According to WHO, mental health is a global emergency, for children, adolescents and young adults in particular. Universities and colleges across the world are struggling with rising rates of students’ mental disorders. Demand for services on campuses exceeds available resources. Therefore, most students remain undiagnosed or untreated. There is growing awareness of the need for effective prevention, early detection, new treatment and support approaches for common mental disorders (CMDs) among students. Reliable data is critical for planning and implementing sustainable, effective interventions. Yet, there is a lack of studies on CMDs among university and college students as well as relevant interventions in African countries. This proposed study aims to contribute evidence to address this gap in research. The aim of this study is to use a mixed methodology combining the power of stories and power of numbers [10], qualitative and quantitative, to address this gap by bringing evidence on the extent of CMDs and their associated factors among undergraduates, to describe the lived experiences, key barriers and facilitators to help-seeking behaviours for CMDs among undergraduates in four African countries: Senegal, Cameroon, DR Congo, Algeria. Specifically, we want to: 1. To estimate the prevalence of common mental health disorders (CMDs) – i.e., depression, anxiety, and alcohol and substance use disorders, and suicidal behaviours – anonymous survey. 2. To describe the determinants of CMDs, sociodemographic factors, personal/lifestyle factors, family-specific factors, university-related variables, and community-level factors associated with common mental health disorders – i.e., depression, anxiety, and alcohol and substance use disorders, and suicidal behaviours – anonymous survey. 3. To document the personal and shared meanings of lived experiences regarding CMDs and to describe key barriers and facilitators to help-seeking for CMDs – observations, in-depth interviews, biographical interviews. To achieve this study’s objectives, a multidisciplinary approach as well as a close dialog between biomedical sciences, humanities and social sciences is a requirement. MAMA_AFRICA brings together researchers from different backgrounds under the leadership of PRODIG – UMR8586 and the Child and adolescent psychiatric division of the Centre Hospitalier Charles Perrens. The disciplines represented in the consortium revolve around the above-mentioned areas of studies and research: anthropology, epidemiology, sociology, psychology, psychiatry. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first multidisciplinary and multi-sited study, combining the power of stories and power of numbers [10] to study mental disorders in French Speaking African universities. Our sample makes our study the biggest on the subject, to the best of our knowledge, at least in French Speaking Africa. Our study will benefit the universities studied while contributing robust data to tackle a critical global public health issue. In the short- to medium-terms, evidence from our study will help the development of preventive, promotive and supportive mental health models to facilitate and guide the transition of young graduates into the labor market and family life. In the long-term, evidence from our study will contribute to the attainment of Target 3.4 of the UN SDGs of improving and promoting mental health and well-being (among young people in Africa). This study has other methodological as well as practical implications in terms of capacity building and knowledge transfer. It will reinforce a global South-North and South-South partnership, rather than the usual global North-South partnership. Our team is made up of scholars with expertise on mental disorders and the specific contexts of Low-income countries that we need to understand, to direct policies at a pan African and global level.

Commercial flows (deliveries to shops, restaurants, individual and business customers) supply urban areas and are so integrated to the way cities function that they become barely noticeable. They are often considered to be a source of road congestion and pollution. Yet, throughout the world, they are deemed necessary and grow continually and quickly. In this context, the issue of urban logistics (organization and distribution of trade flows in cities) is a recent and international research topic. However, few studies have dealt with urban logistics in the context of cities from the Global South despite the fact that their issues are similar to that of the Global North. By cross-analysing Brussels, Paris, Casablanca, and Nouakchott, we aim to document how logistics transitions, marked by various forms of dualisation are at stake in cities from both the Global North and the Global South. The aforementioned cities from the Global South will help us better understand the ongoing transformations in Paris and Brussels, such as the growth of opportunities and risks that is consubstantial to the atomization and fragmentation of logistics operations in the city core, and its outsourcing to small-scale carriers. Conversely, the case of European cities brings light to what is taking place in the Global South, that is, the structuring of major national and global operators' networks from hubs located mainly in semi-urban areas. In this changing urban logistics landscape, looking at both Northern and Southern cities shows that analogous transformations take place in many cities of the world. By entering into the day-to-day reality of this sector in these four metropolitan areas, we wish to highlight the challenges of social, economic and political sustainability in the context of the growth of trade flows in the world's major cities. The research method of the Trans-Log project is both hypothetico-deductive and inductive: it starts from strong hypotheses (about dualisation and a beginning of logistics transitions) and at the same time will proceed inductively thanks to the feedback from the four field studies. The research method is also multi-scalar: from the analysis of commercial districts, which will serve as a starting point for our field work, to the North-South macro-regional links (i.e. integrated into a transnational space), via the articulation of logistics circuits within the urban area. The project is organised around four tasks that combine spatial and territorial contextualisation of logistics and field work phases. A transversal action of valorisation and dissemination, aimed at stakeholders outside the academic community, completes this framework.

In Brazil, agroindustrial expansion has accelerated since the 2000s, with new combinations of monocrops (mainly soybeans) and cattle ranching, despite various instruments of environmental regulation (rural environmental cadastre, deforestation licenses, water licences, etc.). We hypothesize that these new forms of regulation actually support the spatial expansion of agriculture. The objective of SOYLANDIA is to identify how agribusiness actors construct, modulate or use these instruments to develop their activities, through three complementary approaches (WPs): 1) the co-construction of legal and regulatory frameworks, 2) the spatial practices of agricultural enterprises, and 3) the genesis of environmental narratives favorable to agribusiness. The study sites are new frontiers of soybean expansion, located at the humid tropical borders of the country (Amazonia and Pantanal), and older frontiers reactivated through irrigation, in savanna uplands (Cerrado). The project presents two innovations: a) an interdisciplinary approach to understand the material and discursive dimensions of agroindustrial expansion strategies, and b) the consideration of the complexity of these strategies beyond deforestation issues, by incorporating water issues. SOYLANDIA differs from current work on deforestation, based on the monitoring of agricultural frontiers through remote sensing. The team is composed of 11 french researchers in geography, geomatics, agro-economics, sociology, political science and law. It relies on two main partners (UMR ART-Dev and PRODIG) and on collaborations with Brazilian research institutions, local associations and NGOs. It will have important applications for the debate of environmental policies with society, in South America and Europe.

The interdisciplinary project INFRAPATRI aims to study the local knowledges and forms of attachment to urban plants in four sub-Saharan African cities : Yaounde in Cameroon, Ibadan in Nigeria, Porto-Novo in Benin and Dakar in Senegal. Our reflection is based on the notion of "heritage from below", allowing us to understand the relationship of city dwellers to plants in terms of memory and conceptions of the past, rarely recognized by institutional approaches to heritage conservation. Plants in the city, which cover multiple figures and spaces, are in fact used in a variety of ways based on practical or symbolic knowledge. Together, this knowledge and uses are produced by various urban collectives based on family, ethnic identity, religion, neighbourhood, profession or political representation. We formulate the hypothesis that they are preserved and transmitted through different channels at the basis of various forms of urban identifications. The aim of the project will be to identify these forms of heritage from below emanating from plural relationships to plants, and to analyse them in the light of past and present institutional attempts to patrimonialise urban plant entities and groupings. This research project is based on a comparative. The four cities selected for the survey present contrasting but not dissimilar histories and ecosystems. All of them are also threatened today by urbanization policies determined by a certain conception of "modernity" promoting the use of concrete, the artificialization of soils and highly regulated greening methods, in addition to land and property speculation. Nevertheless, in each of these cities, urban plants have recently been brought up to date by new urban elites or public authorities, through the prism of the global model of the "sustainable city" promoted by international cooperation and major development agencies. Within the framework of INFRAPATRI, interdisciplinary collaborations between human and social sciences and natural sciences will be set up in order to understand urban nature both as a historical, social and cultural construction and as a set of living elements with tangible physical, biological and ecological properties. The project also places great emphasis on collaboration between scientists and visual and audiovisual artists, not only in terms of disseminating the results to a variety of audiences (inhabitants, urban planning and sustainable development actors, academic and cultural actors) but also in terms of survey methodology. This interdisciplinary project thus brings together geographers, anthropologists, historian, botanists and artists from Benin, Cameroon, France, Nigeria and Senegal, all of whom are familiar with the cities selected for the survey and the project's issues. To address INFRAPATRI's interdisciplinary issues, the research methodology will combine qualitative and quantitative survey techniques, using both secondary (archives, contemporary grey literature, cadasters, local press articles, online resources) and primary sources (via data collection work directly on species and natural spaces in cities and together with different types of urban dwellers and the authorities in charge of environmental management and urban planning). By combining archival work, botanical inventories, production of geolocalized data, cartographies, and interviews and long-term ethnographic observations, the project borrows from several disciplinary traditions. Finally, our approach is resolutely participatory, based on a "multi-species ethnography" approach that allows us to consider inhabitants and natural elements together in their daily interactions within the urban space.

ECOBOOM project proposes an analysis of the contemporary transformations of the mining sector in the energy transition, and its effects on the modes of exploitation and the territories. It takes a North/South perspective, extending from extractive territories to national and global scales. It compares two parallel but connected extractive processes in the global mining arena, and investigates their connections: the energy transition metals (ETMs) boom, which concerns metals such as lithium and rare earths, and artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) supply chain, which particularly affects the gold sector. This collective research is based on the central hypothesis of the ecologization of the resources, understood both as a new rhetoric aimed at making the exploitation of certain minerals 'indispensable', and as the set of institutional and technical mechanisms linked to it. This comparison between supply chains and resources aims to take into account the complex articulation between spatial scales, temporalities and levels of socio-political organization, for which a common analytical framework is mobilized. The notion of 'moral economy' allows to take into account the production, circulation and use of moral sentiments, values, norms and obligations in the global social space, which are superimposed on the traditional political economy. The notion of 'governable spaces' focuses on the impacts of these changes, both in the global mining arena and on territories. This comparative perspective places the study of the energy transition within the more systemic process of the 'great transition' in terms of North/South environmental, social and global justice. This approach responds to the issues of the "Societies and territories in transition" axis by questioning spatial transitions, identities and territorial sovereignties, the relationships between societies and territories around resource management, and the recomposition of relations between centers and peripheries introduced by the new extractive booms. The project focuses on three research axes: 1) the discourses and devices of the rhetoric of ecologization of the resources, perceived as a new global moral economy that we confront with the moral economies of the extractive sites of ETMs and ASM (gold); 2) the implementation of this ecologization in mining territories through a more localized bottom-up approach to governable spaces, which indicates both the reorganization of material flows specific to each resource and their infrastructures, and the recomposition of forms of politicization, in terms of social and environmental justice; 3) a comparative approach between supply chains aimed at determining the driving forces that orient their respective trajectories. This analysis of discursive and material circulations aims to consider the effects of decoupling between 'green' and 'dirty' supply chains, in a context of competition between extractive territories. The comparative case studies have been selected in the North and South for their complementarity, the expertise of the project members and the new orientations of national policies towards the extraction of ETMs. The main fields are France, where a collective fieldwork will be conducted to strengthen the comparison, New Caledonia, Bolivia and Ivory Coast. They will be complemented by secondary fields (Arizona, Venezuela, Senegal, Sudan) which have been selected to serve as counterpoints to the main fields or to shed light on decoupling effects. In each field, workshops will be held with the resident populations in order to exchange views on the energy transition and to carry out joint reflections towards a fair and equitable 'great transition'.