Research project: Beyond the boundaries of pleasure and violence: A new social history of sexuality in Beirut This interdisciplinary project focuses on the former Hotel Carlton in Beirut, which had been a central locus of pleasure and violence in Lebanon’s capital over a fifty year period. Methodologically, the project draws on anthropology, history, and literature. The project is a partly fictionalized biography of the Carlton that is based on the examination of administrative and personal records as well as on ethnographic interviews. This approach allows for an assessment of the hotel from an intimate vantage point intended to provide a new social history of sexuality in Lebanon that pays close attention to the social, political, and religious constituents of the country’s capital city. Biography Sofian Merabet is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose expertise lies in the modern Middle East (with a particular focus on Lebanon and Syria) and the wider Muslim world, including Muslim immigrant communities in Europe and the Arab Diaspora in South America (especially Argentina). His interdisciplinary research analyses the human geography of queer identity formations and the social production of queer space as constitutive features of wider class, religious, and gender relations. His professional interests draw on comparative methodologies and approaches ranging from religious and cultural history to the politics of sexuality. With a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in New York, Sofian Merabet has taught at the American University of Beirut, the University of Louisville, and New York University. Since 2009, he has been on the faculty of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas in Austin.

Research project: Leibniz and the “Philosophical Problem of War” This research will focus on two principal lines of war philosophy, i.e. Just War Theory and Source-War Theory. Contrary to the theory that war sets the law (war-source), its goal is to re-engage the modern Just War Theory, particularly some conceptual tools which arise from Leibniz’s thought, with some contemporary issues concerning war. Within this framework, three types of war will be considered: war between nation states, humanitarian intervention and terrorism. The power of Leibniz’s thought is particularly useful: firstly, his distinction between three degrees of natural law (especially strict law and fairness) makes it possible to find criteria in order to justify or condemn some wars; secondly, his reflection on deontic modalities may substantially contribute to defining a formal schema in order to classify the conflicts: justifiable, justified, unjustified and non-compulsory wars. Biography Griselda Gaiada is Doctor in Philosophy from the National University of La Plata (UNLP), Argentina. She works as Ayudante Diplomado Ordinario of Epistemology in the Faculty of Psychology of the UNLP. She is associated researcher in the Centre d’Histoire des Systèmes de Pensée Moderne (Paris 1 University) and in the Philosophy Research Centre in Buenos Aires. Her research areas cover metaphysical, epistemological, juridical and moral subjects of modern and contemporary philosophy, with a particular focus on Leibniz’s thought. In addition to several articles, reviews and translations, she has recently published the book Deo volente. El estatus de la voluntad divina en la Teodicea de Leibniz (Comares, 2015). In July 2016, her PhD thesis received the “VGH-Preis für hervorragende Leibniz-dissertationen”, organised by the Leibniz Universität Hannover and the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz-Gesellschaft.

Project research: West Indian and Guyanese presences in Senegal since the end of the 19th century The French colonisation, cooperation and policies of the black diaspora by the independent African states have created opportunities for encounters in Africa and specific links between Caribbeans and Africans in the colonial and post-colonial periods. This research project aims to reconstruct trajectories, restore the diversity of experiences of Caribbeans in Senegal, and thus show the complexity of their relationship with Africa and historicise it. It is a question of analysing their representations of Africa, their motivations, the institutional and political frameworks for their long-term mobility, lifestyles, cultural practices, perceptions by the Senegalese, the impact of their experiences on how they defined themselves, given the weight of the representations on them and the identities assigned to them. The objective is to analyse constructions, dynamics and identity strategies in post-slavery, colonial and post-colonial contexts, the way in which identities are made and recomposed, as well as the political and social uses in the francophone Black Atlantic. Biography Céline Labrune-Badiane earned her PhD in History (which won the Louis Cros Prize) at the University of Paris VII in 2008, and taught Contemporary History at the University of the French West Indies from 2009 to 2011. She subsequently taught in secondary schools. Her research has focused on the history of the school in French West Africa and on highlighting the combination of political, economic and social dynamics underlying the institution of the school since its establishment in the colonial period until today. She has also written a book with Etienne Smith on the cultural productions of African teachers in French West Africa (scholastic, scientific, literary, artistic and intellectual) and their diffusion within the colonial public space. Currently, she is working on identity processes in the Black Atlantic. In a socio-historical perspective, Céline Labrune-Badiane is primarily interested in the actors, their individual trajectories and their capacity to free themselves from imposed statutes, conditions and identities. Her research contributes to reflections in contemporary African history, in a comparative and connected perspective, through the circulation of models, actors and ideas within the colonial, imperial and post-colonial spaces.

Research project: The Revolution’s Revolutionary: Concha Michel and Mexico’s politics of motherhood The Mexican folksinger and erstwhile Communist Concha Michel offers an ideal subject for what scholars have dubbed “new biography,” which explores both the interplay between structures and cultures and how individuals developed as fragmented subjects, often seeking to impose narrative coherence on their own lives. Michel, like many subjects of new biography, was an exceptional figure whose life story illuminates the worlds of actors less likely (either by temperament or by status) to make their way into the archives. Her life story, which spans from the last decade of the nineteenth century to the last decade of the twentieth, provides a vehicle for investigating Mexico’s widespread ambivalence about the commodification of both subsistence labour and popular culture that came with its modernisation efforts. We can observe the ways that shifts in prevailing political-economic thought — from late-nineteenth century liberalism to post-revolutionary populist nationalism to mid-century modernisation to post-1968 Marxist dependency theory and back to late-twentieth-century neoliberalism — rested upon assumptions about the unpaid and undervalued labours of social and cultural reproduction. In the Mexican context, these debates inevitably became imbricate with understandings of indigeneity and mestizaje. Michel’s late-life celebrity, particularly among “new-wave” feminists of the 1970s and ‘80s, allows for an investigation into the appeal of maternalist feminism, not as a more traditional variant of its liberal and radical counterparts but rather as a far-reaching refusal of neoliberalism that poses a more thoroughgoing critique than, for example, those based in Marxist thought. Michel’s life story, although riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies as any life is, provides a narrative vehicle to explore these questions on a human scale. Biography Jocelyn Olcott, Associate Professor of History and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University, is the author of Revolutionary Women in Post-revolutionary Mexico and International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History and co-editor with Mary Kay Vaughan and Gabriela Cano of Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico. She has returned to a long-standing project, a biography of the Mexican folksinger and activist Concha Michel. She has published articles in the Journal of Women’s History, the Hispanic American Historical Review, Gender & History, and International Labor and Working-Class History as well as numerous chapters in edited collections. She also served as a senior editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review (2012-17) as well as on the editorial boards of several other journals. She holds an AB from Princeton University and an MA and PhD from Yale University.

Research project: History of Ancient Sciences of Africa: epistemological problems and studies of oral archives and manuscripts in Arabic and Ajami This project is based on the idea that a study of the history of ancient sciences in Africa must start from the epistemological principle that scholarly knowledge which, according to the rationality of C. Lévi-Strauss, is called "savage mind" is also different from popular knowledge, magic, mysticism, religion, cosmogony and it is practiced in closed places and areas by élites and networks of distinguished élites. It is in the sense of this other view on the so-called savage mind that this research is carried out on the learned traditions of Africa, those of oral archives, and those of the manuscripts in Arabic and Ajami. On the one hand, the study posits that in order to overcome the obstacle which is the weakness of oral memory to deliver history, the study of the history of the science of oral archives in Africa must focus, as a priority, on the places of circulation of scholarly practices, the intercultural dynamics of areas of knowledge and the dynamics of contemporary relationships between academic research and traditional knowledge. On the other hand, on the basis of the historical reality of African written traditions, it is necessary to open an area of study, hardly explored so far, on the history of sciences within the field of research on manuscripts in Arabic and Ajami. Biography Yaovi Akakpo is a Togolese philosopher. He studied at the University of Lomé and at the University of Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar. He holds a doctorate degree in epistemology and a ‘doctorat d’État’ in history, philosophy and sociology of sciences. He is the current Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Society at the University of Lomé, where he is also in charge of the doctoral program in history and philosophy of science and techniques. He is also General Rapporteur of the CTS Letters and Human Sciences of the African and Malagasy Council on Higher Education ‘Conseil Africain et Malgache pour l’Enseignement Supérieur’ (CAMES) and an associate researcher at the Alexandre Koyré Center in Paris. He is the author of L’horizon des sciences en Afrique (Peter Lang, 2009), La recherche en philosophie (L’Harmattan, 2012), and Science et reconnaissance (Présence africaine, 2016). His main fields of research concern scientific and technical transmutations in Africa, the issues of invention and innovation, the history of science of oral archives and African manuscripts, the imagination in science, and the powers of the body.

Research project : The Canon and the Critique: One Hundred Years of the Course in General Linguistics Thanks to its over one hundred-year-long legacy, the Cours de linguistique générale /Course in General Linguistics (1916) attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure acquired the status of an indispensable ‘Great Book’ in contemporary scholarship in the humanities. This canonical text laid out an innovative research program in modern linguistics and it led to the development of a structuralist method in other human sciences, and it therefore occupies an important role in contemporary academic scholarship and college-level pedagogy. While the Course is justifiably enshrined within the contemporary canon of ideas, recent research in Saussurean linguistics offers multiple venues for developing a critical perspective on this foundational text. This groundbreaking research conducted mainly in France has remained confined to specialised academic venues and not nearly as popular and widely accessible as the Course itself. Beata Stawarska therefore proposes to author the first critical companion to the Course in General Linguistics that would appeal to a wide, international and interdisciplinary audience in the humanities, and reflect the relevant European scholarship on the legacy and validity of the Course today. This study would examine the production, reception, and replication of the Course as an official statement of Saussure’s linguistics by examining the dominant social relations of power within European academic institutions and the role social norms play in enabling as well as constraining the establishment of true knowledge in scientific disciplines. It would therefore contribute to a better understanding of Saussure’s linguistics and its social and institutional context. Biography Beata Stawarska is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon, USA. Her areas of expertise include contemporary European Philosophy, especially phenomenology and poststructuralism, French feminism, philosophy of language (broadly construed), and philosophical psychology. She engages thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Saussure, J. L. Austin, Beauvoir, Kristeva, Irigaray, and others. Stawarska has published two books: Between You and I: Dialogical Phenomenology and Saussure’s Philosophy of Language: Undoing the Doctrine of the Course in General Linguistics, as well as a number of essays in journals and chapters in anthologies. She is interested in topics such as embodiment, gender and sexual difference, social relations of power, oppression and resistance, expression and performativity, as well as the historiography of linguistics and the making (and re-making) of an established canon of philosophy. She is currently investigating the complex ways through which language reflects as well as subverts dominant relations of privilege and subordination in society, especially through the reclamation of hate speech by marginalised groups.

Philippe Séguin (1943-2010) a été une personnalité politique considérable dans l’histoire de la Ve République, plus par sa stature personnelle, son style et l’expression vigoureuse de ses idées que par l’abondance des responsabilités nationales exercées (deux années comme ministre des Affaires sociales en 1986-1988, quatre années comme président de l’Assemblée nationale de 1993 à 1997). Les années 1990 furent sa période de plus grande notoriété, en raison de son engagement emblématique contre le traité de Maastricht (1992) et de la figure de « recours » qu’il incarna face à des orientations plus « libérales » de la droite de filiation gaullienne, dans un contexte de grande incertitude institutionnelle (cohabitations successives, passage du septennat au quinquennat, européanisation croissante des outils et des enjeux de la politique intérieure). Il est d’usage de présenter Philippe Séguin comme une personnalité forte et respectée – on se souvient de l’ampleur de l’hommage national qui lui fut rendu, à sa mort, aux Invalides -, mais aussi atypique, turbulente, enfermée dans une vision excessivement « nationale » des questions économiques et sociales, jugée trop en marge de la politique traditionnelle et des enjeux de la mondialisation. La conférence se propose de montrer, au contraire, que Philippe Séguin représentait une vision parfaitement orthodoxe et cohérente des institutions de la Ve République, que le gaullisme social, dont il était porteur, n’a jamais été qu’une composante essentielle d’une puissante tradition politique française – le gaullisme n’étant pas seulement un mouvement historique lié à la personnalité exceptionnelle du général de Gaulle, mais une étape fondamentale dans la construction laborieuse de la démocratie française : construction qui est loin d’avoir atteint sa maturité, et dont on pourrait même soupçonner qu’elle est entrée en régression avant même d’avoir été achevée, comme l’avait prophétisé Philippe Séguin et comme s’attachent désormais à le souligner plusieurs essais récents parus dans différentes disciplines.

Research project: The Theme of Madness in Televisual Creation in Cameroon. A visual anthropology The aim of this research is the study of different representations of madness in Cameroonian TV films and series. It states that TV creation on madness relates to a semiotic project which operates from a set of socio-political and cultural determinations allowing to grasp its intelligibility through three key terms: place, modalities and purpose. Here the place refers to Cameroon, particularly to urban life as an emblematic place of most of the dysfunctionalities. Modalities are related to the ‘how’, to techniques used for efficiency of what has been called here a ‘semiotic project’. Exemplified by the resources of occult economies - ritual crimes for transgressive enrichment, bad luck, spells, etc. - these techniques constitute, under the "how" mode, the corpus of practices that justify a state of being, which has been designated here as a finality. Biography Parfait D. Akana is a sociologist, anthropologist and publisher. His work is principally focused on mental illness in Cameroon, sexual and gender-based violence in the experience of madness, sociology and anthropology of communication (social networks, sitcoms, languages and popular cultures). After studying at the Universities of Yaounde I and II, Paris 13 and EHESS of Paris, he joined the Research Department of CODESRIA (Council for the Development and Research in Social Sciences in Africa) where he worked from May 2014 to April 2017. He teaches at the Advanced School of Mass Communication (University of Yaounde II, Cameroon). He is also the editor-in-chief of both Terroirs (African Journal of Social Sciences and Philosophy), founded and directed by Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, and African Psychopathology (Social Sciences and Psychiatry in Africa), founded in 1965 by Henri Collomb.

Research project: Writing Humanities from an African Perspective The research project is based on the issue of the writing of African humanities. It starts from the premise of the diversity of approaches to reality depending on civilizations and eras, the plurality of ways of knowing, as well as gnosiological and epistemological relativity. It proposes to rethink the plurality of the journeys of human thinking starting from the idea of the principle of equality of the different schools of thought, while acknowledging their incommensurability. This leads to envisaging these different schools of thought from their horizons and the configurations of the imaginable which they propose, like unique journeys of the mind which have developed concurrently, shaped by the cultures from which they originate. Thinking about these questions in an African context calls for an epistemic shift. It is necessary to incorporate the complexity of African social structures and embrace them in their cultural and historical distinctiveness. This requires a change of position within the fields of constituted knowledge and recovery; an act of thinking which pays particular attention to its archaeological setting and actual trends in the societies being examined. But more fundamentally, it is a question of acquiring more in-depth knowledge of African societies and cultures, based on their own gnosiological criteria. To achieve this, it is necessary to adopt other modes of understanding reality, besides the scientific knowledge that has been constructed thus far. The exploration of the relatively unfamiliar territories of African ontomythologies and epistemogonies allows a more open-minded approach to various types of knowledge, thus keeping African societies alive. [This research project will be updated soon.] Biography Felwine Sarr is a Senegalese scholar and writer born in 1972 in Niodior, in the Saloum islands. He attends high school in Senegal before studying economics at the University of Orleans where he obtains a doctorate in Economics in 2006. Full professor and agregation holder, he teaches at the University Gaston Berger of Saint-Louis since 2007. His lectures and academic researches focus on economic policies, development economy, econometrics, epistemology and history of religious ideas. In 2010, he is awarded the prize Abdoulaye Fadiga for research in Economics. In 2011, he becomes dean of the Economics and Management faculty of the University Gaston Berger of Saint-Louis, and head of the new faculty of Civilizations, Religions, Arts and Communication (CRAC) of the same university. He is also a writer and has published several novels and essays. As a musician, he has published three albums thus far: Civilisation ou Barbarie (2000), Les Mots du Récits (2005) and Bassai (2007). With the writers Boubacar Boris Diop and Nafissatou Dia, he cofounded the publishing house Jimsaan. Felwine Sarr is also editor of the review Journal of African Transformation (CODESRIA-UNECA). In 2016, he organized with Achille Mbembé in Dakar and Saint-Louis, the Ateliers de la pensée, which gathers African and diasporic intellectuals and artists to think around the transformations of the contemporary world.

Research project: Black Portugal: dependency, bonded labour and “race” (15th-19th centuries) In the 15th century, the development of an Atlantic network linking southern Europe and West Africa, encompassing many different European and African societies, facilitated the movement of scholars, slaves, legates, traders, converts, renegades, peasants, seafarers and soldiers from one continent to the other. The number of Africans living permanently in Barcelona, Lisbon, Seville or Valencia thus increased. Several lines of questioning permeate the research project at IAS-Nantes: 1. What are the consequences for Portuguese society and economy of the large-scale presence of a slave population of African origin? 2.What are the trajectories of mulatto, pardos and negros (persons of mixed white and black ancestry born in Portugal) take in these cities of southern Europe? 3. Can we speak of a Portuguese social and economic model? Modern-day Portugal and its overseas colonial areas thus emerge as a kind of laboratory in which to consider a chronology of forced labour systems and processes of racial hierarchy; an area which is heir to a Mediterranean history which is as African as it is European and Atlantic. Biography António de Almeida Mendes is a historian specialised in slavery and slave trades of early modernity (from 14th to 16th century) and the history of the Atlantic. He is a lecturer at the University of Nantes, founding member of the International Centre for Research into Slavery, member of the Research Centre on International History and Atlantic and, from 2013 to 2016, member of the National Committee for the Remembrance and History of Slavery. He is co-director of the STARACO program at the University of Nantes (STAtus, RAce and COlours in the Atlantic) which is intended to initiate a thought process on the construction of hierarchies and statuses inherited from slavery in Iberian worlds, as well as the PRALT program (the PRactice of ALTerity from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 15th-20th century) at the Casa de Velázquez (Madrid). He is in the process of finishing two books, Une histoire de la race dans l’Atlantique ibérique (A history of race in the Iberian Atlantic) and Relier et ordonner un monde de races. Histoires méditerranéennes et atlantiques des traites et des esclavages en péninsule Ibérique : XIVe-XVIe siècles (Linking and ordering a world of races: Mediterranean and Atlantic histories of slave trades and slavery in the Iberian peninsula: 14th-16th centuries).