PROCIT is a project backed by an international, multidisciplinary network around the topic of “Local identities in the Mediterranean” and is intended to explore the theme of citizenship from the perspective of property and the rights pertaining thereto. It will focus on the modern era. This project is intended as a contribution to research on processes of social integration and the nature of the socio-economic and legal inequalities that determine the direction of that integration and are, simultaneously, its products. Two decisions in particular characterize this project: the decision to deal with the connected dimensions of citizenship, integration, and inequalities in the longue durée history of Mediterranean societies (from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries); and the decision to situate these themes in a deliberately comparative perspective, on the basis of research carried out in Europe, North Africa, Palestine, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire. The eighteenth scholars working together on the PROCIT project are from institutions rooted in these different countries. Together, they can already boast a shared experience of work and collaboration. The notion of citizenship considered in this project does not refer to the formal political prerogatives of which nation-state members can avail themselves, but rather to the set of rights to which one has access as a result of acknowledged belonging to a particular place. These rights conferred by belonging, in the societies we wish to analyze, are the point of origin of differential access to resources (such as the market, property, credit, work, charity, etc.), which structure the social scale. The term “citizenship” thus refers to a status where access rights to resources encounter the social recognition of these rights as well as the ability to claim them. Our research is thus focused on the processes that have produced this status in different societies north and south of the Mediterranean. In this project, property has appeared as a fundamental variable shared by different societies. In modern societies, the notion of property refers to a vast semantic field, which cannot be reduced to material wealth alone. Differential access to property rights not only outlines economic hierarchies or symbolic primacies; it also creates prerogatives that occupy individuals more broadly. In a wide range of cases, the condition of “citizen” or subject of a central authority is closely linked to the recognition of one’s capacity to access property or to transmit it. In modern societies of the northern and southern Mediterranean, relations to things create social statuses, relations, and ties, and grant access to rights related to belonging. The ability to exercise property rights traces the outline of local communities, and, as a result, of wider territorial communities. Access to property, in that sense, is an essential phase in every process of social integration. This major investigation into citizenship in the northern and southern Mediterranean requires painstaking comparative analysis. The comparison implemented here avoids culturalism entirely and is based on reasoned, methodologically informed empiricism. It will explore an original method, based on sources. This method must allow us to grasp practice as closely as possible to the documentary systems that shape and show them. This will allow the researchers to build a relevant questionnaire and explanatory framework together. This method requires close coordination among scholars, who will choose among three thematic axes: access to the market; creating trusts (“off-market” goods); and finally, wealth transmission practices. Two historians specialized in each theme in the northern and southern Mediterranean will coordinate each axis and organize the comparative work.

This project aims to generate major breakthroughs in the quantification of ecosystem services provided by biodiversity in agro-ecosystems in the lower Mekong basin, a region facing dramatic environmental and societal changes. In this region, paddy fields appear as mosaics owing to the presence of mounds built by termites. While these structures seem comparable to hedgerows or bocage areas in temperate ecosystems, their impacts on the sustainability of agricultural systems and the livelihood of farmers remain unknown. Therefore, ECO-TERM project proposes to characterize and quantify the ecological (e.g., impact on animal and plant biodiversity), environmental (e.g., impact on soil and water dynamic, pesticide utilization, rice resistance and production) as well as socio-economical processes (e.g., impact on food security, human health, and farmer’s incomes) impacted by these patches of biodiversity and fertility in Cambodia, in adequacy with the axis 1.6 and the Sustainable Development Goals n°1, 2, 3, 8, 12, 13, 15 and 17. This project is built around 3 inter-connected scientific work packages (WPs) and on a WP dedicated to the coordination of cross-cutting activities and the co-construction of knowledge by making farmers and scientists interact within participatory workshops. This project brings together 5 French academic partners and self-funded research units in Cambodia, one local NGO, and one society specialized in the utilization of participatory modelling and role playing games. It requires the recruitment of a PhD student, with transversal activities between WP, and a postdoc for two years (only one year requested to ANR) for the construction of econometric models.

Situated within the fields of gender studies and research on contemporary parenthood, the objective of this project is to analyze how new family forms (created through adoption or gamete donation), relate to the question of “origins”. These issues have been the subject of recent public interest in France but have been the focus of very little empirical social science research, especially from the perspective of individuals who joined their families through adoption, gamete donation, or surrogacy. Two hypotheses will be explored by this project: 1) The relationship to origins does not create parents in the legal sense of the term, but contributes to the construction of these individuals’ identities; 2) The concept of origins reveals an important change in the growing disassociation between procreation and parenthood that produces new relationships and roles: when using new reproductive technologies, some individuals involved do not become parents, but remain at the “edges” of kinship. To examine these edges, the group’s 11 researchers will engage an interdisciplinary (history, anthropology, sociology, and law), empirical, and comparative (France, Belgium, Italy, United Kingdom, Quebec, United States, Brazil) approach to analyzing the roles and relationships historically associated with the notion of origins and parenthood in these countries. This project will allow us to analyze new forms of family life by comparing different social, cultural, political, and judicial spaces. The collective work of the research group will be supported by an online platform and four workshops that will occur over the course of the project, structured around three transversal axes: 1) Origin stories: narrative logics, traces, and materiality; 2) Relationships created by origin; 3) Hazards of origins. Findings of this project will allow for a better understanding of new relationship configurations and future transformations related to adoption or assisted reproduction, as well as provide insight to family configurations in the European and American research sites of focus. It will also produce a unique empirical understanding of how individuals confronted with the question of origins construct their relational universes within current family lives. From a social and political perspective, these data can contribute to the legal framework of scientific and medical techniques related to procreation, debates about adoption and access to assisted reproductive technology, and the legalization of surrogacy. Our research will be presented and discussed during our classes and seminars, in international conferences, and during our end-of-project conference. In addition, these findings will be published in high impact scientific journals in English as well as French. Members of this research group will serve as experts for political agencies as well as for organizations, families, and individuals concerned by the subject of origins in new forms of family life, by sharing the results of our research. In collaboration with La Fabrique des écritures innovantes en sciences sociales at the Norbert Elias Center (CNE), this project will also result in animated film produced for children and adolescents living in families created through adoption or assisted medical reproduction.

COMESCOV complements the AEC2-France project funded by REACTing. It is part of two axes of the ANR call: human and social dimensions of the response; preventive measures in health care settings and in population. The objective is to document and analyse the social experience of sanitary measures (containment, isolation, distancing, protection) limiting the transmission of Covid19 in France, Italy and the USA. In a transdisciplinary and multi-site approach, we will address the interpretation, understanding, acceptability, compliance with recommendations, daily practices, adaptations or circumventions for different categories of people in times of pandemic. The speed and acceleration in changing instructions over a short period has confused social actors. Special attention will therefore be paid to the temporality of the social life of the measures from the phases of implementation, routinization, trivialization and end of containment to obtain a situated and contextualized understanding. COMESCOV is part of the Anthropology of Emerging Epidemics Network (RAEE) coordinated by two IRD units. It compte150 Southern and Northern researchers. For example, several teams have worked in 5 countries on a Comparative Anthropology of Ebola (2014-16; Expertise France, Aviesan, Unicef). An intervention programme in line with the WHO's preparedness objective is working on how to co-construct resilience procedures for funeral rites in times of epidemics. Others, in this network, are working on the analysis of the sociological consequences of the epidemic among survivors; on amendments to the response tools; on pedagogical modules and training. These experiences will make it easier to co-construct operational and applied research. The axes are - Protection measures for hospital or private paramedical staff (with the French Red Cross Foundation ant association, and with the European Hospital) - Social experiences of measures by institutional or citizen actors providing assistance to persons confined in vulnerable situations (CRF) - Social experience of "classroom at home" and containment for children and parents (with schools and teachers) - Construction of new sociabilities or professional, relational or playful activities - Induced changes for funeral, burial and mortuary care (with the European Hospital) In an interventional and participative logic, data will be collected using tools co-constructed with other teams (CORAF in Africa; CORACRISE of SESSTIM, Institut Pasteur-Red Cross Foundation Programme on volunteers, etc.) and especially partners in the field (French Red Cross Foundation ant association, White Cross in Italy, European Hospital, etc.). During the course of the programme, we will make contact with other institutions, collectives of social workers, citizen initiatives or individuals in support of people confined in situation of vulnerability. The qualitative methods in social sciences will be observation (direct, remote, by delegation), field diary, ethnographic vignettes, individual and collective interviews, press and documentary reviews. Online and social media surveys, but also remote collection techniques (telephone, videoconferencing), will make it possible to overcome the constraints of confinement faced by researchers. The analyses will be refined by a comparative approach with work carried out in other contexts, previously or simultaneously, in both operational and fundamental terms. Permission to circulate will be requested when in situ surveys are imposed. Good ethical practices (adults and minors) and a data management plan are already defined.

Corporate finance through equities marks the modern period, affecting entire sectors of the economy. The first joint stock companies were inspired at the beginning of the seventeenth century in France models from England and the United Provinces. The ACTIMOD project is a social history project which, with a database of identified shareholders participating in the different companies, should allow to see the social and cultural characteristics of shareholding in France and its evolution, and to highlight a active investor group that weighs on the economic and political choices of the state and announces the influence groups of the contemporary era. They are one of the keys to understanding the economic changes that occur at the end of the modern period.