specialists (Parma Declaration, WHO 2010), more and more of us are suffering from "nature deficit disorder", with deleterious consequences for our health. Its corollary is the "extinction of the experience of nature" and its effects on our lack of commitment to biodiversity. Against this backdrop, which requires both support for the socio-ecological transition and careful attention to individual well-being, offering children varied experiences of nature from an early age is a key issue. Although public policies have recently become aware of this urgency, and have introduced it in several major texts in the early childhood field (e.g., in the Charter of the first 1000 days in September 2020, in the National Charter for the care of young children in 2021, in the strategy for combating and preventing poverty established in 2021), professional practices and constraints are still largely unsuited to bringing children (and the adults who accompany them) back in nature. This research-action project aims to fill this gap: it proposes an innovative approach to support early childhood professionals and parents (hereinafter referred to as "referring adults") to experience nature with young children (0-3 years), with the help of a catalog of activities, which are participatory co-constructed and validated by volunteer referring adults. A participatory platform, designed and created through the collaboration of the four project partner teams, will enable the referring adults to find inspiration, interact with each other and co-construct these early-learning practices in contact with nature. Eventually, this platform will become a pedagogical resource center, and provide a vast amount of data that can be mobilized by research to characterize the effects of nature experiences on children and on referring adults, but also on the child-adult relationship, on relations between adults and on the design of the early child caring professions. This co-research project is dedicated to the co-design and the first steps of this platform. The relationship with nature and the relationship with others being at the heart of this project, conservation sciences (at Cesco) and information and communication sciences (at Cerlis) are brought together in this highly interdisciplinary project, which aims to link the study of the semiotics of nature experience and its operational translation: proposing, collecting and sharing these nature experiences in a digital platform enabling to enlarge the participating community, to make exchanges faster, and to archive posted data. This project is initiated and co-supported by Label Vie, a association from Social and Solidarity Economy founded in 2002s and that supports early childhood facilities for ecological, social and health transition. Label Vie has always championed the major role of contact with nature in the well-being and health of young children. Through its network of almost 1,000 early childhood facilities, Label Vie has a very good practical knowledge of the early childhood and how to mobilize the professional community. Finally, the Mosaic service unit, founded in 2020 following a PIA investment; it is a partner in twenty participatory research schemes based on data co-production and sharing platforms; Mosaic will be the methodological and technical partner for this platform project.