“The professional paths of top athletes (TA’s)” is a research subject that has not yet been fully explored by the social sciences. Sociological studies analyze the way in which TA manage to juggle their dual sports and professional projects, and how they handle their career transition. As a result, there are marked differences in the way they anticipate their professional integration according to their sport’s specific features, their age, their gender and their status (Olympic/Paralympic). Biographies on ex-TA’s professional paths can be found in history. But there is no global study on professional careers. This project intends to uncover inequalities in ex-TA’s professional paths. We will focus on post-sports careers to analyze the jobs they have held and thus better understand professional careers’ structure and stages: what proportion of TA’s are employed in the sport sector? What jobs do they hold successively during their career? What are the features of these jobs (employment contracts, salary, level of responsibility, etc.)? This work will make it possible to bring to light multi-factorial inequalities (according to gender, sport specialty, age, status, etc.) that make their respective professional paths more or less fragile. The methodology envisaged is a multidisciplinary and hybrid one. In order to apprehend their professional paths in the medium and long-term, we will mobilize sociological and historical research methods well controlled by our team. Three steps will structure this project. The first phase will consist of a census of TA’s since the introduction of the TA status in 1982. From this database, we will proceed to a stratified sampling of 10,000 people that will respect the structure of the parent population on the following criteria: gender, age, sports specialty, status (Olympic / Paralympic). Secondly, we will conduct a questionnaire survey among this sample of individuals with an aim to identify the different stages in their professional careers. This involves analyzing the features of the jobs held on the basis of objective indicators to understand the knowledge and skills used in these jobs. The possible links with the schooling, sports career and training courses will be questioned. This quantitative stage makes it possible, on the one hand, to generate new knowledge about TA’s (no survey of this scale has ever been carried out) and, on the other hand, to better design the qualitative step. This third phase will allow for a more precise understanding of each individual’s professional trajectory through a better knowledge of their experience and personal path. Such is the objective of this socio-historical protocol within which 300 biographical interviews will be conducted. The aim will be to determine typical profiles and question the impact of gender differences, sports and status, but also the personal resources available to the TA’s. We also wish to understand the links between the sports experience and access to key political positions (for ex-TA’s become sports ministers) via a complementary analysis of ministerial archives. The results will be made available to the general public (creation of an interactive dashboard hosted on a website, various interventions, communication on social networks) and scientifically valued (conferences, articles and book). The team that is carrying out this project is attached to the Gustave Eiffel University’s Comparative Analysis of Powers laboratory. It is the sports science team specialized in sociology and history. Members are specialists in employment and training issues in the sports sector. In addition, several members have worked specifically on TA’s, gender and/or disability.

Since the turn of the millennium, cities across Europe have persistently lost population while their surrounding metropolitan areas grew. These divergent dynamics have reshaped the relationships between urban centers and their suburbs. Moreover, the contrasting demographic trends challenge the widely held perception of large urban regions as exclusively places of growth. These divergent dynamics question the urban policies and planning implemented in European central cities. Paris and Madrid, two Western-European capital regions rarely analyzed from this perspective, experiment intense population loss whereas their metropolitan areas grow both demographically and economically. Both central cities are aging at a faster pace than their surroundings. This research project will undertake an in-depth examination of the socio-demographic shifts in Paris and Madrid over the last decade to determine the intensity and geography of change in the two metropolitan areas, the emergent challenges resulting from population shrinkage, and the (in)effectiveness of planning responses. First, statistical and spatial analysis will be used to determine the intensity and persistence of the demographic shifts as well as its effects (aging, shifts in public or private services, etc.). Second, qualitative analysis will be used to gauge the impacts of population shrinkage on the urban population, particularly on the older adults of 65 years and above. Specifically, we will explore how urban residents who decide or are obliged to live in the city handle, resist or profit from demographic shifts. Finally, the research project will question the extent to which planning considers (or underestimates) population shrinkage at several distinct spatial scales (municipality, metropolitan/regional government, estate policies).

The project « EIKON – Das Leben griechischer Bildnisse/ The Life of Greek Portraits » brings together a research group of Franco-German specialists in the sciences of Antiquity and in particular classical archaeology. The research subject deals with portrait statues from the fifth to the first century BC, whose omnipresence has had an important impact on the visual culture of Ancient Greece. The erection of statues, a topic which has often been addressed in research, is not the main subject of our research. For the first time, it is the “life” of the portraits from their erection to their destruction which constitutes the main subject (and not a marginal one). The “life”of the portraits is the processing of their transformations, their appropriations, their semantic evolutions and their successive re-contextualisations through ritual acts, repairs, reutilizations, new exhibitions etc. It means studying the dynamic processes of transmission, of reception and of the changes that characterise Greek portraits. They must be understood in their communication, cultural and socio-political contexts. This project combines systematic and paradigmatic studies. Its innovatory character lies in the problematic which, for the first time, is not about circumstances and primary messages but about the concrete (re)utilization of ancient portraits and thus contributes to highlight clearly the process of their cultural and communication function. With a modern approach of the study of portraits, the project combines a contextual study and a systematic mixture of witness accounts and archaeological perspectives, epigraphs and histories that bring us to confront in a critically analytic way the very different scientific traditions from France and Germany. Two principal perspectives stand out: the actual study of the statues (the “practices of the portrait”), like coronations, repairs, honorific customs etc., and the conditions of reception that change throughout time in different reutilizations, different exhibition contexts and medium (which is “re-contexualisation”). The results of the project will be presented in monographs on particular aspects yet unexplored in this field of studies. A complete and systematic publication will also present the results in the form of a handbook. Moreover, a complete database which will be available for future research on portraits will be created with the collaboration of the École française d’Athènes. This database will gather all witness accounts about ancient portraits in Delos, one of the most important sites for the study of Greek portraits. The results of studies in two urban sites of major importance for contextual research on portrait statues, Delos and Pergamon, will be confronted in a symposium which will be followed by a publication. In Delos and Pergamon, French and German institutions have been leading archaeological explorations for a long time. Thus, a case study about the functions and the “life” of portraits in two major urban centers of the Hellenistic world, studied by groups of researchers of German and French traditions, will be underlined. .

POCRAM is a research project concerning the various attitudes and positions of the political power to religious conversion. It belongs to the sub-theme “Religions et systèmes mythiques” of the Call for Projects program, more specifically connected to “questions of religious transfers” and “relationships between religion and the definition of a nation”. State coercion in religious matters is a hot topic, which often inspires simplistic discourses opposing tolerance and bigotry. Our approach of interplays of political powers and religion is both open minded and focused on historical situations located in a distant past, when an impressive variety of attitudes to conversion were elaborated. All religions require from their followers recognizable signs of membership, organized in more or less complex and more or less binding systems; these systems, which have been codified across history, make religious changes visible to political authorities, and eventually sensitive to them. We shall work on religious conversions as much as they can be perceived through such signs. This is why we shall focus on individuals or groups of people changing their adhesion to a religious association, leaving apart the study of conversion as a personal experiment of intellectual or spiritual metamorphosis. By religion, we mean any organized structure based on a specific view of the world and a system of belief. By political power, we mean any form of civic authority or organization, whatever its scale. Interplays of political powers and religious conversions can happen in many various ways: political power can identify itself with a religious group, collaborate closely with it, as well as it can disqualify it, or confront it. Political attitudes vary according to a complex set of factors depending on the position of religion in human society, on the flow of converted people, on the political and ideological background. However, despite a large number of publications on religious conversion as such, no global study of political interferences exists. A significant number of studies devoted to local situations suggest that the time has come for such a global research project. We believe that studying the various political attitudes to conversion, seen as a sign of religious changes, can be a privileged way to a better understanding of the situation of religion in any society. We aim to study these attitudes in different settings ranging from the end of Antiquity to the ‘critical years of the European mind’ at the end of the 17th century. Our starting point is Western Europe and relationships between Christianity (in its many branches) and other religions (Judaism, classic Mediterranean cults, Islam, as well as extra-European religions met by Christianity), and relationships between various branches of Christianity. At some point in the project, scholars working in different cultural fields will be invited to help to see European contexts in perspective. Our goal is to elaborate a typology of political attitudes to religious conversion, to build up conceptual tools, which could be used by historians to study religious conversion as a key element of religious change. We shall use a comparatist approach, considering specific case studies across time and contexts. The research project is historical at heart, processing situations across a long period of time and a wide geographical area, but dialog with political science, sociology and anthropology is an intrinsic part of it.

Split between contradictory narratives –disappearance vs. great return – social scientists display a complex relationship to the working class as a subject of study. De-industrialization did not occur, but the transformations within Western economies have changed this social group. This leads us to renew our analytical framework. The main objective of the WORKLOG project is to impulse such a renewal by developing an original approach, which combines sociology of work, employment and lifestyles with urban studies. The starting point of the WORKLOG project are new forms of work organization and "proletarianization" of the tertiary sector. We focus on workers in logistics that occupy an intermediate position between industry and services and represent 1.5 million jobs in France and an equal amount in Germany (i.e. 13 % of total worker's employment in France). In the retail's sector, their work consists in getting the goods into cities, which is a core function for urban lifestyle. Having identified this group, we aim to understand what workers’ social practices outside warehouses are. Observing their residential areas, consumption practices and leisure activities, we aim to analyze how they create their own social spaces and to what extend they are autonomous or open to other influences. We see connections with other social groups, including dominant social groups, as a part of identity-building processes. First, we aim to show that logistic working class members create meaningful and consistent cultural universes despite that the latter are geographically and socially disseminated. Second, our ambition is to identify how similar social conditions and cultural circulations generate social forms that make sense together from the local to the international level. Empirical investigation of both hypotheses will be based on an ethnographic survey. Four samples of 20 employees each (a total of 80 employees) will be selected. They concern logistic parks and their workers in four cities: Paris, Orleans, Frankfurt/Main and Kassel. The first originality of the study is the use workplaces as an entry for fieldwork. Using this approach, we observe a limited group whose members share similar working conditions and we can analyze how those conditions affect their consumption and residential practices and leisure activities. The second originality is to conduct our investigation in two "world cities" and in their satellites. We will identify and analyze connections between “centers” and "peripheries", from the local to the international level. The third originality is to combine classical ethnography (interviews and participant observation) with a visual ethnographic method consisting in the production and collection of images (especially photography). This approach aims to report material and cultural universes for each field and to define what sort of visual references and categories of thought and judgment circulate among them and sometimes beyond. The WORKLOG project will include two phases. We will first map and compare residential and consumption practices and leisure activities. With the household as a unit of analysis we will compare forms of belonging within each single samples and across our different samples. Second, we will identify a set of practices common to our different samples, for example a sport, such as cycling or a hobby such as online video games. This will enable us to identify images and thought patterns that are interchanged by groups, both locally and globally, and that interrelate working class universes within and across social groups.