Social Sciences

In
 the
 ancient
 Greek
 and
 Roman
 world,
 entire
 cities
 participated
 in
 the
 performance
 of
 hymns
 during
 religious
 festivals.
 These
 “cultural”
 and
 civic
 events
 were
 commissioned
 by
 the
 city‐state,
 and
 the
 hymns,
 including
 song,
 music
 and
 dance, were
performed by
a
chorus
of
citizens.
The
genre

Power Struggle by Olga Kisseleva is a live battle between four anti-viruses commented by actor using the tone of an altercation or a political confrontation. Each anti-virus tries to destroy the other three, eradicating everything in the computer until there is only one left. The performance offers a beautiful metaphor for the struggle for power currently taking place between politicians, as unproductive as it is dangerous. The fight becomes visible to the spectators thanks to lines of code racing on the screen.

This project is proposed as a first step to establish a strong collaboration between the Aesthetics of Performing and Spectacular Arts Department (EsPAS) headed by Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau at the ACTE Institute, a joint research center between CNRS and Sorbonne Paris 1, and the Theater and Performance Studies Department (TAPS) headed by Jennifer DeVere Brody at Stanford University, a collaboration we intend to pursue over the years. This collaboration will involve several permanent researchers and postdoctoral fellows from these research departments.

The project examines the role of social programs in the incorporation of Latin American immigrants in France and the United States. The project seeks to understand how immigrants interact with social assistance programs and how experiences with these programs affect (e.g. help or hinder) their incorporation into the host society.

Language acquisition — the process by which children break into their native language — is both an exciting scientific frontier and a critical applied issue. During the course of acquisition, babies both have to learn the meanings of words and learn to recognize different ways the same word is pronounced, all while ignoring irrelevant variations (e.g. “dog” is the same word even when spoken by two different people). These two aspects of language learning are both important problems but have typically been studied independently.

This study is relating to the treatment of bank failure in a comparative perspective. As banking institutions manage their business globally, the treatment of their failure may not be ended in one single jurisdiction.

My project aims to examine underprivileged people’s relationship to politics, in the current context of economic crisis and rise in inequalities, from a twofold perspective. The first raises the following question: since underprivileged people are often said to be deprived from resources to discuss politics, how do they manage to make up their opinions and representations about the political and social fields? Here, I also seek to understand the ways they think with respect to politics and their modes of political reasoning.

Today, 144 countries have committed to grant asylum to those fleeing persecutions by signing the 1952 Geneva Convention on Refugees. However, the Convention does not specify how this should be done in practice. As a result, today there are as many asylum institutions – set of rules that govern how refugees are admitted in a particular country – as there are signatory countries. What are the consequences of this eclectic institutional design for refugees? How do these institutions affect who gets asylum status, and how well refugees integrate into the host society?

My visit to the Center for Ocean Solutions (COS) provides an opportunity to develop collaborative research between Stanford and Ecole Polytechnique on the question of oceans’ sustainability. The management of oceans ecosystems is at the center of environmental policy agendas and wider political, industrial and societal concerns. Noise for instance is a particularly significant problem in the US and the European Union.