Project research :"The Impact of New Technologies and Capital on the Chinese Music Industry" WIPO set “Get up, stand up. For music” as the theme of World IP Day on April 26, 2015, which has been perplexing people all over the world who enjoy, create, record and distribute music. This research will explore the impact of new technologies such as those applied in the recording and access of music and capital on the music industry in China in order to truly understand the relationship between property ownership and technology and capital. Site LI’s hypothesis is that it is the unique Chinese ownership system and the country’s political institutions that play significant roles in this process through manipulation of laws and other political/economic/cultural regulations in regard to new technologies and capital. The music industry has suffered most and has had to change drastically. Ideally, this research will be deepened using cases from other countries. Biography Site Li obtained a Master’s Degree from Sun Yat-Sen University in 2005 and a Doctoral degree in legal theory at Peking University in 2009. Since 2009, he has worked at South China Normal University and was promoted to associate professor in 2015. He has taught several courses including jurisprudence, law and politics, sociology of law, and Chinese legal culture. His research interests are jurisprudence and the sociology of law and his recent research focuses on the interplay between intellectual property law and culture industry. In addition, he is interested in interdisciplinary research on law and culture and has published several articles in various Chinese academic journals. He is also the principal investigator of the project entitled “Copyright Problems about Music”.

Research project: "Dialogue with Justice Alam" His research interests are focused on socio-legal and political theory, law and culture, human rights law, comparative law and comparative constitutionalism. Understanding postcolonial constitutionalism, especially the developments related to the languages of human rights in the global South, contemporary social and legal theory, and comparative studies. He also has long term interest in the ideas of law and rights and the trajectories of their circulation and transformation, especially in, but not confined to, India. Biography Sitharamam Kakarala teaches Law and Justice in a Globalizing World and Comparative Public Law/Systems of Governance. He joined Azim Premji University from Glocal University, Uttar Pradesh where he was the Vice Chancellor. Prior to that, he was briefly a Visiting Professor in Bengaluru and for much longer periods a Professor at the Centre for Culture and Society and at the National Law School of India, Bangalore.

Research project : "(In)justice in Urdu Poetry: between Ghalib and Faiz" The research proposes to examine the sense of (in)justice in Ghalib’s works, his Urdu poetry and letters, and then to compare it with the ideal of justice in the work of Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Ghalib (1797-1869) is recognized as one of the greatest Urdu poets. Faiz (1911-1984), who came over a hundred years after Ghalib, is equally recognized as another great poet of Urdu. Both Ghalib and Faiz lived in times that were turning points in the history of the sub-continent, though in very different ways. Ghalib lived at a time when British colonial power, following its suppression of the revolt of 1857, finally took over Delhi and snuffed out the last symbol of the Mughal rule, such that the social and juridical order around the Last Mughal also collapsed. It was in this context, of the fall of the ancien regime, that Ghalib wrote his poetry. Alive to the social tensions of the time, Ghalib, in one of his couplets said: "Faith pulls me back even as I am beckoned by heresy; the K’aaba is behind me and in front of me is the church". Faiz, a century later, watched the imperial/colonial power exiting India. Freedom for the sub-continent, however, brought with it partition, which, in turn, unleashed one of the worst periods of social strife and communal killings in the history of the world. Imbued with a Marxist world-view, Faiz heralded the dawn of the post-colonial order, but also saw the souring of the dream of a just social order. Writing of the morning of independence, Faiz said that it "was night-bitten and showed only patches of brightness/sunshine; it was not the object of their quest". Both the periods of time in which Ghalib and Faiz lived saw deep and far reaching changes that transformed the very basis of their society. It would be both interesting and instructive to examine how these historical changes impacted the idea of justice of those times, and of the two poets individually. The study seeks to identify motifs of law, rights and justice in the poetry of the two men, locate these articulations in the socio-political milieu of their times, and reflect on the larger themes that these motifs suggest. Biography Aftab Alam was born in Patna (India). He enrolled as an Advocate and practiced in the areas of Criminal, Labor and Constitutional Laws at the High Court in Patna. He was designated a Senior Counsel by the Patna High Court at the relatively young age of 36. Six years later, he was appointed a Judge of the Patna High Court. He served as a High Court judge for over seventeen years and as a judge of the Supreme Court of India for about six years. He belongs to that very small band of persons in the Indian Judiciary whose years on the bench far exceed the number of years as a Lawyer. While at the Supreme Court, Justice Alam delivered some notable judgments on criminal sentencing, investigative journalism in pending criminal trials, State subsidy for the Haj pilgrimage, and in the areas of Environmental and Patent Laws, etc. After his retirement from the Supreme Court, he was appointed Chairperson of the Telecom Dispute Settlement Appellate Tribunal, a specialized adjudicating authority for Telecommunication related disputes. Besides Law, Aftab Alam is deeply interested in classical Urdu and Persian Poetry and studies in Sufism. He is due to retire from the Telecom Tribunal in June 2016 and looks forward to spending time on Poetry and other pursuits.

Mystical movements in Islam are not only the domain of a minority of contemplatives cut off from the world: Sufi brotherhoods bring together millions of followers from all over the world. Mysticism represents one of the most important aspects of potentiality in Islamic religious life. This conference will look back at the history of these very diverse movements, their main doctrines and practices and their impact on literature and the arts. The talk will also discuss some of the more striking personalities of this mysticism as well as its role in the modern world.

Research project : "Representation and Immersion" The project investigates the relationship between representation and immersion. It aims to show how today’s digital environments recompose and reorganize the possibility of a simulation by imitation (mimèsis) such as it might have been suggested and theorized in the past. It is first necessary to carry out archaeological and genealogical research on imitation in order to place the question in the long-term context of esthetic and poetic theories. However, representation and immersion take place within an entirely different framework as this illusory simulation no longer acts as a simple imitation but as a representation - the reiteration of an initial presence – and as a substitution when an immersive environment is created. It thus becomes apparent that the question is not simply esthetic but that it also concerns the relationship with the world around us. Does the immersive environment produced by digital objects generate over time a “new reality” which supplements or even replaces the immediate reality? Biography Jacques Athanase Gilbert is a Professor of General and Comparative Literature at Nantes University. His background is both literary and philosophical. He defended his thesis on the subject La relique under the guidance of Henri Meschonnic in 1990.This work looks at the special status of relics between presence and representation.In 1995, he joined Nantes University as a lecturer in the faculty of Foreign Languages and Civilizations where he fulfilled an administrative and pedagogical role. He went on to develop his research into questions of presence and representation, more specifically in their esthetic and religious dimensions. His work deals with a long period, from Antiquity to the Classical Age.From the beginning of the 2000s, he took a keen interest in the digital transformation which he immediately saw from a perspective of digital representation and simulation of the world. This led him to consider the issues of immersion which he studies both as technological environment substitution and as a “symbolic form” embodied in cultural anthropology.

Research project : "Creating a Life Alongside the Law" The research proposes to study and produce an ethnography based on fieldwork in Mersin, a coastal city in the south of Turkey where Kurds who have been forcefully displaced from their villages in the 1990s have migrated to. They have been able to build a life for themselves there, a life which is not strictly speaking within the law. Sociological/anthropological studies have called this "the informal sector" and other such names. The researcher, by contrast, aims to question two concepts in this context: what exactly is the law, and what does it mean to be alongside the law; and, secondly, what do we understand from the notion of "a life," what constitutes a life? Biography Nükhet Sirman is a Turkish anthropologist who has worked in the department of sociology at Boğaziçi University since 1989. Having completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at University College, London in 1988, she has worked on peasant farms in cotton production, feminist movements, honor crimes and violence against women, gender construction under nationalist discourses, Kurdish women’s movements and the settlement of internally displaced persons. She has also been a feminist activist working for peace. She has written academic as well as more popular and political articles on these topics, both in English and in Turkish.

Research project : "Islamic plurality in Côte d’Ivoire: actors and issues" Muslims have been the majority in Côte d’Ivoire for a very long time. But this majority is only numeric because for decades, they have had little influence on Ivorian society from both a sociological and political point of view. Islamic actors have become more and more numerous and have obtained the right to the city. They have gone from a posture of cooperation to one of demands and negotiation with the State. The various political and social crises have reinforced this posture. The typology of Islamic actors present and the issues that motivate them will help to better identify and understand their activities on the ground. Biography Mathias Boukary Savadogo, Ivorian, is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Félix Houphouët-Boigny University in Cocody-Abidjan, Côte d’ Ivoire. He is a specialist in contemporary Islam and is in charge of History of Religions in Africa. He supervises the students’ research for the various cycles of the Department (Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD). Under the direction of Professor Jean - Louis Triaud, he defended a thesis in history on the Tijaniyya Hamawiyya in Sahelian and forested areas of West Africa. As well as Muslim Sufi movements, Mathias Boukary Savadogo is interested in the transformations of Islam in Africa. To this end, he founded a research group focused on the Transformations of Islam in Africa (GRETIA).

This lecture argues for the role of the ‘law’ as a fundamental connector in history using the example of how this operated within ‘maritime’ and ‘global’ history. By focussing on how medieval and early modern dialogue and exchange between various traditions of maritime laws (in the plural), created a flexible institutional framework which integrated and connected the early modern world, and formed the basis of international law, I shall also argue for the need to reassessing the fundamental importance of the Mediterranean within scholarship concerned with global history.

Research Project : "Ecological urbanism in the urban planning process. The issue of green spaces in the face of shifting paradigms" This research reflects on the reproduction of urban green spaces within changing contexts and related socio-economic issues. It refers to urban ecological precepts which provide new methodological principles that contribute to their design renewal. These involve management methods in the field of sustainable development strategy, taking into account the effects of the fragility of these green spaces on maintenance costs. Within the framework of urban ecological planning, the study examines the relationship between scientific research and operational activities. It suggests the problem of interdisciplinary research as a concept of multifunctional development approach, with regard to biodiversity and ambivalences that characterize this correlation. These types of open spaces are considered as places of “mediance” relating to social practices and civic implications. The investigations aim to interpret the created innovations in the light of changes implying the exploration of "urban resilience" as a concept in progress. Biography Ammara Bekkouche is an architect and urban planner graduated from the Polytechnic School of Architecture and Urbanism of Algiers (EPAU) and retired Professor of Higher Education in Algeria. She taught architecture and urban planning at the University of Science and Technology of Oran (USTO). Presently she is associate-researcher at the Centre for Research in Social and Cultural Anthropology (CRASC) in Oran. Following on from her earlier work on ecological urban planning, her research focuses on public green spaces examined through the lens of multifunctional practices, methods and management including urban development professions. Her investigations on urban design have led her to study different aspects of urban ecology in relation to environmental issues integrating social practices in economic valuation of green spaces. In addition to the quantifiable standards that characterize the "intermediate space" administration, sociocultural meanings are required as symbolizing the historical heritage and identity of the place. They refer to urban resilience issues and the adaptability of socio-ecological landscapes. The examination of ambivalences related to the paradigms in place contributes to ecological knowledge production through emerging concepts such as mediance and capabilities.