At a time when we reflect much on the issue of social cohesion, on the influence of architecture in lifestyles and on relationships between neighborhoods within large modern cities, our project aims to approach the study of "inhabitating modes" at the beginning of the Roman Empire. The first century of our era is indeed a pivotal moment in the process of redefining identities, thanks to the Roman conquest of a good part of the Mediterranean. The case of Herculaneum (in Southern Italy) is in this respect a "laboratory" to investigate. Since it disappeared during the eruption of the Vesuvius in 79 AD, which also buried Pompeii, this ancient city has been relatively spared from archaeological and historical studies in favor of its famous neighbor. To date, most of the buildings are still unseen and there is no recent general synthesis pertaining to the habitat and lifestyle of the Herculaneum society. However, the exceptional preservation of the archaeological site and the abundance of archival documentation would enable a systematic analysis of buildings, furniture and décors and sculptures, returnable within their original context : such data could feed a larger study on social sciences and history issues, while engaging the study of life, social fabric, as well as the specifics of Herculaneum compared to other Campanian cities, including Pompeii. Led by a European (France-Italy) and interdisciplinary team (archeology, archaeometry, ancient history, history of archeology, art history, anthropology), this research program will work in stages, leading to completion: 1 - A study of architectural structures and décors of the city of Herculaneum 2 - A protocol of analysis of “décors in context” in a socio-cultural perspective (knowledge of the social environment and its inhabitants) 3 - An enhancement of the heritage of Herculaneum and a lecture of domestical surroundings through 3D renditions of buildings. 4 - A reflection on the interactions and social mixity within ancient urban landscape. Vesuvia project is innovative in that it seeks to transcend traditional disciplinary compartimentalization by combining all available sources on an ancient site. The purpose is to produce a comprehensive analysis centered on ancient urban society, but also to be attentive to different readings and interpretations that have been rendered since the eighteenth century. So far, the study of the Roman people’s material cultures has been little exploited as a source within a socio-historical study, historians focusing generally on written sources. This primacy of literary and epigraphic documents could be countered, in Herculaneum, by the wealth of material source, which prove more numerous and more reliable than literary sources in particular, in regards to the study of domestic life. Though some attemps were made to exploit material cultures in the analysis of the Pompeii, they strangely enough chose to exclude any analysis of décors (murals, mosaics, sculpture), despite the amount of information provided by such living environment on the social status of the people, the occupation of space by individual inhabitants (by gender, social origin and place in the familia) and circulation within the house. The Vesuvia project is also innovative in that it aims to use the tools and analytical frameworks of contemporary geographers and anthropologists so as to establish clear pattern of people-city interactions within an ancient society. It outlines the social mixity and "gendered" occupation of urban space. It also mobilizes the most cutting-edge technologies in terms of analysis of both techniques of ancient décor (with LRMH) and 3-D reconstructions (with Archéotransfert) in order to provide the public with a renewed and live vision of the ancient city Herculaneum, with a concern for the development and dissemination of scientific research.

The study of discourse is of particular interest for understanding the linguistic and cognitive difficulties of people with neurodegenerative diseases. Analyzing fluency and disfluencies (hesitations, reformulations, interruptions, errors, pauses, prosodic organization) in such studies is particularly crucial since they reflect a good command of language skills and allow us to distinguish between different types of impairments, in particular with regard to primary progressive aphasias (PPA). These are characterized by predominant deficits in language skills and are considered as atypical variants of Alzheimer's disease on the one hand and frontotemporal dementias on the other. A distinction is made between fluent - semantic and logopenic - and non-fluent variants of PPA. In an elderly population with or without neurodegenerative pathology (typical or atypical Alzheimer's disease and front-temporal dementias), this project aims to: 1) characterize the nature of the disfluencies observed during oral production of discourse and during reading; 2) specify the understanding of their neural and cognitive causes according to the type of disorders; 3) investigate the impact of a potential history of oral or written language developmental disorders on their manifestations.

The CLASS project aims to examine the links between the development of intercultural sensitivity and the restructuring of the conceptual system of the second language learner in a migratory context as it manifests itself in the lexicon, the understanding and treatment of figurative expressions, the conceptualization of events and the construction of the narrative. The project is particularly interested in Arabic-speaking refugees or asylum seekers from Syria who are learners of French as a second language at the French university. While being in the field of language acquisition and cognition, it relies on collaboration with experts in intercultural psychology. The project thus aims to develop an innovative multidisciplinary methodology to collect and analyze intercultural, language and eye-tracking data with the aim of characterizing precisely the evolution of the two variables (intercultural sensitivity and restructuring of the conceptual system) through time. The project is innovative in several ways: (i) It focuses on a learner profile that is difficult to access and rarely studied in the field of second language acquisition. The targeted learners, increasingly present on French territory, have an atypical life and training trajectory. (ii) It adopts a recent approach and an innovative methodology allowing to take into account the differences in the learners’ intercultural profiles and the way in which the differences determine or influence second language acquisition. The multidisciplinary methodology will also make it possible to combine qualitative and quantitative data and to gain access, thanks to the technology of eye tracking, to cognitive processing during the performance of language tasks. (iii) It will generate unprecedented longitudinal data whose interpretation and analyses will contribute to a better understanding of language acquisition in a migratory context by disadvantaged learners, a profile largely neglected by second language acquisition research for several decades. Regarding the benefits of the project: (i) Given the lack of work on second culture acquisition and its manifestations at cognitive and language level and the little perspective on language acquisition and conceptual development in a migratory context, the results of the CLASS project will bring new insights into the development of the conceptual system in L2 in general, and that of the Arabic-speaking learner of French L2 in particular. (ii) This research will also make it possible to understand the intercultural trajectories of learners from a culture and L1 that are different from the culture and language of the host society, and who evolve in difficult living conditions with often limited opportunities for interaction in L2. (iii) Finally, the results of the project may ultimately contribute to the design of pedagogical environments and activities allowing the development of intercultural competence and to contribute to the improvement of educational practices with migrant populations. This JCJC project will allow the project leader to consolidate her research on language acquisition by Arabic-speaking migrants within her team. In particular, it will allow her to deepen the issues emanating from the SOFRA project (2018-2020) and to tackle the many scientific obstacles that this research involves, benefiting from different expertise brought by the members of the consortium (in cognitive, acquisitional and intercultural development). Finally, it will allow her to expand her solid experience in the field and the target population, and to generate a substantial body of longitudinal data that can make a real contribution in the field of second language acquisition.

Drawing on Michel Foucault, many contemporary sociological works criticize social institutions by focusing on the ways in which those institutions control, limit and discipline bodies. Fewer pieces – with notable exceptions – have concentrated on the disciplinarization of minds. By scrutinizing the social production and framing of feelings and emotions, ETHOPOL will analyze institutional work as a specific pedagogy that transforms not only our identities and behaviors, but also our feelings and judgments. Members of ETHOPOL will focus on policies that aim at transforming subjectivity, in order to detect practical forms of power and government that are deployed onto and into their subjects’ “inwardness”. Hence, rather than focusing on biopolitics (which directs the lives of people), we will focus on actions that regulate feelings and redefine ethical relations to the self and to the world, a relation we define as “ethopolitics”. Unlike many contemporary approaches, ETHOPOL does not aim to describe the affective dimension of actions; we rather intend to analyze how affectivity becomes the main – if not exclusive – object of regulation policies. In fact, ethopolitics seems to encompass specific forms of social intervention, which endeavor to transform how people think (including about themselves), how they formulate moral values and judgments, and how they feel. Members of ETHOPOL have decided to focus on family intimacy to observe these dynamics – and more specifically on institutions that produce, correct, authorize, and/or impede family ties. These institutions have been carefully selected for being complementary to one another. Either belonging to public, associative or business sectors, they intervene in various fields: social work, health care, moral expertise, etc. Five different objects have been selected as sites in which to observe these processes of ethical alteration: international adoption, gestational surrogacy, paternity testing, postnatal depression, and IVF refusal. These objects share a similar but paradoxical dynamic. All five include institutions which aim to intervene in order to support, help, or appease. However, these interventions can be perceived as a means of transforming their participants’ relations to the self and to others, and which – by “working on” their affectivity – compels individuals to concur with the process to which they have been subjected. Thus, for example, adults who are engaged by Adoption Bureaus experience a transformation of their parental desires; parents by gestational surrogacy are confronted to moral and ethical dilemmas that surround the relationship between their child and his/her biological mother; individuals who resort to paternity testing question their paternal love; women suffering from postnatal depression are cured from their so-called inability to “mother”; and, finally, people who are denied IVF have to cope with a refusal based upon an expertise which judges them inapt to parenthood. Due to the fact they are “taken in charge”, all these people experience – in different ways – an evolution of their own judgments, wills, desires, and also their convictions, opinions and ways of being. As such, they experience a policy that “directs” them by arousing their voluntary adhesion to a process that limits and frames their desires and affects (rather than undergoing a mere discipline that would “correct” them by imposing new forms of action and/or behavior). Newly convinced subjects, they are now expected to feel how purposeful and well-founded enacted norms are. This project is part of a broader theoretical perspective, which aims at unifying the critique of framing processes with the comprehensive analysis of their effects, by focusing on “inwardness”. As such, ETHOPOL will help to understand sensitive marks of the government of self, and to develop a new reflection on these “ethopolicital” subjective transformation policies.

We cannot wait much longer. The Bassar region in Northern Togo is an exceptional place to study the history of ironworkers and the impact of their activities on the society and the environment. In spite of the disappearance of traditional ironworking, its memory is still alive and regularly studied and the high quality of Bassar ore still attracts modern industry. This human and cultural heritage will soon be lost if an international (France, Togo, the United States) and interdisciplinary (ethnology, archaeology, archaeometry, geology, metallurgy, geography and anthracology) team is not deployed to this region. Previously completed and current research will allow us to get straight to the essentials. After agriculture, iron metallurgy profoundly revolutionized the organization, economy and technology of human communities. Its widespread adoption forever transformed soils and landscapes. These effects are currently accepted today, but the scale, intensity and chronology are still not well understood in many respects. The Bassar region offers a unique framework for advancing on these issues. The SIDERENT project is diachronic and its main aims are: - To study the technoly, volume and quality of the iron produced; - To study the methods of natural resource exploitation; - To study the impact of this ironworking on the society and the environment. The central pillar of the SIDERENT project, on which its strength and its ambitions are based, is thus to answer important questions about the interactions of Humans and the Environment by the close collaboration of all relevant science domains (human, natural and physical).