Category Archives: Research

Research Area 1 – Displacements, “Dépaysements” and Discrepancies: People, Knowledge and Practices

Research in this area aims at further developing understandings of displacements that impact people, knowledge and practices by exploring the ways they are transformed as they pass through space and time. The term ‘displacement’ covers the whole scope of mobilities, flows and circulations related to people, material and cultural goods and ideas. Displacement entails renegotiating and reshaping the content it affects. Indeed, it involves crossing borders, whether symbolic or concrete, where interactions, exchanges, contacts and frictions can occur. Continue reading Research Area 1 – Displacements, “Dépaysements” and Discrepancies: People, Knowledge and Practices

Research area 2 – Norms & Transgressions

Contemporary discourses on freedom of expression, multiculturality, emigration or sexuality persistently toy with the notion of transgression. Transgression can be viewed as a strategy adopted by various actors–religious, cultural, social–to claim and legitimate such norms they deem alternative to the established hierarchies, conventions, traditions, canons and laws. As a discourse, transgression contests the absolute authority of the existing norms, and questions their performative power with its own. As a practice though, it leans on a repertoire of actions (violence, humour, silence, and so forth), which do not necessarily imply any assertion nor self-awareness, for social practices of transgression cannot be reduced to their moral comment. Continue reading Research area 2 – Norms & Transgressions

Research Area 3 – Objects, Traces, Mapping: Everyday Experience of Spaces

This research focus is based on both an empirical and a symbolic definition of space (social, geographical, historiographical), considered as a construction prompted by practices and experiences.

Experiencing space is framed by the layout imposed by objects– architectural, instrumental, or common–as demonstrated by current research on the social life of objects, which grasps them in their interactions with individuals and groups. Such an everyday experience of objects is intertwined with a range of symbolical structures: mental mapping, through which space is both surveyed and imagined; traces of a presence/absence, which are open to the archaeology of events both gone and surviving; palimpsests, with their time layers; and boundaries, both concrete and symbolical, through which space is defined, classified, organized and made one’s own. Continue reading Research Area 3 – Objects, Traces, Mapping: Everyday Experience of Spaces

CfA: AV ČR – CNRS TANDEM Program 2018-2020

The Czech Academy of Sciences (AV ČR) and CEFRES/CNRS are launching this year a new research program called TANDEM based on the CEFRES Platform’s cooperation and endeavour to excellency in social and human sciences.

The aim of the TANDEM program is to associate two researchers, one from the AV ČR, one from the CNRS (French National Research Center) around a joint research project leading to the submission of an ERC project (starting, consolidator, advanced…).
The first TANDEM team will start its work from February 2018 for 2 years. It will be based at CEFRES. ERC projects can be submitted once per year during the appointment of the team at CEFRES.

Continue reading CfA: AV ČR – CNRS TANDEM Program 2018-2020