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.

The LIMINAL project focuses on the interactions and mediations between migrants and institutional, associative and informal actors in situations of migration and humanitarian crises, as they have been developing in France since 2015 (increasing number of refugee camps, refugee shelters and welcome centers). Although linguistic and intercultural interactions and mediations in the context of international migration and humanitarian emergency have major social impact, they have never been studied by national and international research programs. They are, however, in line with the priority challenges of the European Union (H2020). LIMINAL's multidisciplinary team brings together anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, linguists, sociolinguists and semioticians from three major research centers from the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) –The America, Africa and Asia Center for Social Sciences (CESSMA), the Center on Plurality of Languages and Identities: Didactics, Acquisition and Mediation (PLIDAM) and the Center for Studies and Research on Literatures and Oralities (CERLOM), to which are attached researchers specialized in migration and mediation from other French Centers (Triangle/ENS Lyon, URMIS and CRPMS from University Paris Diderot) and the SOAS (University of London). They will work together on the interactions and practices of mediation in five major languages: Urdu, Farsi, Dari, Amharic, and Arabic. The team will conduct field studies in pairs (anthropologists-sociologists and sociolinguists) in refugee camps and centers of three zones in France: Paris and suburbs, Hauts-de-France, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, as well as in two border towns (Dover and Ventimiglia). LIMINAL is thus an action-oriented research on sensitive fieldworks, requiring the respect of an ethical charter for the collection and exploitation of data. It is based on several theoretical hypotheses, including (i) the interest of questioning interactions and mediations for a better understanding of the strategies of the actors; (ii) the impact of institutional and informal contexts on mediation situations; (iii) key role of the interpreter-mediator in facilitating mediation with migrants (iv) the need to develop adequate training tools in response to the constant demands of the actors in the field. To answer these proposals, LIMINAL will develop an original and reflective methodology based on the collaboration between researchers and professional and associative actors, in particular Emmaüs Solidarité (Paris) and the Migrants Service Platform (network of 24 associations working on refugee camps in Hauts-de-France). Through the collection and analysis of verbal and non-verbal, textual, audio and audiovisual data, the LIMINAL project aims to (i) constitute a multilingual digital platform based on lexico-terminological data in order to document poorly known migrant populations and their use of languages in migration contexts (ii) produce an audio-visual corpus on key situations of interaction and mediation (iii) create scientific and pedagogical tools for the training of interpreters-mediators (development of training modules, proposal of glossaries and lexicons). These deliverables will be developed thanks to the expertise of members of the consortium working with the digital environment (audiovisual archives of research, HAL-INALCO, INALCO digital humanities presses) and external members (INA, TELECOM PARIS TECH). The LIMINAL project aims at responding in an innovative way to the understanding of migration issues and their treatment, focusing on the challenges of welcoming migrants in France and Europe.

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.

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.

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.