“The Emergence of Autonomist Politics: European Radicalism after the Extreme Left, 1976-1985” (AutPo) Abstract This project will produce an original, comparative, and transnational study of the European autonomist movements of the late 1970s and 1980s, the most significant youth movement in the contemporary history of Western Europe after that of 1968. The study will focus on autonomist currents in the major metropolitan centers of Paris, Milan, Rome, Zurich, Frankfurt, and West Berlin, focusing particularly on autonomist ideologies and practices and the response of institutions, including the far left, radical feminist movements, and the state, and on examining issues of protest and political violence. The objectives of the project will be achieved by archival research in both state and social movement archives in France, West Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, including a secondment in Rome, but will also be amplified by the constitution of an oral history interview base and the use of questionnaires informed by the most recent sociological methods. The study is relevant to the MSC-IF program because of the enduring impact of autonomism on radical political culture in Europe and because it will examine dynamics of political violence in protest movements, moving beyond the typical focus of studies of violence in the 1970s on terrorism and armed movements. In so doing, it will facilitate better understanding of the dynamics of violence in contemporary protest by helping to identify the historical transformations of protest cultures and the interactions between protest movements and state institutions in a comparative and transnational lens focused on recent European history.

Migration scholars are increasingly attentive to human agency in global mobility processes, leading to a growing interest in ‘migratory imaginations’. There is an unfortunate tendency in the discipline, however, to emphasise the perceptual dimension of the imagination at the expense of its action-oriented one. This hinders the imagination's conceptual and empirical potentials, not least where the particularly ‘active’ imaginations of immigrants are concerned. We know, for instance, that migrants are likely to develop multiple place affiliations and cultural identifications by virtue of their exposure to several environments. Yet little is known about the sociocognitive frameworks that foster these multipolar orientations. Im.magine addresses this gap by treating international migration experience as an ‘extreme life event’ that expands the imagination through combined material and symbolic processes. On a theoretical level, Im.magine underscores the crucial elements of relational and reflexive thinking, which are visible in foundational sociological and geographical conceptions of the imagination, yet frequently overlooked in research on migration-related imaginations. It offers an empirical application of reflexive imaginations by means of comparative case studies of North Africans living in Montréal, Canada, and Marseille, France. Through a triangulated use of official and literary discourse as well as first-person oral, visual, sensory, and digital migration narratives, it will help open up the ‘black box’ of immigrant imaginations. Specifically, by casting migrant biographies onto multiscalar and inter-connected spatio-temporal frames, the project will advance our understanding of complex place affiliations and identifications, thus illuminating the very real impacts of the imagination on mobility processes.

Most debates that define the future of our society and our planet are opaque. In the case of the debates on adaptation to global environmental change (GEC), the cause of this opacity is twofold: the extreme technicality of the issues at stake and the multiplicity of scales and actors they imply. Despite its magnitude and urgency, the issue remains incomprehensible to most of the population. The reason is not, however, the lack of publicly available information. The UN Framework convention on Climate Change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and many other national and international bodies release extensive documentation on the topic. Official negotiation documents, position papers, scientific reports, and pamphlets are all freely available on the Web in near real time. But as research on the media has shown, information overload does not necessarily foster better democracy. The proof is that the agenda of public opinion is still occupied by the issue of the anthropogenic origin of global warming, while this issue has for long now been a point of consensus both in scientific community and political negotiation. To contribute to understanding the challenges raised by adaptation, the exploratory and collaborative research project MEDEA (Mapping Environmental Debates on Adaptation) proposes a fourfold research programme based on the innovative methodology of controversy-mapping. Firstly, drawing on a close collaboration between climate experts and social scientists, it aims to collect an extensive corpus of both scientific and media discourses on GEC adaptation debate in France. Secondly, it aims at analysing such corpus using methods and tools developed in the field of Science and Technology Studies. Thirdly, drawing on media design expertise, it aims at developing an on-line interactive platform to make the debate legible to a large audience. Finally, the project will conclude by disseminating this platform to all relevant stakeholders in the debate. Overall, the project intends to provide an answer to the following question: What difference does it makes to be equipped with tools for mapping technoscientific debates? Can such equipment change (and potentially improve) the way we publicly discuss climate change adaptation? In line with the priority of the call for projects, the MEDEA intends to give the project an original approach combining quantitative and qualitative methods from social sciences (particularly, science and technology studies, sociology of public problems and media sociology), climate sciences and digital and communication design. To ensure such original disciplinary articulation, this research project engages the collaboration of three partners: Sciences Po (particularly its médialab and the IDDRI), the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et l'Environnement, a CEA-CNRS-UVSQ mix research unit (UMR8212), and the ENSADlab de l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. Given its extensive experience in controversy mapping, the Sciences Po médialab will ensure the management of the project, under the scientific coordination of Tommaso Venturini. While being innovative, the clear-cut strategy of MEDEA establishes a sound basis for an interdisciplinary research project, ensures that relevant answers to the challenges pointed in the project at the end of the three-year duration, and integrates dissemination activities. In this manner, the project will contribute to support policy development and public debate on adaptation and to provide a relevant contribution to the understanding of the processes underlying the GEC and its governance – which are core objectives of the CEP&S call for projects.