Albeit by no means new, collaboration in science has recently gained unprecedented momentum and visibility. Commonly presented as “a good thing”, it has become an imperative. This holds especially true for sustainability science, a recent and expanding problem-driven science that focuses on the dynamic interactions between nature and society and aims to create and apply knowledge in support of decision making for sustainable development. Researchers in this field are strongly encouraged to work with colleagues from other disciplines and actors from outside academia. Yet, little is currently known about how collaborations transform the work practices and identities of researchers and contribute to the shift towards more sustainability. COLLAB² will offer both a broad and in-depth view of inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations in sustainability science. It will pursue the four following goals: 1) elaborate a typology of these collaborations, based on a thorough investigation of their characteristics; 2) describe and analyse their dynamics: how they unfold over time, what stimulates or on the contrary hinders them, at various levels; 3) explore their effects on the practices, roles, identities and trajectories of researchers and their collaborators, and their capacity to contribute to the shift towards more sustainability. A fourth cross-cutting goal is to conduct this research and disseminate its results in close association with sustainability scientists and their partners, so that this project about collaboration will itself be highly collaborative (hence the acronym COLLAB²). COLLAB² will explore the full scope of collaborations in sustainability science in three institutional settings aiming to foster them: CNRS’s Zones Ateliers and Observatoires Hommes-Milieux, and biosphere reserves. It will produce a balanced and multi-level analysis of collaborations, and address their different dimensions (material, cognitive, relational and affective) in the long run. A common research framework will be adopted to allow a cross analysis of the data. It will rely on a mixed method, combining bibliometric tools, a national questionnaire that will be disseminated simultaneously in the three institutions, and an ethnographic survey of a sample of diversified collaborative projects. COLLAB² will devote paramount attention to the perspectives of participants in collaborations, which is crucial given the importance of their human factors but has seldom been addressed so far. COLLAB² will bring together six social and life scientists with strong personal experience of collaborations in sustainability science and wanting to explore them together and with other partners. A dyad of collaborators from each institution investigated will be closely associated to the work of the consortium throughout the project. This will enable us to experiment with a process of participative and iterative reflection through the sharing of experiences and ideas beyond the consortium, leading to new knowledge and mutual learning. COLLAB² will thus make an invaluable contribution to the emerging scientific field of collaboration studies. Its results will be disseminated to a large and diversified audience, using well-adapted language and through a wide array of communication channels (articles in academic and technical journals; conferences and seminars; presentations to the institutions investigated; short videos; interactive website). It will help sustainability scientists and their collaborators to identify the factors and effects of collaborations, overcome their inherent difficulties and form a community of practice. It will provide science policymakers and relevant ministries with concrete recommendations to improve collaborations in sustainability science and craft sound research policies in the Anthropocene.

Since the 1970s, the social sciences have analyzed science as a historically and geographically situated social practice, an approach that has undoubtedly transformed our view of scientific production. SciOUTPOST sheds light on scientific places at the margins of French overseas territories inherited from its colonial past. This project proposes to test and theorize the concept of “scientific outpost” as one possible development for lab-studies, useful to characterize scientific places that are neither calculation centers nor fieldwork sites: these outposts are remote, permanent, relatively autonomous. They induce a temporary monastic-life where scientists and nonscientists, private and intensive professional life, are intertwined. Place-based practices in these outposts shaped by geopolitical (often postcolonial) context also produce universal knowledge and exclude possible local knowledge. This project will be pursued in an interdisciplinary manner, linking approaches from STS, political sociology, anthropology, geography and history. Moreover, SciOUTPOST will promote exchange with natural scientists working in the investigated infrastructures. Each case study will be carried out through a combination of fieldwork (in-situ observation, life histories, interviews) and archival study, guided by the shared conceptual framework. The concept of outpost will be tested by progressively extending the comparison, from a first stage already explored with space launch centers (Algeria), volcanological observatories (Martinique) and tropical biology stations (Fr. Guyana), to astronomical observatories, polar stations (Arctic and Antarctic), TAAF Islands, meteorological stations, or archaeological stations in Maghreb. The comparison will also be made between historical periods, geographic areas (and ecosystems), various disciplines, and then the "nationality" of these scientific infrastructures, beyond the French overseas territories which remain the focus of SciOUTPOST.

Sparsely populated areas are an important stake in today’s world. They hold most of the available natural resources, deliver fundamental environmental services but also are more and more viewed as having an intrinsic value. Those areas are the object of an external governance since urban societies to which they are administratively and legally bound tend to rule on their exploration (being the markets which buy the natural resources) as well as on their protection (by voting environmental codes, rules or laws). This external governance and the reactions (positive and negative) that it generates must be analyzed in order to gain a better understanding of its mechanisms and outcomes. The GUYINT project aims at contributing to such an approach by focusing on the Guianas plateau, especially the department of French Guiana and the Amapá state in Brazil. Those areas are very sparsely populated and they host a vast array of natural resources, as well as high environmental stakes. Since the beginning of the 2000s, they are the object of an intense preservation policy, which conflicts with the practices and interests of local economic groups such as those linked with illegal mining. What’s more, the participation of Indigenous and traditional populations to the definition and enforcement of environmental rules is also an issue. Finally, opinions about the environment at a regional scale, for instance in Cayenne and in Macapá, may differ a lot form those in Paris or in Brasília, leading to conflicts about the environmental governance’s objectives. Hence, the Guianas plateau allows to approach the different scales, conflicts and interactions included inside the question of the governance of sparsely populated areas. The GUYINT project is structured around four thematic work packages which will each tackle a facet of the general question: 1. Production and use of geographical information, focusing especially on environmental information; 2. Definition and enforcement of environmental preservation policy; 3. Exploration of natural resources, with a focus on mining; 4. The strategies of local populations, especially Indigenous communities. All of them will provide feedback to a fifth work package which will elaborate a theory of the governance of sparsely populated areas and confront it with the case of the Pima county, in the US, where the same dynamics as the Guianas plateau were registered historically. Regarding the methodology, the GUYINT project will rely on a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches based on primary data (gathered through interviews, questionnaires and field missions) and secondary data (especially GIS information produced by the stakeholders). Combining the methods and the final comparison with the case of Pima county, the GUYINT project expects to improve the initial conceptual framework laid out during the project’s elaboration. During the project’s execution, a strong emphasis will be given to fieldwork, to the interaction between researchers involved in the different work packages as well as to the exchange with stakeholders through ad hoc meeting and seminaries. The GUYINT project will be carried out by a number of researchers from several French and Brazilian universities and research centers. It will be coordinated by the Iglobes Research unit (UMI 3157). Several stakeholders are also partners, such as the Armed forces in French Guiana, the Parc Amazonien de Guyane ou the Tumucumaque National Park in Brazil. Thus, results will immediately be valorized among those institutions, giving a research-action dimension to the project. Papers will also be written and submitted to international journals by each thematic work package and also by the theoretical WP in order to reach the highest possible level of scientific dissemination.

The aim of this project is to describe and compare the construction of mechanical knowledge in indigenous societies of the Atacama Plateau and the Gran Chaco. We will approach the subject making four preliminary assumptions: (1) in these strongly asymmetrical social contexts, the mechanics knowledge is a place of power, of marking differences (of gender, ethnical, of nation, of dressing, etc.), and of creating social subjects. In this sense, one must retrace the evolution and local tensions of formal devices of mechanical instruction (military service, religious missions, technical education), that are also devices of control and social discipline of heterogenous and underling populations. In this context, mechanics is an asymmetrical field under tension, with legitimate and illegitimate forms, counterculture and competing circuits of mechanics. (2) In the peripheries of large technological systems (mines, sugar plantations), the process of indigenous appropriation of machines produces a singular field of heterogenous technical practices, discourses about machines, ways of naming and classifying them, identification of dangers and recalling accidents, etc. All this, allows for an anthropology or ethnography of mechanics. (3) Mechanical knowledge and its tensions lead to a production of specific series of tools, technical procedures and gesture, for which it possible to develop an archaeology, and that can be studied through models and formalization. This knowledge is inserted more largely into a local phenomenology of mechanics – the different ways to think and rationalize the machines, to classify and name them, to identify the danger and have a memory of the accidents, to assign to the machines some symbolism, estheticism or animality – this knowledge takes also part of a local sociology of mechanics – actors, divisions, associated paths that emerge – which we have to take into account; It is possible to model those material environment – tools, garbage and wrecks, makeshift workshop, working clothes, etc. ; this material constitutes the archive of those tensions. This research project calls up resources in ethnology, history and history of technology and is based on a explorative, qualitative and comparative method. We study two marginal and weakly populated areas which were lately colonized (1880-1930) by the mechanized extraction front (mines in the Andes, sugar and wood in the Chaco). The comparison between the two moreover totally different areas will permit us to understand how, with different social, technical and historical circumstances, a same technological and mechanical “stratum” is disseminated, absorbed and locally appropriated. The research is organized in three axis : (1) Ethnography of the mechanical fact in the Atacama and the Chaco will investigate the different elements of the local mechanics as well as the individual paths and learning forms; (2) mechanical knowledge, power and colonial spaces will study the formal vectors of mechanics learning (missions, technological schools, etc.) and the archives by interpreting them in the general context of colonization of these territories; (3) edge of mechanics, materialities, technology will analyze and model technological pattern by studying tools, workshops, wrecks in order to understand the tensions, the limitations and contradictions of these local mechanics. Three results are expected : (i) to collect and describe this knowledge through different corpora – ethnographic, documentary, tools and technological procedures – in digitized, indexed forms that permit a collective exploitation ; (ii) to enhance our knowledge of that problem by publishing three articles, a collective book and by preparing a monographic manuscript and (iii) to dynamize the academic and scientific collaboration between the different partners in order to develop a work in progress about history and anthropology of technology in colonial/asymmetric contexts..

INTERRUPTIONS examines newly-mechanized societies relationship to the environment in South American territories under extractivist constraint, through the study of how accidents, malfunctions and downtime fashion landscapes, technicities and society. The advancement of extractivist fronts into indigenous territories in South America has normally been understood as a linear movement consisting of the integration and global standardization of populations and ecosystems that were previously peripheral and heterogeneous. However, these territories are characterized by a large number of accidents, shocking to those on the ground but unattended to by administrations, and which often take place in informal contexts and among populations that are newly-mechanized (women, children, indigenous peoples). Similarly, the operation of extractive industries in these remote and poorly regulated contexts is frequently interrupted by social flux (road blockages, strikes, etc.), technical contingencies (breakdowns, malfunctions, etc.) or environmental hazards (floods, earthquakes, fires, etc.) that cause frequent time spent idling. These different forms of interruptions are the root causes of detours, handiwork repairs or bypassing methods, which can be hypothesized as shaping these territories as much as public policies or the actions of dominant actors (companies, the State, etc.). South America’s extractive landscapes are thus scattered with accidents and roadside memorials, with daily life punctuated by time spent idling or waiting, and scarred landscapes. These breakdowns and accidents, which are rarely studied, have been partially approached through the prism of road safety and accident-prevention policies. INTERRUPTIONS studies accidents, malfunctions and forms of downtime as processes that fashion space, technology and society. It considers two large South American territories under extractivist constraint, the Southern Andes and the Gran Chaco, through three research axes: 1) Accidents as fashioning landscape and memory studies the documentary, memorial, ethnographic and material traces of breakdowns and accidents in indigenous territories as re-elaborations of relationships to death, time and nature; 2) The technicities and affordances of malfunctions focuses on forms of repair and the maintenance of mechanical devices outside of formal circuits, affordances and norms of intended use; 3) The life of downtime and the social agency of interruptions examines how interruptions and downtime shape social, gender, ethnic-based and intergenerational relationships, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. INTERRUPTIONS is supported by three large laboratories (CREDA, Mondes Américains and PRODIG), which share a common location on the Campus Condorcet and bring together a young, gender-equal, multidisciplinary and international team with long-term experience in South American fields. The project envisages the recruitment of 3 post-docs and is organized around 4 work-packages regrouping the different tasks of ethnographic, spatial and historical research that will nourish the virtual platform INTERRUPTIONS, which will be both a tool for and result of the project. The project contains a risk management strategy and an ethics and gender-parity monitoring system. In addition to the expected scientific impact of this novel and high-potential research, it will raise awareness among local administrations about the importance of identifying and preventing occupational and traffic injuries in indigenous contexts. The main deliverables of this project are: i) a permanent seminar at the Campus Condorcet; ii) the platform and virtual museum INTERRUPTIONS: Another view of extractive territories; iii) three workshops and a final colloquium giving rise to three thematic dossiers and one collective publication; iv) ten collective articles in international journals; v) an ERC or H2020 relay project that will be presented.