The Experimentarium: doctoral students and high-school students get together

The Experimentarium, deployed at Inalco for the first time on January 20 and 21, 2025 in partnership with the University of Burgundy, was an opportunity for around 100 high school students taking part in the Cordée "Langues et Cultures du Monde" to discover research in the human and social sciences.

Prior to the event, eight doctoral students from Inalco took part in a scientific mediation training course run by Sylvain Audet and Albane Molinier (Inalco), and Robin Drieu and Élise Cellier-Holzem (Université de Bourgogne), which enabled them to learn how to present their research in an interactive, lively and accessible way. Relying on a variety of supports and playful situational activities, they developed small, rich and dynamic workshops, leaving plenty of room for exchanges and questions from the youngsters.

The program included: the history of representations, with the discovery of a late 16^th century Indian emperor through works of fiction; digital sociology, with the study of an online Libyan Amazigh community; anthropology, with a dive into witchcraft in Madagascar; and finally, tea culture in China through the prism of ecological issues.

Linguistics and language didactics were also on the agenda, with an exploration of foreign language learning in Mozambique, the discovery of certain syntactic aspects of Berber and Ginyanga, a language spoken in Togo, not forgetting the discovery of movement verbs in Laari, spoken in Congo.

Arts, literature, anthropology, linguistics, didactics: by navigating through a wide range of disciplines the students were able to realize the full richness of the human and social sciences and the diversity of methods that make scientific research possible.

These encounters with a young audience, unprecedented for most of the PhD students, were both a major challenge and a source of intellectual stimulation, enabling them to take an introspective look at their research. "It was interesting to arouse the students' enthusiasm and curiosity about our work, our career paths, our questioning as researchers," explains PhD student Samyra Labaïed.

By offering young people a space in which to discover research, while raising PhD students' awareness of the challenges of disseminating knowledge to the general public, the Experimentarium is fully in line with the Cordée "Langues et Cultures du Monde", a program that values the collective construction of knowledge through experimentation. An initiative that will be rolled out throughout the year, and which concretely realizes one of the University's missions, sharing critical knowledge with the general public and non-specialists.

Inaco PhDs participating in this year's program: Ada Lipman, Ekaterina Aplonova, Francisco Fernando, Katrin Rougeventre, Miharitiana Rakotonirina, Ourida Manseri, Raphaël Otho and Samyra Labaied.