The event and the structure: Thinking about contingency and permanence in SHSs
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The Centre for Research and Documentation on the Americas is a Joint Research Unit (UMR 7227) under the double supervision of the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 University and the CNRS and is a part of the CREDAL (Centre for Research and Documentation on Latin America), founded in 1968.
CREDA is a basic research unit in the social sciences specialised in the Americas, working mainly under Section 39 of the CNRS. Its main aims are to renew knowledge of the Americas and to develop social sciences through the confrontation of non-European fields – especially countries of the South – interdisciplinarity and exchanges with international researchers. The systematic accumulation of scientific knowledge on the Americas, thanks to the library of Pierre Monbeig and its outreach through IHEAL publishing, have led to a renewal of research topics and methods in order to develop our approach to social sciences.
PALOC, “Local Heritage, Environment and Globalisation” is a multidisciplinary Joint Research Unit (UMR 208) in human and social sciences (anthropologists, archaeologists, ecologists, geographers, curators, botanists, historians, lawyers, surveyors), under the supervision of the French Institute for Research on Development (IRD) and the French National Museum of Natural History (MNHN). Its main campus is located in the Jardin des Plantes (5th arrondissement of Paris).
Its main partners and field offices are located in the Mediterranean, in Eastern and Western Africa, in Asia (India and South-East Asia) and in America (mainly Brazil and Mexico).
In January 2020, PALOC comprised 50 members:
In a challenging global context of ecological and climate crisis, PALOC researchers study the transformation of relationships between societies and their environments, by using a set of complementary concepts and approaches. Heritagisation – whether linked to biodiversity, associated knowledge, territories, etc. – is taken as a starting point to question governance, transmission, commons, regimes of rights to biodiversity and/or the environment), land tenures and knowledge processes from different perspectives.
Conceived as a notion and a mode of action, heritagisation constitutes an object of research to understand, evaluate, accompany and anticipate the transformations taking place in a globalised world. Studies start out from the local logics of actors and institutions, resonating with the national and international bodies, and focus on the interlinking scales in heritage processes; they are attentive to their social, cultural, environmental, legal and political repercussions. The whole contributes to a collective reflection on collaborative and participatory approaches and research.
The scientific aims in the medium term are to: (i) enable a better understanding of the effects of current environmental changes, especially by questioning the notions of transition, vulnerability and resilience in their own spatial and temporal areas, and analysing their socio-political processes and cultural transmission (especially knowledge of biodiversity through the confrontation and hybridisation of local and scientific knowledge); (ii) reinforcing awareness in research programmes of the increasingly intense global environmental crisis, and consolidating the participation of human and social sciences through international platforms (IPBES, UICN); (iii) continuing and developing an ethical reflection on the topic of rights to biodiversity and the related knowledge, especially surrounding the Nagoya Protocol and its integration into research practice; and (iv) making sure that research programme results are delivered and taken up by public institutions and local populations.
The methodological approaches developed by PALOC take account of local stakeholders, of the interweaving scales involved in heritage dynamics, as well as their social, cultural, environmental, legal and political repercussions. They feed into a collective reflection on approaches, and collaborative and participatory research. PALOC research is co-constructed and its modes of delivery are of interest to all the stakeholders involved in the process of heritagisation creation in the North and the South: local communities, regional and national administrative bodies, international bodies, NGOs, private stakeholders, etc.
PALOC is constructed around three scientific strands (Emergence, Appropriation and Uses of Heritage; Globalised Societies and the Environment; Knowledge, Collections and Movement) and transversal work including practical activities (workshops, seminars, reading workshops), teaching and supervision (summer school, Master’s 1 and 2 internships, support for doctoral student research).
The members of PALOC are fully committed to the training of students from undergraduate level L2 at Sorbonne Universities, minor pathway, module in “Local Heritage” and L3 at Sorbonne Universities, minor pathway, module in ‘GIS (Geographic information system)”; the Master’s degree in “Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolution” (BEE) at MNHN with the steering and teaching of the pathway Museology of Natural and Human Sciences (MSNH); participation in modules of the Society and Biodiversity pathway (SeB); and teaching at the ED227 MNHN-UPMC Doctoral School in “Sciences of Nature and Man: evolution and ecology”. PALOC is a unit which hosts students on the BEE Master’s and doctoral students at the ED227 Doctoral School. The Unit is also committed to providing training during summer schools and seminars in France and in the Global South.
The SeDyL Joint Research Unit (Language Dynamics and Structure) is a research and training centre in language sciences under the supervision of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the French Institute for Research on Development (IRD) and the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO).
SeDyL was formed in 2010 by the merger of the CELIA (Centre d’Etude des Langues Indigènes d’Amérique, UMR 8133, founded in 1973) and the Linguistic Circle of INALCO, founded in 1994.
The SeDyL comprises around 45 members, including:
The scientific aims of SeDyL are:
SeDyL focuses on four fields of expertise:
1) the description, documentation and grammaticalisation of world languages;
2) the study of language contacts, linguistic variations and change;
3) linguistic and regional typologies;
4) the study of multilingualism in different contexts (school, health, migration) leading to the critical analysis of linguistic policies.
SeDyL stands out for two major specialisations:
-the joint treatment of less widespread – or even undescribed – languages and languages with an academic tradition, which has led to an abundance of work. This joint approach is adopted as a positioning in order to reach beyond certain purely typological approaches and is central to the editorial line of the unit’s Faits de Langues journal.
– the inclusion at the heart of our scientific projects of a close involvement with the field and the “Global South” countries, where the unit is an important scientific actor cooperating with other scientific bodies in knowledge transfer and dissemination. This specific epistemological positioning is central to our experience of the Global South as the IRD’s only unit in language sciences.
SeDyL has its place in the national and international landscape in two complementary fields:
– the field of the linguistics of language diversity: the unit is a member of the TUL Federation made up of eleven research units nationally, and the EFL LABEX which is formed of eleven Parisian units within the SPC. It also partners regularly with research centres in Germany and the Netherlands (Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Universities of Leiden and Amsterdam), or in the United Kingdom (Manchester, SOAS and King’s College London).
– in the field of research in social sciences of the Global South: the unit is a member of the F3S Federation and is the leader of Package 2 of the LMI MESO. It regularly forms partnerships with universities of the Global South (CIESAS in Mexico, URBA in Cambodia, UNB in Brazil), and is part of a network of research centres specialised in the field of multilingualism in the Global South (MultiLing in Oslo, Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Stockholm), through the Southern Multilingualism and Diversities consortium.
Alongside its central role of knowledge production, as demonstrated by the many publications and the two journals it produces (Amerindia and Faits de Langue), as well as the research outputs (such as the production of corpora, methods or platforms), SeDyL makes sure that society benefits from its work through cooperation (bi-national projects or implication of the communities on which the research is based) or promotion (science and society debates, scientific outreach, translations), as well as training.
SeDyL is also highly committed to training language sciences students in Paris, from bachelor’s to doctoral levels. Our Master’s degrees – especially the INALCO-Paris 3 dual-degree – are an introduction to research practices within our four areas of expertise, each demanding specific methodological and theoretical skills which we teach with a comparative approach to different areas. The unit continues to structure linguistic activities at INALCO, thanks to interdisciplinary linguistics courses for undergraduates, the management of a Master’s in linguistics which is co-accredited with INALCO-Paris 3, and the coordination of 5 doctoral seminars that are open to all.
The Migrations and Society Research Unit (URMIS) is a Joint Research Unit under the supervision of Paris Diderot University and Nice Sophia Antipolis University, the French Institute for Research on Development (IRD, UMR 205) and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS, UMR 8245).
URMIS is multidisciplinary (sociology, anthropology, history, geography, political science, demography), located in Paris and Nice and works in France and internationally
In January 2018, URMIS comprised 60 members:
URMIS is a research unit specialised in questions of migration and movement within the context of the creation of social barriers, whether defined in terms of race, ethnicity, territory, culture, gender, etc. The unit studies the processes of identification, categorisation and redefinition of relations of power driven by the migration of people, ideas and beliefs. It implements a constructivist perspective which considers the ethical and racial dimensions of communities and personal identifications as entirely relational social productions, and looks into their relevance as categories of practice used in situations of conflict, in control measures and social or health policies, or in identity affirmation strategies. The research pays particularly close attention to the effects of globalisation on the opening-up of local spaces, the multiplication of supranational and international decision-making bodies, the growth in transnational networks in economic, cultural or religious exchanges. From January 2019, URMIS will be structured around 3 core themes: Migration and Movement; The Making of Otherness: Racial Questions and Discrimination; Belonging, Mobilisations and the Political Sphere.
The unit hosts two Master’s degrees at Paris Diderot (a vocational M2 and a research M2R in “Migration and Interethnic Relations” which became “Migration, Racism and Otherness” in 2019) and at Nice Sophia Antipolis University (research M2R “Migration and the Otherness”, now “Migration Studies” in 2019 and a vocational M2 in “Sociological Studies and Diagnoses”). The Unit’s aim is to supervise doctoral and post-doctoral students specialised in the fields of migration, the making of “otherness”, of racism and discriminations, as well as the different forms of belonging and political mobilisation.
