IEA

Like all Institutes for Advanced Studies the primary mission of the Nantes Institute is to assist scholars in their intellectual creativity and to help them bring their innovative projects to a successful conclusion. Applications from all candidates are welcome, no discipline or subject being banned.

The main ambition of the Nantes Institute for Advanced Studies is to widen studies and human sciences to views different than those expressed by the Western academics. Instead of considering other major civilisations as mere subject of study or objectives for missionaries, the Institute aspires to create a new style of intellectual relationship between the countries of the ‘north’ and ‘south’.The so-called "developed" countries (very roughly the countries of North America, Europe, Australia and Japan) have until recently dominated the social sciences, treating "the rest" of the world - that is, 85% of the world’s population today - more as objects of inquiry or as students than as real partners. Even today the vast majority of researchers invited to "Northern" conferences or universities come from the North, while "Southern" academics are welcomed in significant numbers only in the context of area studies. This tendency will ultimately lock the social sciences into a self-referential loop with the illusory belief that their categories of thought are universal and timeless.

While some exceptional scholars of course went their own way (we are thinking of people like Jacques Berque or Marcel Griaule), this was and still is the general trend. At the most we acknowledge nowadays that these civilisations possess aesthetic or philosophical "resources" which we can appropriate just as we do mined or botanical ones, or else that these should be consigned to museums to save them from extinction.

The goal of the Nantes IAS is different. It implies that the small academic community that will gather every year at the Institute must be composed of scholars with widely differing intellectual and cultural baggage but who share the same type of perplexity and whose projects have enough elements in common. However, research projects do not themselves have to have a "North-South" dimension. To take an example from our first year of Fellows: we welcomed a European historian working on Europe, who felt that Europe could be better understood by working alongside Southern colleagues who could view the subject from the outside.

Living and working under the same roof for several months enables the residents of the Institute to confront the way they perceive issues that thanks to globalisation are common to everyone. The Institute aims to become a place of mutual learning and a breeding-ground for lasting ties and collaborations between intellectuals and artists from all continents, thus helping to fight unilateralism that leads scholars from the southern hemisphere to adopt northern values and methods.