“China’s Great Brain Gain” is a response to the inadequate representations of the Chinese experience with globalization. Its central object of analysis is the systematic reexamination of the role that American-educated Chinese (liumei) played in the birth of what we call “modern China”. Between the First Opium War (1839–42) and the founding of the People’s Republic of China (1949), over 40,000 Chinese students went to study in the United States, intending to return and apply the knowledge they had acquired abroad to “modernize” their country. These returned students represent a wave of brain migration unique in world history, with far-reaching effects that have yet to be fully examined. Our approach is based on the conviction that social actors rather than abstract geopolitical entities are the driving forces of historical change. It is also based on the conviction that a proper reevaluation of the liumei’s contributions must include the quantitative and qualitative analysis of their life trajectories, social networks, and cultural discourses from a transnational and longue durée perspective. Our methodology relies on the systematic collection of historical data from a wide range of multilingual sources, their integration within a digital environment, and their semantic enrichment using advanced techniques of Natural Language Processing. This data-rich history is designed to overcome the limitations of both traditional and “big data” approaches and to enable multidimensional analyses that were not heretofore possible. This project emphasizes feasibility through its well-defined target population and source corpora, its reliance on validated methodologies, and its two-pronged approach combining macro-analyses with selected case studies. By combining cutting-edge digital methods with an intellectually ambitious research agenda, it will profoundly reshape our understanding of modern China and radically transform research practices beyond the field of Chinese Studies.

EGALIBEX is an interdisciplinary research project (philosophy, law, ICST). It focuses on the regulation of freedom of expression in liberal democracies. While legal philosophy has extensively studied the regulation of certain categories of expressive acts (pornography, incitement to racial hatred, advocacy of terrorism, etc.), regulations governing access to public forums and their use have been understudied, especially in French-language work. These rules, however, pose specific difficulties because they do not only restrict freedom of expression in the name of other freedoms or social interests: they mainly organize its exercise in order to reconcile the freedom of expression of one with that of another. Their aim, in other words, is to make it possible for all the holders of this right to exercise it in fair conditions within public deliberation. They raise today, with regard to the Internet and the new media, new legal problems related to inequalities of access to expression and to information (for example in the case of net neutrality, the regulation of social networks or the control of algorithms used by search engines). How can the law regulate access to these media, or even their use, without unduly restricting freedom of expression? If the law states, in liberal democracies, general principles such as media pluralism or the right to information, these are not sufficiently determined or prioritized to solve these problems. The ambition of EGALIBEX is to contribute, on a theoretical level, to solve them. Its main objectives are the identification, clarification and evaluation of principles that can guide the fair regulation of freedom of expression. To this end, it will conduct 1) a conceptual analysis of freedom of expression as a democratic right, 2) a normative analysis of the legal implications of the theories of democratic deliberation, and 3) a comparative survey on the right to freedom of expression in France, Europe and the United States.

This proposal is part of an in-depth work carried out by the Claude Bernard University of Lyon 1, which is based on the strengths of the institution, the practices of its researchers, its actions and mediation mechanisms, as well as its research on the issues of dialogue between the scientific and social spheres, in order to envisage an interdisciplinary department. This department, which is part of the institution's strategic plan and is to be set up in 2025, will work to enable and make visible the crucial question of the continuum of "creation, production, openness, dissemination, circulation, sharing and appropriation" of knowledge, from the scientific to the social sphere. The project therefore aims to equip and consolidate this prefiguration work, which places ethics at the centre of its dynamics, to better support researchers in their practices, to enable these practices to be recognised as research work, to better welcome the public, and thus to establish a clearer understanding of the links and articulations between "knowledge dissemination", "scientific mediation" and "open science". The aim of this project is therefore to develop the University's third mission at a time when it is contributing to the production of knowledge in research fields that directly address the major challenges facing our society (health, climate, digital transformation).

What capacity is left to produce an inclusive city, in the context of an accelerated verticalization of contemporary metropolises? At first sight, promoting a denser city would accommodate further growth, provide housing for the people while limiting urban sprawl. That is how densification is justified in many cities across the world. But in a context where regulatory capitalism and entrepreneurial municipalities are participating in the creation of the most favorable conditions for developers to control the urban space, verticalization, and particularly residential verticalization is questionable. If office towers have gained attention recently, the vast majority of vertical developments is residential, a phenomenon having far reaching consequences on the daily life of residents and urban communities. Verticalization, if not new, is currently happening in a very different context than after 1945, when Charte d’Athènes and modernism where the dominant planning principles. Today, residential high-rises are more than architectural solutions, as much as office towers, they are commodities in a global market where capital flows are fixed by developers and municipalities. By shedding a light on the making and the experience of residential high-rises, we assess the contemporary transformation of the city and test it against inclusiveness. Aiming at the construction of a transdisciplinary theoretical framework (architecture, geography, sociology, anthropology), we intend to critically question the inclusiveness of contemporary urban production, through the residential high-rise phenomenon, in Lyon and Sao Paulo. Inclusiveness, as defined by the UN (economic; social; political; cultural and symbolical) is our benchmark, both a state and a process; it is a result and a condition for an egalitarian/equitable urban environment. It lies in the making and in the experience and imaginary of the city. Framed by the above theoretical framework, the project is rooted in case studies, enabling to reveal different types of local-global negotiations in the making of the city. In order to deliver the most, Lyon and Sao Paulo where the partners of the project are based (USP and Université Lyon2, with collaborations with practitioners such as the Municipal Agencies of both cities), have been selected as the core case studies, because of their specific residential high-rise history. The project is thus both international (experts from abroad will be invited) and deeply locally rooted. The project is divided in two sets of tasks, which will use methods never (or too seldom) applied to the study of residential high-rises: oral histories, interviews, house biographies and emotional cartography, long-term observation, and documentaries. Three transversal tasks: project coordination, 2 academic-practitioners workshops, and 3 theoretical workshops that build a transdisciplinary environment of analysis, give a common language, and prepare the final conference of the project. Re-injecting the case studies in the theoretical discussions would help deepen and root the analysis of inclusiveness, around the notions of democracy, accessibility, and “living together in the contemporary city”. Four work tasks. After an initial spatio-temporal contextualization of the two case studies (1), the tasks are ordered according to the two ways of apprehending inclusiveness: first, in the fabric of the high-rise residential building (2), then in the way stakeholders value them and construct their discourses and strategies through time (3). We then look beyond to investigate contemporary practices and usages in high-rise living (4). HIGH-RISE intends to contribute to the discussion on the building and living of the contemporary metropolis in globalization and verticalization pressures, through: actions of scientific communication and in favor of scientific and technical culture, contributions to higher education curricula and recommendations for planners in the two cities.

The aim of the research project is to understand how the Franciscans used literature in French as a communication tool in order to spread Franciscan ideology in the lay society between the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Indeed, the Franciscan order appears as a remarkable organisation of cultural production and diffusion, inscribed in the networks of economic and political power : it put in circulation literary works in French that were designed as didactical and ideological supports accessible to lay people who were away from the clerical world. Two main tasks will be carried out during the research project: the establishment of an exhaustive repertory of "Franciscan works in French", which will allow the cataloguing of medieval French texts of Franciscan origin in the form of an open source relational database MySQL; the examination of a first corpus of Franciscan texts made up of the French lives of St. Francis and St. Clare of Assisi, which will be the subject of a philological, literary and bibliological study. The project will question how Franciscan writings, by configuring a new form of "literary preaching" in the context of the court conceived as an emerging "mediatic society", ensured the elaboration and transmission to the ruling classes of a Franciscan norm conceived not only from a dogmatic perspective, but from a spiritual one in the broadest sense, embracing the different aspects of creation in a harmony of human beings (social dimension) and living beings ("ecological" dimension). In general, the establishment and examination of the corpus of Franciscan writings in French will pave the way for a new paradigm in Medieval literature studies by defining the contours of a "literary franciscanity" in vernacular.