Research project : "Is Labour Law Possible?" "Labour law is made possible by, and depends upon, a self-constituting narrative which describes its empirical domain, identifies its conceptual building blocks, and provides a normative account of its significance. Labour Law’s long dominant narrative is well known to be under siege. Many scholars have documented the demise of its empirical/conceptual underpinnings - the decline of the standard model of employment, and so on. But few have identified, let alone taken on, the other task at hand - that of understanding the traditional accounts normative structure and wondering whether a new normative account exists or can be called into being. This research project exposes and explores this normative vein. It draws on the work of Amartya Sen, and his account of the concept of "human freedom" as a source of inspiration. The aim is to identify and explicate labour law’s already implicit new account of itself. This entails, among other things, a reconsideration of whether labour law can be "visited" upon the world, particularly the "developing world" by, for example, the ILO." Biographical elements: Brian Langille is Professor of Law in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. Professor Langille also holds appointments in the Centre for International Relations and the Centre for Industrial Relations, and is a Fellow of the Centre for Ethics, all at the University of Toronto. A former Associate Dean of Graduate Studies as well as Interim and Acting Dean of the Law Faculty, Professor Langille has also served as a Governor of University of Toronto. Professor Langille studied philosophy at Acadia University and law at Dalhousie and Oxford Universities. Prior to his appointment at Toronto he was a Professor at Dalhousie Law School. Recently he has been a Visiting Fellow at the International Institute for Labour Studies (ILO, Geneva), the Graduate Institute for International Studies of the University of Geneva, the European University Institute in Florence, the Centre for Transnational Legal Studies in London, Dalhousie Law School in Halifax, and at the Law Faculty of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona.

Research project : "The contribution of Chinese law to the synergy between human rights and trade law in the context of the internationalization of law: research under the protection of property rights" The enactment of the Property Act 2007 is an important event in the construction of the Chinese legal system. The acceptance of international legal instruments to guarantee foreign investments, and to protect intellectual property rights is prior to the formation of internal law on ownership. The development of the implementation of constitutional and statutory guaranties through the integration of international economic standards, but also human rights standards, would lead to dismantling the compartmentalization between trade and human rights. Starting from a spirit of synergy between trade law and law of human rights, and between domestic law and international law, the research aims to explore the dynamics of law and the contribution of Chinese law in this process of harmonization of law which is based on shared values.

Research project : "Tribute to Vitruvius: Inquiry on the Aesthetic Heritage in the Theory of Architecture" "The project has taken shape from two directions. On the one hand, it is related to a larger research on the beautiful ("the aesthetic layer") in the theory of architecture, for which De Architectura Libri Decem represents an unavoidable reference point. On the other hand, this later study acquired a relative autonomy of its own. The more I studied the treatises of architecture, the more consuming became the idea that Vitruvius’ books were misread or misinterpreted to a large extent. Vitruvius ideas concerning the architectural beauty seem to be richer and more flexible than it is usually thought. After many re-readings of the text, the "tribute" I would pay to Vitruvius is an attempt to "see through his eyes" and provide a new interpretation of his books. My approach is particularly focused on the ambiguities of the text and on the many aspects that the succeeding treatises eluded (for reasons to be analyzed from various points of view). Thus, the two researches would permeate each other fruitfully."

Research project : “Hidden properties: people, death and legal masks in South America” “Albert Camus famously stated that “property is death”: I wish to explore and write about the accountabilities of death in terms of property, as produced by legally codified French and Chilean governments during the 19th Century, in the context of different South American wars and post-war contentions, reparations and compensations, as undertaken on behalf of French and other European nationals. I seek to understand and explain the working chromatography of inequality in Latin America as displayed in the discourses on property, especially when they refer to processes of (post)colonial racializations - still effectively displayed through national media in all of the countries involved, to the extremity of war. This links to present times of international boundary strife and shared xenophobia in the southern cone.”

Research project : "The imaginary institution of society in North-West Africa: the voices of women and about women at the heart of establishing symbolic systems." The construction of the objects for this research concerns one of the major issues of the institution of Islamic societies since the Middle Ages to Present Times: "at the heart of societies" (M. Sahlins), is not the status of woman or women but of symbolic systems which found, justify and establish the relationships between women and men. Societies structured in and through difference, domination and inequality, own their very existence and reproduction to power and strength (P. Clastres and L. Marino), but also to resistance, circumvention, shunning and reversal of the power and strength against their source. Narratives (myths, stories, epic poems and hagiographic tales) that are the raw material for analysis, can be worked to identify formal logic or internal consistency. This work will be done only as a step toward the proper socio-anthropological analysis. The latter - whose source is the life of the researcher and "immersion" in the social groups who receive him periodically, but irregularly and for at least three decades - is developed in the constant concern to link the lively speech of women and men about their reciprocal relations. It was then that the unsuspected importance of the relation to the body itself and to kinesics, to the appropriation of space and to the trial of domestic and societal territorialization. The assumed inaudible voice of women is, on the contrary, deafening: structuring space and time, the reproduction of society, as well as rituals and economic and politic rhythms, it orders the differences and inequalities and maintains a constant symbolic tension between, on one hand, the powers exercised on women and subjecting them and secondly the forces of opposition of the women reducing domination or making it implode. My work is both a critique of theories of unilateral domination of women by men and a construction of new questions based on the analysis of original oral ‘texts’ of women and on women.

Historienne et archéologue du bâti formée en France et en Allemagne, Sara Keller a mené des recherches pluridisciplinaires portant sur les monuments et les structures urbaines historiques en tant que source d’information pour l’étude des contextes socio-culturels pluriels. Au cours de son séjour de recherche à L’Institut, Sara Keller est partie à la découverte de la ville de Nantes qu’elle a explorée pinceaux à la main. Aujourd’hui, c’est donc en tant qu’artiste qu’elle expose ses aquarelles au Passage Sainte-Croix à Nantes du samedi 7 octobre au samedi 21 octobre sous le titre Escale Nantaise, dans le cadre d’un nouveau partenariat entre le Passage et l’Institut d’études avancées : « Escale Nantaise présente le carnet exploratoire d’un chercheur en sciences humaines et sociales de passage à Nantes. Pour quoi chercher ? Pourquoi à Nantes ? L’exposition « Escale Nantaise » vous invite à découvrir en image le récit de Sara Keller et à (re)visiter l’histoire de Nantes à travers ses aquarelles qui posent un regard tendre et léger sur l’esprit ouvert et bouillonnant de la ville. Pour cette seconde édition, l’exposition est enrichie d’un master objet, « La Châsse à Nantes », écho d’une réflexion sur l’identité nantaise. L’installation, haute en couleurs et en lumière, donne la voix au public. »

Project research : "God of Vengeance and Mercy: On the Qurʾan’s Theology in Relation to Jewish and Christian Tradition" Much has been made of the rhetoric of the Qurʾan on divine retribution. In a number of different chapters (“Suras”), including especially 7, 11, and 26, the Qurʾan relates a series of accounts which involve God’s destruction of a people who refuse to listen to the prophets sent to them. The Qurʾan in places emphasizes the vengeful nature of God, calling him “the possessor of retribution” (dhū al-intiqām) and “quick to judge” (sarīʿ al-ḥisāb). At the same time the Qurʾan also insists that God is merciful and compassionate (al-raḥmān al-raḥīm) and reports that his "mercy encompasses all things" (7:156). In this project, Gabriel Said Reynolds will investigate the juxtaposition of mercy and vengefulness in the Qurʾan in the light of pre-Qurʾanic Jewish and (especially) Christian literature. He will illustrate how this juxtaposition is not unique to the Qurʾan; indeed in Exodus (34:6-7) God is “slow to anger” and yet lets “nothing go unchecked.” Similarly, the Syriac fathers emphasize the mercy of God manifested in the sacrificial act of the crucifixion even as they insist that God will punish those who reject Christ. In his project he will examine the Biblical subtext of the Qurʾan which might allow academic scholars today to see the juxtaposition of mercy and vengeance as part of a longer debate which joins together different religious traditions. Biography Gabriel Said REYNOLDS researches the Qur’ān and Muslim/Christian relations and is Professor of Islamic Studies and Theology in the Department of Theology at Notre Dame, USA. At Notre Dame he teaches courses on theology, Christian-Muslim Relations, and Islamic Origins. He is the author of The Qur’ān and Its Biblical Subtext (Routledge 2010) and The Emergence of Islam (Fortress, 2012), the translator of ʿAbd al-Jabbar’s Critique of Christian Origins (BYU 2008), and editor of The Qur’ān in Its Historical Context (Routledge 2008) and New Perspectives on the Qur’ān: The Qur’ān in Its Historical Context 2 (Routledge 2011). In 2012-13 Prof. Reynolds directed, along with Mehdi Azaiez, “The Qurʾān Seminar,” a year-long collaborative project dedicated to encouraging dialogue among scholars of the Qurʾān. He is currently Chair of the Executive Board of the International Qurʾanic Studies Association (IQSA) and completing a book (Yale Univ. Press) on the Qurʾan in the light of Biblical tradition.

The proposed project fits in the continuity of a research path which aims to analyze mediumship and clairvoyance phenomena which characterized certain population strata - women, in the majority of cases - in southern Italy. The Calabrian religious field has changed in a restricted temporal arch. Today, there is a complex reality, in continuous oscillation between the memory of the peasant civilization and a break with the past, between the action of ecclesiastical domestication and the dissemination of new religious movements. A panoramic view of the contemporary pattern of Calabrian prophecy, clairvoyance, and mediumship, its challenges and transformations, shows such a richness and articulation that necessitates a plurality of interpretive approaches. This research is part of a perspective of understanding the dynamics of belief, of the forms of institution of culture and of authority around the religious, while focusing on areas of rewriting new cultural codes. Biography Alfonsina Bellio is an anthropologist and co-representative for post-doctoral researchers at GSRL, Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités (EPHE-CNRS) in Paris. She is jointly responsible for running the research seminar “Religion and politics: the subject of the Apocolypse” at l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and lectures at the Catholic University of the West (UCO) in Angers and the University of Bordeaux. She obtained her Master’s degree in social and historical anthropology of Europe at EHESS with distinction, and wrote her thesis (entitled “Women who go with the Dead”) under the direction of Daniel Fabre. She then went on to defend her doctoral thesis in anthropology and literature on the subject “Clairvoyants and Sibyls, Ethnographic Perspectives and Literary References”. She was a temporary lecturer and research assistant in the Department of Humanistic Studies of Calabria (Cosenza, Italy). As a laureate of the program "Research in Paris", she benefited from a scholarship from the City of Paris in 2012-13. She has carried out research and taught in various institutions and research organisations: not only within the department of humanistic studies at the University of Calabria, but also for the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, and the superintendence of historical, artistic, and ethno-anthropological patrimony of Calabria. She is also responsible for the Giuseppe Pitrè dossier for BEROSE (Database of studies and research on the organisation of ethnographic knowledge) and is secretary of FER EURETHNO (Scientific and Technical Cooperation Network for the Council of Europe). The results of her findings have been presented in several international scientific conferences (in Italy, France, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Croatia, Germany and Canada).