Medically Assisted Reproduction and Infertility in a Globalizing World (Pretoria, Ouagadougou, Paris) The use of biotechnology in the case of medically assisted procreation is becoming an increasingly globalized practice (its actors are mobile, as are the gametes…). It is inscribed in a context where the use of new communication technologies allows for an access to medical information. Nowadays, in a growing number of African cities, private hospitals (in which doctors from the public sector intervene) are taking care of infertile couples. Some of them come from neighboring countries which are lacking services dealing with such issue, other fly to Europe to benefit from these techniques. This situation has to be understood with the lack of social recognition of infertility in sub-Saharan Africa as well as with the political unwillingness to turn it into a Public Health issue while medical doctors and demographers do affirm that the fight against infertility has to do with the demographic transition. Infertility do also poses the question of gender relation in a context of social change. In this regard, it is an empirical entry into the issue of women’s vulnerability (abuse, divorce, social downgrading, suicide…) in a context where the «valence différentielle des sexes» (differential valency of sexes) leads men to hardly recognize their own infertility. The project aims to assess the increasing penetration of these techniques in Africa looking at two countries inscribed in contrasting social and economic realities as well as falling under different laws (Pretoria in South Africa and Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso). A third fieldwork site is located in Paris to assess specific situation of migrant couples or of couples engaged in logic of therapeutic mobility. The project also aims to study, among couples who had children using medically assisted procreation, the effects of these techniques on their theories of procreation, on the way they see filiation (especially with regards to the lineage model), and on their parental models. With the aim of understanding medically assisted procreation in the context of globalization, our project will look at health clinic web sites which are offering medically assisted procreation services, at blogs, forums and other kind of materials available on the web. This choice is grounded on observations made during preceding research projects in anthropology of health (Aids, Genetic disease…) in which members of the present team have witness how the web has become an important source of information for health professional and some patients on the African continent.

Brittle materials as concretes, rocks, ceramics, glasses or some polymers are widely used in industry or in civil engineering under dynamic loadings, high pressure or impact. In this project, it is proposed to develop specific experimental procedures and numerical methods to improve understanding and modelling of the dynamic behaviour of brittle materials and to validate the model.

A systematic and massive appeal to communication campaigns for the preservation of the population’s health was reinvested in a number of health policies following sanitary health crises at the end of the 20th century (New Public Health). Since the beginning of the 20th Century “knowing how to prevent” implies to engage with “modern” audiovisual techniques of communication. In order to put this development into perspective, the research programme will examine, historically and from an audiovisual point of view, the forms and variations of communication in the health sector. The study builds on systematic analysis of ways of producing early health education films dating from 1900 to 1960 in France. The central hypothesis of the project consists in thinking that an analysis of production modalities of these first films, which depict information and prevention in health, as well as the competences required for their production, their diffusion, and the complexity of their use, can contribute to better understanding practices and stakes of communicating biomedical knowledge and representations in a sector that constitutes a public sphere in the 21st century: health. Researching films of facts leads us to questioning the mise en scène of scientific knowledge and power and our capacity to distinguish clearly in their discourse between what could be concerned as misconceiving propaganda in contrast to faithful information. The program is organized according to two major lines (axes). The first axis of the program involves constituting a corpus of films that are little known or inaccessible. An exhaustive inventory of health films does not exist at present. The films themselves are often preserved in 16 or 35 mm format, which is difficult to project and therefore rarely used. The central wager of the first research axis is to compile an inventory and gather a homogenous, circumscribed, and manageable body of films in order to pursue systematic analysis. Intimate knowledge of this body will invite interrogation of about 1) how images produced in a situated and specific scientific context depict and represent sanitary knowledge; 2) how images produced for and distributed in the public sphere orient and determine our perception of what science, technology and medicine are; 3) how dispositifs of communication carry these images, the impact of audiovisual media, the meaning of cinematographic art serving transmission of a message but as well the constraints that film making imposes and the questions raised by directing, producing and distributing films that participate in public discourses about health information and prevention. The programme takes the shape of an observatory of audiovisual communication in the health sector from the origins of film to the arrival of television at the end of the 1950s. The methodology of the project is foremostly comparative. Following studies shaped by the concepts of comparative history and entangled history, these will be adapted for analysing the films. The aim of this method is to transcend the singularity of each film document in order to focus analysis on (1) the socio-political context of these films in France, (2) their cinematographic and audiovisual context of the era, (3) the international health film context comparing French, German and Russian film productions. The second axis of the programme will use the corpus analysis results to orient investigations and comparisons of the different productions. Proceeding in this way has the advantage of an analysis that is systematic in approach and feasible for constituting and analysing the film corpus, while maintaining a weft of structured analysis in the comparison of synchronic/diachronic, of different film categories (laboratory films, documentary films, fiction films), and national/international.