"Pour toi, Arménie..." (For you, Armenia...). In France, this refrain recalls the surge of solidarity that swept through Europe after the 1988 Spitak earthquake: on the initiative of a famous member of the Armenian diaspora, funds were collected and sent to the other side of the continent for distribution. Dispersed communities have carried out such operations for centuries. In the 17th and 18th centuries, religious divisions and wars tore Europe apart. Money, people, information and know-how circulated on the occasion of large collections and international relief operations. However, "long-distance" relief can't be considered as "humanitarian aid" at that time. Primarily, oppressed co-religionists were helped through collections and money transfers, such as those organised by Protestant groups in England, the United Provinces, the Swiss Confederation and the Holy Roman Empire. The SOLIDAMIN project will investigate how mutual aid practices enabled religious and diasporic minorities to construct their collective belonging across 17th and 18th century Europe. It will provide a cross-sectional and comparative analysis of a wide variety of relief operations involving dispersed communities, in particular Calvinist Protestants (Huguenots, Walloons), Jews (Judeo-Iberians, Italian Jews), Catholics (exiled British Catholics, Oriental Catholics), but also French 'political' emigrants following the French Revolution. This project, which is situated in a perspective of social history on a European scale, is innovative in its global and comparative approach to the solidarity networks of this period. Three lines of work will be pursued. 1/ It will ask how the various arguments developed around solidarity practices account for the link caused by the exchange of goods. The "minority fact" raises the question of the boundaries of the collective, of assigned or fantasised common identities, and of the significance of solidarity in the consolidation or weakening of constituted social groups. 2/ It will study the financial flows managed by networks and attributed according to normative criteria. The infrastructures of solidarity require advanced skills, but also a network of followers to implement operations, and thus form a shifting geography that is not the same as that of the paths of exile. 3/ It will examine the circulations of goods, people and values as structuring minority groups. They define the "territories" of diasporas and connect communities, articulating the "local" to the "global". Charitable features such as the habit of answering calls for help, techniques of persuasion, the circulation of funds, the control of distribution are incubators of wider socio-religious developments. They contribute to the development of collective identities across Europe, to the imposition of norms of behaviour or to the emergence of philanthropy, for it is often through their margins that societies are transformed. The SOLIDAMIN project has three objectives: (1) To take the measure of collection and mutual aid operations for the benefit of, or by, minority groups in the 17th and 18th centuries, thanks in particular to the creation of a GIS documentary database, based on the Linked Open Data principle. (2) Compare the practices (oscillating between connivance and competition) of the assistance economy of these different groups. (3) Valorise the results in an online documentary atlas (webmapping) to disseminate them to the public and provide a heuristic tool for researchers. It is based on a collaboration between thirteen historians from French and European institutions (Spain, England, the Netherlands), to which will be added a research engineer, several master's students and a web developer.

GEMER takes into account all the records concerning seamen. This project cross-references the divisions of seamen's registers and the crews books with the civil registers. This allows us to follow each seaman in his navigations, but also to study his coastal links (family, habitat, multi-activity) and get a more precise idea about the problems concerning health or hygienic conditions (anthropology, epidemiology, funeral rites). This is a whole population, "the people of the shores" that emerges and that during eight generations, faces crises, wars and diseases, endures the weight of the State and adjusts to the new social and economic conditions. The rich sources of information allow us to tell the story of all these women and men. These sources allow to retrace a culture both wordily and intangible, always shaped by tradition, sometimes shaped by renewal with its unavoidable disruptions, renewal which is based on submission or resilience. GEMER is therefore a database where there will be 20.000 seamen registered in the class records covering the period from 1690 to 1790: in this database, you will also find the relatives of these seamen, their ascendant, descendant or collateral kinships, as well as their godfathers and godmothers. Three territories having equivalent populations and geographic configurations have been chosen: Plessis-Bertrand Estate with Cancale, the maritime district of the Seudre with Marennes and the district of Berre Pond with Martigues. This research will allow us to carry out a wide and complex study in historical anthropology, by multiplying science-based measures on the three defined areas of interest which complement, support and cross one another. We will study the lenght of careers at sea, the duration of navigations, the number of accidents and epidemics on board, the death rate at sea, the organization of labour and the question of wages. Besides, when seamen go back home, they are reunited with their families. So our study will deal with the way the sailors’ wives, sisters or daughters handle the situation in their prolonged absence. The study will also deal with agency, solidarity amongst women, female multi-activity, additional incomes, relationship with the representatives of the Church (the priests) and relationship with the representatives of the State (the Admiralty officers, "la sénéchaussée", the Commissioner of the "Marine du Roi"). After observing the health conditions of the seamen and their families’ questions may be asked about fecundity and survival, mainly concerning mothers and their infants. The way of life of these populations and the dangers that threaten the seamen have an influence on this social group’s demography. Its components linked with historical demography (marriage rate, fecundity, mortality, mobilities and migrations) will be analysed. What’s the GEMER project? It is an open access database: it will allow us to organize several study sessions that will lead to many publications as well as an international conference with proceedings both in English and in French; there will be also a book including all the elements highlighted by this research and a website will be opened. GEMER will organize a travelling exhibition and a docu drama about a trip to the South Sea will be also made: this documentary fiction will speak about seamen who sail to Newfoundland but who also "discover" the West Indies and the transatlantic slave trade, then, they go to the Mediterranean and finally travel to China. When war breaks out once again, they are also formidable privateers. A close relationship will be established with learned societies in order to reproduce this pattern, as well as with the Education Office.

The project SOCIOMA aims to write a history of sociological knowledges in Latin Europe of the 12th-15th centuries. This research will distinguish itself from other social history studies by focusing on the study of classificatory thoughts, in order to show that these are not only descriptive, but that they are performative intellectual tools, a repertory of social forms available to the actors, a "technology of power". Adopting a comparative (transnational) and multidisciplinary approach, this project intends to mobilize the analytical tools of sociology and social anthropology, applied to the study of unpublished medieval documentary material held in European libraries. Three axes guide this research program: a lexicographical survey devoted to the vocabulary of social categories; the study and editing of theological, legal, philosophical and medical scholarly texts that convey a discourse on the architectonics of medieval society; and the observation of the use of social taxonomies in the literature of praxis, in order to better reveal the social dynamics that result from them. This project is therefore part of the most recent historiography, observing the new 'governmental rationalities' that developed from the 12th century onwards, under the combined effect of the Gregorian Reformation, the emergence of modern States, and the rediscovery of the sciences of politics. Ambitious in its aspiration to give an account of very current principles of general sociology, it intends to participate in contemporary reflection on the methodology of socio-professional classifications and their political and administrative consequences.

Do national, European and soon international regulations promoting the circular economy can reduce plastic pollution, and to what extent? Based on the results of an exploratory research and a collective scientific expertise, this project draws on the hypothesis that their impacts are limited, but more important these regulations are designed and implemented to maintain the collective illusion that the circular economy is on the way. The project brings together 17 researchers on Law, sociology, chemistry, economics and anthropology conducting single and transdisciplinary empirical studies to test this hypothesis in 3 areas. The first concerns the negotiations around the design of 3 national (AGEC), European (2019/904) and international (future treaty against plastic pollution) regulations.) regulations. The second studies the administrative control and the impacts in France of three regulatory tolls of national and European regulations (recycling, the ban of single use product, extended producer responsibility) on the food plastics packaging production and waste management supply chain at the local level. The third studies how routine consumer behaviors of plastic food packaging hinders or, on the contrary, support food plastic packaging consumption and consequently the implementation of the legislation. Finally, the project seeks to analyze the systemic convergence effects between these 3 dimensions in order to identify the less visible hinders or drivers of the economic circular transition.The 42-month project has three aims. First to produce academic articles, communications and books. Second, the creation of a “committee of 'stakeholders' made up of national and European politicians, environmental Ngos and representatives of the plastics industry will be designed to have a broader impact on public policies. The research team will report each year to this committee in order to discuss results and offers new public recommendations trough a final conference and a policy brief (Livre blanc). Finally, the project includes the creation of a documentary film based on the Project's researches to reach a wider audience.

The history of Ancien Régime institutions has been ingrained with a century-long metanarrative of the construction of the modern State, which still impedes our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of its development. Despite an illusory resemblance in vocabulary, categories of the State and civil society that are natural to us were undoubtedly alien to contemporaries three centuries ago. Furthermore, our cognitive representations of what constitutes a political territory remain bounded by geographical projections that were only progressively defined over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. How, then, can we better understand the dynamic relationships of power that presided over and fostered the constitution of the modern State without relying on these inherited categories? To overcome these hurdles, we propose an innovative knowledge representation system of the dynamics of Ancien Régime institutions through the application of ontologies to historical data: the Ontology-based Ancien Régime Data Infrastructure (ObARDI). We will construct this infrastructure in four steps. First, we will assemble an extensive database of the local institutional, economic, and social environment of each of the former communes of 17th and 18th-century France—a layout that will serve as an interoperable matrix for Ancien Régime history. Second, we will integrate this data into a fully-structured information system through encompassing formal ontologies that will manage the geography of base territorial units, describe underlying source material and content, and provide source criticism tools to reinvent the historian’s laboratory. Third, we will render our infrastructure compliant with FAIR data management principles in a Linked Open Data perspective: it will be interoperable and accessible through an ergonomic web platform, which will constitute a tool in fostering the use of the digital humanities across various public. Finally, the resulting environment will enable us to create innovative cartographic tools to represent Ancien Régime territories as an evolving set of layered institutions which boundaries were structured by the relationships of power in their midst.