Something weird is happening in politics. Satirical parties, comedic journalism and memeification are gaining more and more traction; the slippages between parody and sincerity, play and earnestness, real and fake, ridicule and seriousness have proliferated at a dizzying rate. Global entanglements, new technologies, and the surge in populist politics are producing a cacophony of intricate cognitive, social, and economic dissonances bordering on the absurd. The underlying hypothesis of NoJoke is that these dissonances, and the comical reactions produce, have become formative phenomena of the political present; they have seeped into the social fabric and into the ways in which people appropriate their lifeworlds and make sense of themselves and others as political actors. The practice of humour, NoJoke argues, can help us to make sense of the political present; it offers a unique methodology of discovery, a specific education by attention with regards to dissonances that elude conventional academic methods. Bringing together insights from the anthropology of politics and the political, from studies on humour, satire and laughter, and from anthropological advances in ontology, epistemology and methodology, NoJoke will conduct research with humour and humourists, and not merely on them, and establish a radically new approach to the study of the political present. Through a long-term comparative study with caricaturists, comedians, writers of satire, satirical politicians and comedic journalists in Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Caracas, Johannesburg and the Iranian diaspora, it will follow three objectives: (1) to explore the intrusion of humour and humourists into the field of politics; (2) to articulate a theory of humour as an epistemic practice ? a mode of perception, creation and anticipation ? in and of the political present; (3) to launch an alternative practice of academic knowledge production by converting the heuristic of punchlines into a practice of theory.

This project focuses on the Catholic Church’s environmental impacts and its strategies of environmental adaptation in the context of the evangelizing missions during the first half of the 17th century. It is based on three case studies, covering the variety of missions, territories and missionized: the Jesuit mission to non-Christian population, ad gentes, of New France, the Capuchin mission against Protestantism of the Cévennes, in France, and the Jesuit so-called “popular” mission, to already Catholic people, in Southern Italy. These mission lands were remote territories, difficult to access and largely beyond the control of the Church. There, the environment became a central actor and missionaries faced many challenges. With a comparative perspective, MissNature aims to understand the relationship with nature – flora, fauna, geography – and the adaptations required for a mission to work. MissNature seeks also to understand how their encounter with new landscapes and climates redefined the missionary programs. How did these missions impact local environments? How in turn did environmental conditions reshape missionary activities and the adaptation of Catholicism to local realities? Through the challenges of travel, settlements and survival, the environment redefined Rome’s evangelizing project and its understanding of the relationship between the human and the natural—and thus, the very understanding of what the Universal Church should––and could––be. MissNature will lay the ground for a new positioning of Rome in the field of global environmental history, as one of the few truly global institutions of the early modern period, and will participate to the decentralization of the history of Catholicism by embracing the social differences of actors. This project introduces thus a radically new element: the environment seen as an historical actor, capable of influencing the directions taken by Rome in its missionary programs and, ultimately, the European expansion.

Cells control their content by balancing its synthesis and degradation. Autophagy is a key degradation process capable of engulfing large fractions of cells, including organelles, into double-membrane vesicles called autophagosomes. These fuse with lysosomes causing degradation of their cargo. Secretory pathways, including secretory autophagy, offer an alternative option to remove unwanted materials from cells. However, mechanisms allowing the secretion of larger cellular components are still unknown. We identified a novel pathway, which we termed autoxitus – for self (auto) exit (xitus) – that leads to the secretion of autophagosomes. This proposal aims at defining the molecular mechanism and regulation of autoxitus. We will first study how specificity and decision-making between secretory autoxitus and degradative autophagy routes is achieved and whether there is cross-regulation. Autophagosomes on the autoxitus route can contain parts of the cytosol, but also large fragments of organelles, raising the question whether the secreted autoxitus vesicles signal to neighbouring cells in a non-cell autonomous manner. We aim to uncover the impact of these signalling processes to determine whether and how autoxitus helps to signal stress conditions or may even deliver material or organelles to other cells. Finally, the role of autoxitus in two (patho-)physiological conditions will be analysed. Since autophagic processes are key to viral particle release, we will study the contribution of autoxitus to the viral life cycle. Furthermore, we will investigate the role of autoxitus in the release of protein aggregates from cells and the resulting seeding propensity. This proposal will give ground-breaking insight into autoxitus, its molecular underpinnings and physiological consequences. AutoXitus will provide the framework for future integration into numerous cellular pathways.