Research areas

The CESSMA research unit is structured into three thematic axes. These axes are not teams in themselves, but parts of a whole. They are therefore permanently interrelated. In parallel with these axes, a central seminar common to all team members (statutory researchers, associates and doctoral students) ensures unity of thought and constitutes an important forum for exchange. CESSMA's thematic axes are:

Axis n°1: "Norms, circulations, actors"

Axe n°2: "Production, policies and practices of the city"

Axis n°3: "Construction and uses of knowledge"

Thematic axis #1: "Norms, circulations, actors"

The aim of this axis is to apprehend, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the dynamics that lie at the intersection between the multiple past and contemporary forms of circulations on the one hand, and the complex processes of creating norms, understood as formal or informal rules on the other. The starting point is the observation of a fundamental and dialectical interaction between circulations and norms. In the context of successive globalizations, and no doubt even more so today, all the circulations that can be observed on every scale contribute to the production of a new environment for the creation, transfer or hybridization of multiple practices, rules and conventions, all of which are norms, in the sense of instituted forms of social relationships with a prescriptive vocation. Existing norms in one place and at one time are diffused (or regressed) through contact with other spaces or actors, in logics of power relations marked by multiple negotiations. The African, South American and Asian worlds are particularly well-suited to the observation of these interactions between multiple instances, under the effect both of an increasingly profound - and differentiated - insertion into the mechanisms of globalization, and of a profound recomposition of the interplay of actors involved in the production of social relationships.

Subtheme 1: Human circulations, migrations and migration policies

Sub-theme 2: Urban systems and their insertion in a globalized space, the construction of large regional spaces

Sub-theme 3: Religious activity and its regulation

Subtheme 4: Companies and societies

Thematic axis 2: "Production, policies and practices of the city"

The axis' project takes as its starting point the analysis of social productions that rely on specifically urban spatial and economic configurations, more than that of urban objects or the city itself. The latter correspond to a certain type of resource (urban habitat and its services, centrality and connectivity, etc.), to a certain economic organization between these resources and actors (land or real estate market, urban job market, public regulations, urbanization policies), but also consist of a particular configuration of politics, insofar as the exercise of power corresponds to the control of urban space. Finally, these configurations are organized on the basis of models that evolve and shift, forming matrices (the colonial city, the modernist city, the neo-liberal city) that may be superimposed, transformed or sedimented, and that need to be considered in a multidisciplinary way and in their circulation

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Applying this approach through interdisciplinary work and across several cultural areas, the axis is organized into themes based on two different types of object: on the one hand, social productions linked to inequalities (of status, income or other) that form the social relations, tensions but also law produced in the city; on the other hand, cultural social productions, considered in their urban context as a result of circulations, the interplay of media and actors inscribed in urban configurations.

Subtheme 1: Right to the city, powers and intra-urban inequalities

Subtheme 2: Urban cultural and social productions and identities

- Materiality of cultures and practices

- Actors, cultural policies and the reconfiguration of territories

- New social representations

Thematic area 3: "Construction and uses of knowledge"

The construction and uses of knowledge, its circulation and recomposition are today at the heart of crucial social, political, economic and ethical issues within the geographical areas studied by the CESSMA laboratory. Indeed, the growing inequalities in education, the concern to preserve local knowledge or defend the use of vernacular languages, social science research on Africa, Latin America and Asia or produced in these areas, and the need for and use of expertise in these disciplines are particularly keenly felt by the societies in these territories. These questions are complicated by conflicts of interest between players. Their competing strategies reconfigure the construction and use of knowledge, and also give it a political dimension. Thus, the general problematic questions the relationships between knowledge(s) and power(ies), by varying scales, from local to global, as well as durations, from ancient history to the present. Research on African, American and Asian societies will adopt a multidisciplinary perspective.

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The CESSMA laboratory hypothesizes the extremely varied nature of "knowledge" - be it "scientific", "vernacular", "popular", "practical" etc. - as well as the diversity of its forms. Its work will thus consider knowledge as the (co-)production of social actors of varying status, with varying degrees of recognition. They will focus on the hybridity of these social, political and cultural representations.

Subtheme 1: (Co-)productions, transfers and circulations of knowledge

Subtheme 2: Historiographies from elsewhere. How history is written outside the Western world

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Subtheme 3: Institutions: places and processes for the elaboration and transmission of knowledge