The pandemic highlighted the centrality of care. COVID-19 heightened awareness of the myriad forms of social connections in care as essential work crucial to the functioning of society. Care work has never been so visible, yet so precarious and vulnerable. Disruptions due to COVID made visible the web of social relationships of care and revealed the vulnerabilities of care recipients and caregivers. Abundant evidence disclosed the disproportionately negative consequences of COVID-19 on women, particularly women of color, migrants, and refugees, both as essential care workers and as recipients of care. The pandemic also revealed the limitations of care systems, exacerbating the care crisis worldwide with a greater impact in vulnerable territories. This project seeks to uncover and understand the fragmented and uncoordinated matrix of care provision, and the resultant overlapping, inconsistent and at times competing polices and regulations. Rebuilding a robust and more resilient care organization requires a comprehensive understanding of the care economy and entails learning from innovative initiatives in different countries. Our transnational team, extending previous comparative research networks, will bring together experts on care studies to analyze countries with differing welfare regimes, level of inequalities, social organization of care, and health systems in Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, United Kingdom and United States to explain responses and capacities to cope with the crisis. Comparisons will proceed along four main axes: (i)The impact of the pandemic on needs and modalities of care provision. Axis 1 explores how different types of families deal with the challenges imposed both by the usual care needs and by increasing demands during the pandemic. We will survey alternative methodologies to organize national databases to identify the existing connections between kinship, economic activities, transfers of time dedicated to care and the strategies for hiring paid domestic workers. (ii)Labor conditions and rights in a post pandemic world. Axis 2 carries out a cross-country survey in partnership with collective organizations of paid care workers in the 6 countries. It aims to assess the employment conditions, health, and well-being, pre- and during the pandemic, encompassing the diversity of occupational groups that fall into the definition of care workers. In parallel with the survey, qualitative studies will focus on experiences of different workers in paid care pre- and during the pandemic. (iii)Care as a strategic dimension and pillar for public policies on social infrastructure rebuilding. Axis 3 proposes a strategy for analyzing the infrastructure of care systems and care-related policies and will deepen understanding of state responses to the pandemic, an essential issue for building back better more resilient care systems post-COVID. We will examine two main components required for re-building care in the future: social infrastructure and the policy matrix. Comparison across cities and countries will provide a more precise mapping of distinctly different care systems anchored in a multi-scalar approach. (iv)Caring strategies when the state fails. Axis 4 will focus on different forms of vulnerability and the role of collective action to overcome them, by means of in-depth qualitative studies in vulnerable areas of different metropolises. Since vulnerability doesn´t just stem from poverty, we will also analyze inequalities in access to care that come from stigmatization and discrimination by sexual orientation or cultural/religious background. We will share preliminary findings with care workers and key stakeholders from the co-designed research and promote workshops to collect feedback and prepare policy briefs for each country. Public engagement activities will disseminate results and policy recommendations. Anonymized findings will be presented at national and international conferences and published.

This participatory and multidisciplinary research project aims to analyze the social and urban reconfigurations underway in the “popular” neighbourhoods from the perspective of their youth. The goal of this study is to understand the experiences of youths, from their territorial anchorages, their individual and collective trajectories and their social representations. By situating them in a history and present of the “popular” neighbourhoods, it tries to capture the different conflicting dynamics that contribute to these reconfigurations. To do this, it relies on a threefold approach: it is based on this youth's experience; it grasps the metropolitan area from the perspective of “popular” neighbourhoods; it develops participatory methods in a citizen sciences perspective. It responds to both methodological issues, epistemological and theoretical.

Between 2012 and 2015, a slew of historical sites registered on the World Heritage List were systematically targeted by terrorist groups in Mali, Iraq, and Syria. In response to this crisis, UNESCO adopted a strategy aiming at ‘incorporat[ing] the protection of culture into humanitarian action, security strategies and peace-building processes by engaging with relevant stakeholders outside the culture domain’. Since then, this UN agency has reaffirmed the significant importance of cultural heritage protection by referring to it as a protection of ‘cultural diversity’ against ‘cultural cleansing’, the strategy of terrorist groups to attack local communities through their cultural heritage. Now, the use of the term ‘cultural diversity’ provides a privileged entry point into three fields of international law and its actors (international human rights law, international criminal law and international humanitarian law). By doing so, UNESCO appears to distance itself from a top-down perspective of cultural heritage managed by the States to adopt a bottom-up perspective, focused on the local communities’ participation. In this context, HUMANITIES raises the following question: Is this change in terminology indicative or even provocative of a much deeper shift from a top-down approach to a bottom-up approach of cultural heritage in emergencies, closer to the needs of local populations? Using mixed methods, we will first analyse how UNESCO built its ‘humanitarian agenda’ in 2015 around the notion of ‘cultural diversity’, thus extending the range of protected heritage (both tangible and intangible) in contemporary conflicts (e.g. in Ukraine and Nagorny Karabakh). Secondly, it will examine how the term 'cultural diversity', when used as a common denominator between international organisations dealing with the protection of cultural heritage in emergency situations, produces a new way of thinking about collective responsibility in this field.

The object of the proposed research is to examine the circulation of heroin in France between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 21st century. How, during this period, did heroin consumption, once confined to a limited number of restricted circles of consumers, become extended to a far greater number of groups and social milieux? How were the networks of distribution and commercialization set up? What effect did public policy (legal, sanitary and social) have on these phenomena? How, in a nutshell, did this “French epidemic” become possible? It is useful to situate these research questions in their context. Though the cumulated effects of the diffusion of heroin and the aids epidemic constituted a social and sanitary catastrophe, this situation has been very little heeded and studied, and this for two reasons. On the one hand, the danger has been kept out of the public eye by the denial of the sanitary and social risks incurred by diffusion and use in high risk populations; on the other hand, the social sciences are concerned, little interest has been expressed for this recent, nebulous and little heeded historical phenomenon. The project aims to reconstitute the historical context of the commercialization and diffusion of heroin by bringing to light the continuities and ruptures which characterize the history of modes of drug use, dealing and distribution. We will be particularly interested in the way in which proximities created by the crossing of social and cultural boundaries between apparently heterogeneous worlds have weighed on practice. Attention will also be directed to the influence of markets and economic organizations which have played a role in the distribution of products. Although, in view of the decline, in the mid-1990s, of the associated social and economic mechanisms, it might seem today that the dealing and use of heroin belong to bygone times, we feel it is reasonable to affirm that similar phenomena may well affect other products and other worlds of users. Our hypothesis is that the rules which govern consumption form social processes which are both diversified and dynamic. As such, they are continually evolving via the influence of three types of actors and the “worlds” of which they are part : 1/ consumers and the “world of consumption” whose modes of proximity and distance determine the circulation of products as a social phenomenon; 2/ the world of suppliers involved in various aspects of the economic calibration of products; 3/ institutional actors and the policies which guide their actions. Our analysis, which is primarily longitudinal, will be situated on three territorial scales: the first is transnational and particularly concerned with the propagation of cultural significations, and with networks of production and diffusion; the second is national, involving attention to representations, to criminal affairs and to public policies; the third is local and explores the world of users in large cities. We will focus on two urban contexts, Paris and Marseille, seen as significant both as far as drug use is concerned, as homes to laboratories, as centers of production and calibration, and as strategic centers for criminal activity. The methods used include archival research, personal accounts and biographical interviews, family histories involving the circulation, commercialization, consummation and the valorization of heroin. Thus, we will be referring to secondary sources such as official reports, legal files, newspaper articles, films, fictional accounts, and so forth. We will also interview several generations of individuals directly or indirectly involved in the situations and activities under study. Lastly, we will carry out a statistical analysis of legal decisions on both national and local levels upon which we will found our analysis of public policy.

While the majority of social science studies on the State focus on its employees and institutions, or the way it works, our project stands apart from these approaches by focusing attention on the people subject to this administration. It looks at the concrete terms in which governed populations perceive and face State power. In a context where the intervention of public power is increasingly questioned, PROFET offers an ambitious and multidisciplinary study of ordinary relationships to the State in France. PROFET focuses on representations and practices that may not necessarily be political but nonetheless reveals a certain relationship to public institutions. The governed are faced with State power in a variety of practices ranging from paying taxes or putting their children through school to going to court or acting to defend their safety. The original nature of the project lies in its crosscutting approach to the State, examining different institutions head-on as a range of modes on which the same social relationship operates. The project deals with the different ways people are faced with the State, combining quantitative and qualitative methods and using different scales of observation. The first key issue is devising and analysing an unprecedented questionnaire administered to a representative panel of the French population and devoted to the different ways in which an individual can face State power. The second section of the project includes four ethnographic studies in urban and rural fields focusing on the relationship to tax, to school, to the police force, and to the law, as well a cross-cutting study looking at the relationship street-level bureaucrats have to the State. This project brings together specialists from different disciplines (sociology, political science, law, history, and educational science) and is organised around three themes of reflection. - The first theme focuses on socialisation to the State. Ordinary relationships to State institutions will be broached as a variety of modes of inclusion in society, considering both situations of interaction and forms of influence at a distance. - The second theme relates to inequalities in access to public services. This question addresses the objective and perceived inequalities deriving from differences in social position and means, or geographical disparities, among other factors. - The third theme looks at the different strategies used by governed populations in their dealings with the State, whether through collective mobilisation or individual reactions. If we consider the application of the law as an arena in which conflicting interpretations and power relations come into play, we can bring to light widely varying types of behaviour and strategies ranging from consent to resistance. This research programme aims to renew studies on the State and to build a new research space that can fit into partnerships with other European countries. Our anticipated results will therefore provide scientific knowledge, but our project also aims to improve the knowledge of decision-makers and to find a wider audience by contributing to contemporary debates.