PredicMo considers preaching as a common element of the three Abrahamic religions. Preaching has, however, been understudied in a connected perspective. This project aims to establish a common "grammar" of preaching, understood as a set of principles, rules, strategies and models, together with their variations. While Judaism refutes its universal vocation, Islam and Christianity have placed preaching at the heart of their doctrine. As the driving force of 'making people believe', preaching is understood as a device (dispositif Foucault) embodied by the presence of an individual or a group in a territory in order to constitute or consolidate a community of believers. Adopting a Weberian perspective, the programme focuses on preaching, whose objective is to convince and which develops in a context of religious crisis, and not only on the cure of souls. Preaching as an internal and external constitutive device of faith experiences has been constantly reshaped since the end of the 19th century. PredicMo focuses on its contemporary reinventions and redefinitions. PredicMo will renew the study of preaching through original transversal hypotheses. In order to do so, it has chosen the Middle East as a privileged observatory, a space of elaboration and circulation, constantly connected with international dynamics. The seven territories concerned by our survey (Egypt, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq) have all experienced this large-scale phenomenon with varying temporalities, actors and dynamics. The project first argues that preaching is a common matrix for the three Abrahamic religions. By analysing preaching in the light of its lexicon (S1), its cartography (S2) and its staging (S3), the programme's first objective is to propose a common ‘grammar’ of preaching. Its second objective is to elaborate a solid and innovative reflexive methodology allowing a religious, temporal and geographical decompartmentalization (A1). Not limiting itself by focusing on a specific country, PredicMo will analyse influences, emulations, competition in preaching discourses and spatial strategies using several case studies. Finally, preachers have played a decisive role in the (re)configuration of the religious and political environments of the Middle East since the late 19th century, but no archival corpus is devoted to them. Our third objective is therefore to build a catalogue and a corpus of indexed preaching archives (A2). Supported by IREMAM, Ifpo and EFR, PredicMo will gather an international and interdisciplinary team to cross-analyse new visual, sound and written sources, developing digital tools to make them accessible to a large public. The team consists of specialists of Islam, Judaism and Christianity with a long experience in Middle Eastern fieldwork, as well as various actors of preaching. The people in charge of the three institutions, and the scientific subprojects will guarantee the good governance of the programme (A5). In partnership with the Mucem, a data collection-survey will focus on the material conditions of preaching. Besides its theoretical contributions, publications and scientific promotion (A4), PredicMo will deliver an online dictionary of the vocabulary of preaching (A1), an indexed catalogue of the sources of preaching and a mapping of the trajectories of preachers (A2). The collaboration with the Mucem will make possible the integration of some of the items of the survey-collection into the museum collection and the creation of an itinerant exhibition (A3). Reflecting the team’s approach, two web-documentaries as well as several video and audio clips will be produced and made accessible to a large audience: academics, students, and the general public.

SUBLIME investigates the recent shift affecting the cornerstone of the Welfare States in the MENA : the universal subsidies on food and energy. The two waves of uprisings in the region – 2011 and 2019 – have made social justice a central issue. In this context, international donors and new regimes called for the renewal of ‘social contracts’ and pushed for the removal of subsidies and their replacement with targeted cash transfer programs. However, the lift of subsidies is a crucial political-economic dilemma, as it causes price increases on basic commodities and raises the risk of new revolts. In the eyes of policy-makers, but also of many scholars, subsidies appear as an instrument of political subordination that produces consent among citizens who would resign themselves to an authoritarian but protective order – and symmetrically would be likely to rebel if prices were to soar. Our project reverses this argument, and hypothesizes, rather, that the lift of subsidies produces political subjectivation not because it supposedly triggers food or fuel riots, but because it unveils the political struggles and relations that shape the complex socio-economic and bureaucratic supply-chains forming the subsidy systems. The lift of subsidies brings about multiple modifications in those chains that generate ambivalent political debates, sectorial mobilizations and new imbricated layers of welfare in which citizens are caught. Our project provides the first systematic, empirically grounded and comparative political sociology of subsidies in four post-uprising societies where this reform is on-going (Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria and Lebanon). Mixing complementary methods (archival research, mapping, quantitative dataset, qualitative surveys, ethnographic fieldworks), and gathering experienced field researchers and 3 PhD/Post-doc, the project excavates the social embeddedness of subsidies and the transformations of state-citizens relationships caused by their lift.

PRECARités seeks to understand what hinders the mobilization and development of safety nets in the wake of the multi-sectoral crisis that Lebanon is currently experiencing. It aims to figure out how the Covid pandemic and the explosion of the Beirut seaport, increased social and economic inequalities, uncertainties, and demands for social security. The series of structural weaknesses highlighted by the crises overwhelmed Lebaneses' safety nets. These have generated various forms of precariousness, both in terms of the commodification of protections and social relations (family, community), both of which, paradoxically, constitute two pillars of neoliberal development models. In this sense, the current crisis reveals structural instability, which literature on resilience has masked in the past. With these issues underlined, we may be able to act on them. Three areas of precarity are highlighted: labour, mobility, and property. To work on this, the team will bring together French and European academics with Lebanese academic in a current situation of precarity, with oher (young or more experienced) researchers whose work has been precarious for a long time. It will conduct a quantitative survey and 5 qualitative case studies, the results of which will be published in a peer-reviewed journal as well as a series of policy briefs. A seminar course offered to Masters students in Lebanese universities will contribute to and reflect on this research. In addition to the production of original data that will be publicly disseminated, the objective of this project is to constitute a research network capable of applying for European grants, putting Lebanon in dialogue with other cases studies.

The joint project “Galen in Arabic (GAIA) – More than a Translation” aims at investigating the crosspollinations between three intellectual strands of the Islamicate world in the 9th and 10th centuries: the reception of the Greek medical tradition as expressed in the writings pertaining to the Galenic tradition, early Arabic philosophy (falsafa) and early Islamic theology (kalam). Our hypothesis is that the intellectual debates that took place within the Islamicate world impacted the reception of this Greek medical tradition. We will focus on two main areas : epistemology, and semiology, i.e. the study of signs. The GAIA project proposes two main shifts of focus for its research on Galen, namely from the source text to the target text, and from Galen the physician to Galen the philosopher. In the past the Arabic transmission of Galen has often been approached from the point of view of the Greek Galen, i.e. either to reconstruct Galenic treatises lost in Greek, but preserved in Arabic, or to study Greek-Arabic translation techniques. The GAIA-approach, in contrast, focuses on the target audience for whom Galen’s works were translated, their understanding these translations, their impact on the transmission and the development of the transmitted thoughts. The research undertaken in the framework of the proposed project will further stress and acknowledge the fact that the Arabic translations of Galen the physician were not exclusively read for medical purposes, but also out of interest for their philosophical contents. In this way Galen the philosopher and his influence on the philosophy and theology in the Islamicate world shall emerge. As many of the Arabic translations of Galen’s original treatises as well as their abridgements remain unedited, the project will provide a number of dearly needed editions centring on Galen’s "Method of Treatment", in which the methodology and, more generally, the epistemology of the Greek physician is expounded. Based on these editions, the formation and transformations of the theory of knowledge in the Arabic Islamic world of the 9th and 10th centuries will be studied. A further area of research will be semiology, i.e. the study of signs, in which Galen’s influence is particularly important either through his "On Demonstration" which is lost today in Greek and Arabic, but of which substantial fragments survive, or through his "On the Usefulness of the Parts" in which he presents arguments from design as indications for the existence of the Creator. The project will apply an interdisciplinary methodology bringing together the methods used in the fields of philology, the history of medicine, of ancient and medieval philosophy, as well as of kalam theology. The main researchers responsible for the project “Galen in Arabic” will be the two scientific coordinators, Dr Pauline Koetschet and Dr Elvira Wakelnig.

Since the uprising and the war that followed, the knowledge produced on Syria came mostly from experts and journalists than from the academic field. If social scientists keep on publishing despite the impossibility to go to Syria, they are often prompted to provide studies framed for international or national decision makers. As a result, they have to handle a double challenge: to pursue their research according to their proper pace and approach as well as to invent new methods to invest the Syrian fieldwork. How to conducting research on a society scattered by war and under constant transformations ? How to figure out phenomenons of brutal dislocation of familiar spaces and social relationships ? How to chart extreme violence and trauma ? Analyzing the upheavals shaking Syria since 2011 raises epistemological, ethical and reflexive issues, as the commitment of the researcher has become unavoidable. The SHAKK's team is willing to tackle these different challenges according to a multidisciplinary and comparative perspective. It will associate the Center for Religious Social Sciences studies (Césor/EHESS), the French Institute in the Near East (Ifpo) and the audiovisual department of the French National Library (BNF). This team is composed of nine researchers – anthropologists, political scientists, historians and linguists- as well as a research engineer, Arabist, a specialist of digital humanities and a curator, specialist of audiovisual archives and will also associate exiled Syrian students. Indeed, the pooling of scientific and technical skills is essential to carry out the different aspects of our project. Our first ambition is to come back to the origins of the revolt and to the various stages of its transformation into a military conflict, closely scrutinizing actors, trajectories, actions and narratives. Paying special attention to moments and places, we will examine political, religious, social, territorial and memorial reconfigurations proper to this context of uncertainty (Shakk in Arabic) and extreme violence. We will focus on relationships that are broken, suspended and renewed by the uprising and the subsequent war through the notions of displacement and indetermination. Displacement and indetermination of centers of power, of identities, of frontiers, of religion and politics as well of categories, methods and paradigms. We believe that these two notions are particularly relevant to grasp this in-between temporality made of ruptures, disorders and conflicts, proper to war. Our team also wishes to develop an in-depth reflection on methods of inquiry: we will conduct our researches outside Syria while seeking to narrow the geographical distance imposed by war. Fieldwork will be carried out in bordering countries (Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan) and in Europe (France, Germany and Sweden). We will also proceed to online interviews with people inside Syria via Messenger, WhatsApp and Skype. Furthermore, and that's where lies the originality of our approach, we will investigate the digital space and more specifically, the huge amount of videos uploaded on YouTube by the different protagonists of the revolt and of the war. This vast digital territory will be considered as a site of inquiry for which we will elaborate specific tools for collect and analysis. In addition, these online videos will also be investigated from an archive perspective and the making of a vernacular memory of the events. Finally, we hope to contribute to the emergence a new generation of Syrian researchers who are exiled in Europe.