The MoSAiC project aims to create a European consortium bringing together academic and non-academic partners around the question of the imaginaries, practices and memories of social and political commitment in the contemporary era (19th - 21st century), from the local to the global scale. The European project targeted is the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Staff Exchanges 2023, which will enable the organisation of one-month to one-year mobilities over four years between the various partner institutions. Based on their internationally recognised expertise in the fields of cultural history, the three laboratories behind MoSAiC propose, in a multidisciplinary (history, art history, literature, LLCER, artistic disciplines, etc.) and international approach, to renew the study of the complex process of individual and collective commitment around four axes: from the triple angle of imaginaries, practices and memories; over a long period of time, from the early 19th century to the present day; in a comparative and diachronic perspective. Finally, special attention will be paid to the question of sources, archives and objects available to tell this historical narrative. Thus, through the choice of these perspectives, the MoSAiC project wants to renew the study of social and political commitment in the contemporary era - understood as all actions, individual or collective, within the public space (polis), with a view to influencing public, national or international life. The aim is to encourage an analysis based on thematic entries (such as republican, national and patriotic activism; workers' internationalism; communism; fascism and anti-fascism; the defence of human rights; international solidarity movements; feminism and ecology), crossing the study of imaginaries and practices in order to grasp the representations that both play a role in the process of mobilisation and emanate from the commitment itself. The third dimension, the memory, aims to emphasize the issues of writing the historical narrative of the commitment. Material culture and visual culture in particular will be mobilised here in close dialogue with archivists and museum managers in order to reflect together on the types of sources (written, audiovisual, etc.) and objects to be collected, preserved and developed around the history of commitment in all its facets. Indeed, the originality and innovative character of the MoSAiC project also rests on the choice to develop a programme of mobility between the personnel of research centres, universities on the one hand - and in particular doctoral students - and archive, documentation and exhibition centres on the other. The ambition is to encourage close collaboration between these different institutions, with their respective expertise, in order to jointly reflect on how to better disseminate the results of scientific research to a non-academic public. The mobility programme should also enable a dialogue to be initiated between scientific and artistic approaches and lead to concrete results in various formats: publications, exhibitions (virtual or otherwise), web-documentaries, etc. Taking up the theme of social and political commitment in order to contribute to the democratisation and popularisation of knowledge on a European scale seems to us to be particularly relevant in view of the numerous challenges currently facing democracies in Europe.

Environmental Changes and their Categories of Analysis This project seeks to question the categories that inform our perceptions of environmental changes as dynamics that file continuities and discontinuities between men and their environment. The key objective of the project is to move beyond the dualism between environmental change and social and cultural change, as such dualism informs western ontologies, through an understanding of how this dualism has been produced and how it can be reshuffled. To put it another way, how are such categories produced by humans, negotiating and fighting with human and non-human actors around the way this environment should be understood and possessed? This defines their notion of political and cultural community, within a context of moving environmental and economic constraints. The originality of the consortium lies in the association of different disciplinary research communities, which have already a genuine expertise and maturity on environmental issues, in order to develop an inter-disciplinary approach, but also – and most of all – shape a common space that does not exist yet and will produce lasting effects on the organization of research. No research project funded under the programme “CEP&S” then “SOC&ENV” has yet gathered historians, philosophers, political scientists, agro-ecologist and specialists of American studies in an inter-disciplinary research structure (the Observatory of Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, host of the project), able to initiate a dialogue with specialists of environmental and climatic changes from natural sciences. The method of analysis of the historical and philosophical foundations of the concept of nature is four-pronged: First, which are the ethical and philosophical categories that structure the relationship between man and nature? The originality of the question, which lies on a wide body of literature, is a proposal to unleash the dualism between nature and culture, exploring pairs of tensions such a nature/artifice, or savage/domestic. Second, how are such categories incarnated in cultural forms that are specific to different societies? The originality here lies in a comparison between schemes of arrangement that are historically situated between humans and non-humans, from three different schemes that are close to each other because they are westerners, but yet firmly unlike each other: the wilderness (US), the terra nullius (Australia), and the landscape (France). Third, how do these categories translate into forms of government and how are they tested by extreme events in a contact of environmental changes? Sovereignty here is addressed from the hypothesis of a biotic right that leads to a re-foundation of the cosmopolitics of nature. This hypothesis of political theory will be tested from the most extreme kind of environmental change: the natural disaster, understood as a laboratory, a dream/nightmare for the government of nature, and government at large. Fourth, what is the capacity of researchers to invent and explore new modes of expressing themselves, thus contributing to the construction of more sustainable communities, beyond the borders of academic research? The moving exhibition (in the footsteps of the exhibition ‘Native Land. Stop Eject’ of the Fondation Cartier), the digital writing of history (the programme Narrativesofchange, UVSQ-UNESCO-MEDDE) and the gallery of natural history (the National Museum of Canberra, the Australian Museum of Sydney and the Natural History Museum of Lille) will be mobilized in this cluster. The final output of NATCAT will be a contribution to the opening of new perspectives to make nature our home, from philosophical categories that can be mobilized by communities whose sense of place, renewed by the integration of environmental issues, will make them more able to face upcoming challenges.

The goal of the DEF19 project is to fill a gap in the history of publishing, by developing a Dictionary of 19th-Century French Publishers. Such a tool does not exist yet – for this period (unlike for the 16th-18th centuries), and for this country (unlike other ones, such as Italy or Austria). All these works have proved to be immensely useful. Our aim will therefore be to create a dictionary which is both traditional and innovative. Traditional, in the form of a printed book, since publishing specialists and practitioners tend to prefer classical supports for reading and information. But also innovative, with an online crowdsourcing database, as well as a research blog designed as tools allowing exchange with the academic community. This project brings together various complementary skills : early-career researchers as well as seasoned scholars on the history of the book and publishing, organised around a team from the universities of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ) and Paris-Ouest-Nanterre-La Défense (UPOND), especially the Centre d’Histoire Culturelle des Sociétés Contemporaines (CHCSC), working with professionals of documentation, library and archives who could contribute their collections (from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the French National Archives and the CHCSC), their daily practices and their expertise in the field of dictionaries, directories and databases to the creation of this project. Several scientific events will mark this four-year project, to develop the necessary rigorous methodological framework for data collection as well as for database and dictionary creation and edition. These events will allow us to bring forth the new opportunities for research that will emerge from an exhaustive investigation of an as yet incompletely explored field. As a dictionary, the DEF19 project will be a biographical work, but also a matter of prosopography, which could improve our knowledge of 19th-Century social, economic and cultural history: especially our modern cultural system based on mass culture and on the so-called “civilisation de l’imprimé” (civilisation of the printed word), in which the role of publishers has been and still is essential.

Transcultur@ is a joint research project led by a Franco-Brazilian team of scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Its purpose is to develop an online Dictionary of Transatlantic Cultural History to be published in four languages: English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. This encyclopaedia is conceived as an innovative scientific and technological tool for analyzing the cultural dynamics of the Atlantic Area and its central role in the contemporary process of globalization. The project aims at presenting an interconnected history of the Atlantic Area since the 18th century via a collection of analytical essays exploring the cultural relations between Europe, Africa and the Americas. The project necessarily implies a multidisciplinary approach involving historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, musicologists, or specialists of literature, the visual arts, drama and cinema. Reflecting the most recent research and debates, the dictionary engages the question of transatlantic circulations and cultural globalization as well as the process of identification and the role of borders in the creation and the reshaping of major cultural areas since the 18th century. Supported by the TGIR Huma-Num, Transcultur@ aims at promoting digital humanities in order to measure, map out and analyze transnational cultural circulations in the Atlantic Area. The project will be led by three main partners: the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, the Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 University, and the University of São Paulo.