Social sciences of work and politics have poorly documented the relationship between health and political activity. However, research focusing on elected representatives suggests that there is a need to study this subject. On the one hand, the literature emphasises the intensity of political work, on the other hand, it reminds us that dedication is a central component of the political ethos. This tension, which is structurally inscribed in political activity, invites us to consider the health of elected representatives as an object of research. To do so, we hypothesise that tensions between, on the one hand, multiple forms of testing and wear and tear resulting of the requirements of the function, which can potentially degrade health, and, on the other hand, injunctions to dedication and norms of conduct requiring good health, affect the exercise of political mandate(s). The ELUSAN project, which focuses on professional elected officials (national and local), will contribute to enriching and renewing knowledge of the political profession, by combining contributions from the sociology of work and political science. The objective is to answer four linked questions: What are the salient features of the working conditions of elected representatives? How do tacit professional norms on health circulate in the political field? How has the institutional protection of elected officials' health been differentiated and unequal? How is health inscribed in work experiences and political careers? Finally, the ELUSAN project seeks to make a double break. A break with ordinary but also indigenous discourses that tend to deny any physical or psychological weaknesses to elected representatives and a break with academic approaches to politics that do not consider health as a significant component of political activities.

In the context of agriculture increasingly relying on groundwater irrigation, it is crucial to develop reliable and applicable methods for assessing the sustainability of agricultural systems under climate change. A wide variety of models have been developed for ex-ante evaluation of management policies or assessment of the impacts of land-use changes. They are commonly used to support decision making by stakeholders through participatory approaches. However, due to the difficulty in implementing truly trans-disciplinary projects, the models rarely represent both the complex biophysical processes at stake in agricultural watersheds and the farmer adaptation strategies to changes. Consequently, these models are not able to adequately account for the spatial and temporal interactions and feed-backs between these two components. The Indian context is an extreme case where the integration of these components is both essential and challenging: the “groundwater revolution” which started three decades ago and induced a well identified “groundwater crisis” with tremendous impacts on water resources and ecosystems, is being carried out by millions of very small farmers owning individual borewells, with a large diversity of practices and strategies. The ATCHA project aims to accompany the adaptation of farming systems to climate change by combining an integrated biophysical model with a participatory approach in a network of experimental watersheds in the Karnataka state. Through a truly trans-disciplinary approach, involving hydrologists, geochemists, soil scientists, agronomists, geographers, economists and sociologists and with a strong participation of Indian partners including scientists, extension service agents and stakeholders, we aim at demonstrating the ability of integrated models to share knowledge between researchers and stakeholders and to co-build and assess scenarios of sustainable development of agriculture. The ATCHA project is based on (1) the strong partnership initiated with the International Joint Laboratory IFCWS (Indo-French Cell for Water Sciences, involving the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore) which allowed to build an extensive database in the Berambadi experimental watershed (Critical Zone Observatory, ORE BVET) and (2) a specific Indo-French project (CEFIPRA AICHA, 2013-2016) in which an integrated model combining hydrology (AMBHAS), agronomy (STICS), economy (MoGire) and farmer decision (Namaste) models was developed. The ATCHA project will complement the Sujala III project (2014-2019), led by the Karnataka Watershed Department and in which IFCWS takes part in the coordination of the monitoring carried out in 14 experimental watersheds across the Karnataka state. The ATCHA project is composed of 3 work packages (in addition to the coordination WP): i) development of novel methodologies to gather spatialized information on soils and land use, using both ground and multi-satellite data at high spatial and temporal resolution ii) improvement of the model realism by calibrating a large number of tropical crops and bridging knowledge gaps for modelling nutrient cycles in tropical irrigated agro-systems and iii) development of a participatory approach to build and assess scenarios of adaptation to climate change and its critical assessment. We expect the ATCHA project to produce not only significant scientific advances on the functioning of agro-hydrosystems under high anthropogenic pressure but also to have a strong socio-economic impact, in terms of capacity building for the Indian partners (in particular for crop and agro-system modelling), improving the relevance of advice given to farmers by extension services and the efficiency of public policies.

This multi-disciplinary study examines the changing nature and contexts of human contact with great apes and monkeys in equatorial Africa and the health consequences of that contact. The nature of “contact” has been addressed by biomedical researchers, but not by social scientists. We will bring together historical, anthropological, geographic and biological analyses to provide a fuller description of how contact, its nature and significance have changed over time and shaped human health. This social sciences study will insert the complexity and variability of human practice and historical, geographical processes into studies of zoonotic transmission and disease emergence. Focusing on selected diseases that have emerged in part through human-nonhuman primate interactions, our study will offer robust multi-disciplinary, social sciences understanding of past dynamics of disease emergence and insight into present and future ones. We will set the foundation for a metagenomic study of enterotypes shared by humans and great apes -- of paramount interest because these interactions are the ground zero of potential pathogens entering human bodies.

Humans tend to spontaneously use space in order to think, externally represent (e.g., calendars), and even talk about a variety of non-spatial domains (e.g., time). The general consensus is that mentally spatializing information constitutes a functional feature of working memory, whereby any ordinal/serial information is coded within a spatial framework. However, while developmental studies suggest that this ability might be innate, continuous throughout development, and tied to biological and evolutionary factors, studies on adults suggest that it begins late in life following instruction, and that it is entirely limited to attentional biases dictated by cultural practices. By associating two researchers with opposite views in an adversarial collaboration, the goal of this project is to bring together competing theories in order to create a unified, comprehensive description of humans’ ability to use a mental space for actively representing and retrieving sequential information, from birth and across the lifespan. Through studies in human newborns, infants, and adults, we will shed light into the origins, developmental course, and functional properties of this ability, asking whether it is functional from birth, how it is modulated throughout the first years of life, what are its behavioral signatures and underlying biases, and whether and how this ability impacts learning across different domains of information across the lifespan. The findings from this project will have critical implications for theoretical models of learning and memory across the lifespan and have practical applications at both the educational and rehabilitation levels.