Joint Projects Grant Recipients

Values and Agency. A Franco-American Philosophical Symposium

Description

Innovative co-teaching grant:Philosophy
A thematic doctoral workshop, to be held in Paris (June 2014) at the:

Columbia Global Center l Europe

Reid Hall, Salle de Conférence

4, rue de Chevreuse

Technology, Economy, Democracy: A Proposal for an Interdisciplinary Doctoral Workshop

Description

Innovative co-teaching grant: Sociology  and Political Science
A doctoral workshop, to be held at Columbia in New York (June 2014).

African Studies Global Seminar

Description

Innovative co-teaching grant:History, African Studies, Political Science
A joint course simultaneously offered by Columbia University,  Sciences Po, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, University of Oxford (Spring 2014).

Transitioning Atlantic Hurricanes in a Changing Climate: Future Extreme Weather Risk for the Eastern US and Western Europe

Description

Innovative research grant: Earth and Environmental Science

Joint Research Project, aiming to evaluate the characteristics and statistical distribution of storms undergoing ET in all the models in the inter-comparison, in all the simulations and  a workshop at Columbia in spring 2015, in which preliminary results from the project will be presented.

Sustainable Economic Development and Natural Disaster Shocks

Description

Innovative research grant:
Earth and Environmental Sciences, Economics

Collaborative Research (“Measuring the Socio-Economic Impact of Earthquakes”) and Teaching Project (Graduate Level Course “Sustainable Economic Development and Natural Disasters”), Spring 2014.

Memory in Global Context, a Transnational Research Project

Description

Innovative research grant: History, Cognitive Sciences, Psychology, Neuroscience, Museum studies

A symposium on the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in October 2014, 4 workshops at CU in 2014-15 involving Faculty and graduate students, with counterparts in Paris funded by French sources.

Social Sciences and the Danger of Literature: A Cultural History of Knowledge

Description

The project addresses an interdisciplinary reflection on the idea of interdisciplinarity itself between literature et the social sciences. A doctoral seminar for two years, in 2015 and 2016 will introduce a new way of training doctoral students at Columbia and Sciences-Po in a significant and exciting fashion, with the scholar contribution of several disciplines. The seminar seeks to establish a cultural history of knowledge:  how did literature and the social sciences come to be considered as separate entities?  and how does the present state of the two fields allow us to rethink their connections? The project will foster the institutional links and academic cooperation between the Centre d'histoire de Sciences-Po and two language and literature departments (French and Germanic) at Columbia University.

Scribbles and Scribbling

Description

The main purpose of this research project is to conceive and create a Digital Platform in order to undertake a first inventory, mapping and cataloguing of Early Modern scribbles. Problematic access to these visual sources, which can be found among popular images as well as at the margins of artworks, makes it difficult to study them as a specific phenomenon. The creation of a Digital Platform intends to stimulate and to support research on this little-known if not unpublished material in order to better understand the places and functions of scribbles in Early Modern visual culture. The conception and methodological issues of the Digital Platform will be discussed during a Graduate seminar at Columbia University, by faculty members and students from Columbia University and the Université Paris 1. They will then jointly ensure the functioning of this platform, supporting it with the organization of annual appointments and publications. This long-lasting and sustainable project aims to stimulate a joint research on a new field, encouraging different methodological approaches of the phenomenon as well as collaborations with museum curators and conservators, in order to reconsider the position of this visual production within the field of art history and to promote its future display.

Reconciling Platonism and Nominalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics

Description

The purpose of this project is to organize two international workshops, to be held in Paris at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and in New York at Columbia University, devoted to one of the topics currently center-stage in the philosophy of mathematics, namely, the possibility of reconciling Platonist and Nominalist accounts. For each workshop, we are planning to invite leading scholars in the field, both from Paris 1 and Columbia and from other universities and research centers in Europe and the Americas.

The Territories of the Economy, Rescaling, Circulation

Description

The project is part of an academic and institutional effort to emphasize the interactions and the specific training for PhD Students in economic sociology and political economy.A workshop will take place from  the 6th to the 8th of July 2015 in France on « Territories and the economy, rescaling and circulations ». The project  aims at securing the intellectual dynamics and foster cooperation between Columbia and Sciences Po in the two fields of research (economic sociology and political economy). It will build on the respective strengths and different emphasis on particular  methods, research questions, use of data, theoretical traditions. The point of the workshop is to bring PhD students together to discuss their work and to be discussed by senior scholar from the other place in order to get different perspectives about their research, suggestions for comparison, awareness about specific literature, different emphasis on the arguments, different angles from the two disciplines.

Ethno-Religious Identity and Politics in the Middle East and South Asia

Description

Professor Karen Barkey (Sociology & History, Columbia University) and Professor Christophe Jaffrelot (Political Science, Sciences Po) seek an Innovative Co-teaching Grant from the Alliance Program for their fall 2014 course, “Ethno-religious Identity and Politics in the Middle East and South Asia.” The course will focus on the relationship between religion and politics and the manner in which a past history of religious and ethnic communalism affects contemporary politics. “Ethno-religious Identity and Politics in the Middle East and South Asia” will bring together various comparative historical methods from political science, sociology and anthropology, to examine the historical legacies of communalisms in imperial and colonial contexts, along with the specificities of religious and ethnic politics in India, Pakistan, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. Students will also look at how this can inform our understanding of events unfolding now. The course is designed to be deeply comparative, that is, it takes analytic comparisons seriously, tracing processes of change in various countries to look for similarities and differences across cases. Through this, they hope the course will demonstrate how we can cross boundaries and talk to each other across fields, gaining more by using multiple lenses on a topic.

Social Dynamics and Cimate Change

Description

In relation to the COP 21 negotiations that will be held in Paris in December 2015, an interdisciplinary conference on “social dynamics and climate change” will be organized at the university Paris 1 Panthéon-­‐Sorbonne in October 2015. The aim of the conference is to offer a complementary perspective to the one highlighted by the negotiations by focusing on the bottom-­‐up social transformations that are and will be induced by climate challenge. The joint project’s aim is to enable the participation of researchers from Columbia to the conference as well as to organize a specific one day Alliance workshop within the conference during which researchers from Columbia and from Paris will present their work on the economic, legal and social aspects of the climate challenge.

Negotiating Pluralism in Shared Religious Sites: A Comparative Study of Coexistence in the Eastern Mediterranean and India

Description

Karen Barkey at Columbia University and the Christophe Jaffrelot at Sciences Po have partnered for a joint research project entitled “Negotiating Pluralism in Shared Religious Sites: A Comparative Study of Coexistence in the Eastern Mediterranean and India.” This project counters the prevailing narratives in academia and society which focus on religious fundamentalism and violence by examining how different religious groups exercise their faiths in shared religious spaces. The places where people from diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds are able to live with difference, accommodate each other’s religious needs and negotiate otherness in public are positive examples of pluralism and tolerance. The lands of the Eastern Mediterranean are home to a large number of these spaces where Christians, Muslims, and Jews come together for prayer. Likewise, there are many spaces in the Indian subcontinent where Hindus and Muslims come together. The goals of this project are: 1. the expansion of a network of French and American scholars working on accommodation and pluralism within religion, 2. the training of French and American students in ethnographic methods and collaborative research, and 3. the dissemination of project findings via traditional and new media methods. The project will proceed with a workshop for students and scholars and a series of joint publications will be produced.

Forms of Pluralism and Democratic Constitutionalism

Description

The aim of this project is to discuss four plausible ways to manage pluralism in a “post sovereign” world: federalism; status group legal pluralism; corporate group autonomy; and subsidiarity. The following question animates our inquiry: what forms of legally instituted organized pluralism are compatible with democratic constitutionalism? What principles should structure the allocation of jurisdiction and representation in a democratic polity and/or transnationally? Our aim is to engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue on the best match between the core principles of democratic constitutionalism (equal liberty, voice and justice for all individuals) and the various strategies for including, Integrating and managing pluralism that have become salient, again, in the 21st century. These include versions of federalism, political secularism or multiple establishment of religions, status group legal pluralism for minorities (religious, ethnic, and linguistic), revival of the corporate form as a mode of governance, and the subsidiarity principle as an allegedly flexible multi-level governance alternative to federalism and state sovereignty. The research project includes both theoretical and empirical contributions as well as relevant and comparative case studies (South Africa, Israel, India, Belgium, Canada); and we are open to a variety of ways addressing the four alternatives. 

Africa Global Seminar: Citizenship and Social Movement

Description

The Africa Global Seminar: Citizenship and Social Movements is a graduate level seminar that brings scholars and students from several diverse institutions in the US, France, and Morocco to explore histories of individual and collective manifestations of citizenship in several African countries. Its primary aim is to understand the social, historical, and economic conditions that give rise to political and social action, and to explore these actions as fundamentally creative enterprises that take hold in formal and informal spaces. This seminar will take place at Columbia University, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P), and Sciences-Po in Spring 2016. Students and faculty in these three venues will be brought into dialogue through internet technology (e.g., collective on-line forums, conference calls, shared electronic resources) and by the exchange of faculty and students throughout the term. Through this innovative teaching approach, students in the US, France, and Morocco will learn from each other as they collaborate on assignments, engage in debates, and share their opinions.

Data and Methods for Modeling Migration Associated with Climate Change

Description

This proposal seeks funds for a two-day proposal development workshop focused on the topic of modeling the potential migration associated with climate change.  When discussing so-called “climate refugees”, the most frequently asked question by decision-makers and the media relates to the numbers of people who are likely to migrate owing to climate change impacts. Thus far the academic community has largely been silent, and estimates have been developed by a number of non-governmental organizations and interest groups, most of which are back-of-the-envelope estimates or even wild guesses. Unfortunately, despite their shaky foundations, these numbers are often widely cited. While the difficulties of developing useful future estimates are non-trivial, there are some promising emerging approaches for the research and modeling community to pursue. There are also lessons to be learned from the quantitative climate modeling and climate-conflict communities. What is lacking is a venue to explore the issues and lay the groundwork for future work. The purpose of this workshop is precisely to bring together the community interested in data and modeling related to population migration associated with climate change. This would allow for a thorough comparison of methodologies and the delineation of a clear research agenda that would lead to more robust predictions and scenarios of people displaced by climate change impacts. The collaboration will leverage organizational connections, funding opportunities, and research networks in France, Europe, and the USA, and engage two student interns from Columbia and Sciences Po.

Asymmetric Information, Externalities and Restricted Participation

Description

The project aims to create a Columbia-Panthéon Sorbonne research collaboration. The project focuses on two main research topics: a) decentralizing efficient allocative mechanisms in economies of asymmetric information, and b) designing trading restrictions in commodity and financial markets in order to decentralize constrained efficient allocations of credit economies with limited commitment and strategic default. The unifying theme emerges from the presence of externalities in both research topics. The increasing integration of our economies and societies generates tremendous positive and negative external effects and it creates a demand for new economic policies designed to govern such phenomena. Designing these policies requires a solid understanding of the economics of externalities at a micro and general equilibrium level. The transatlantic collaboration consists of a team with expertise in the transversal topics of the project. The project is open to doctoral students from Columbia and Panthéon Sorbonne, and it includes the co-organization of a joint workshop.

Approach to Developing Low Cost Contacts for Organic Fets

Description 

In continuous improvement, Organic Field-Effect Transistors (OFETs) are the cornerstone of emerging technologies that aim at producing flexible, lightweight, large-area and low-cost  microelectronic systems, such as displays or sensors. Nevertheless in OFETs, gold is still the predominant material chosen for source/drain electrodes. This is mainly due to its chemical inertness, high electrical conductivity, processability, and ability to form a low-injection barrier junction with most p-type organic semiconductors. In a few words, the project CHEAPFET aims at substituting gold with cheaper high conductivity materials such as copper and aluminum, chemically modifying the surface of such metallic electrodes to build efficient,low cost OFETs.

Objects and Archives in Science, Technology, and Society Studies: Promoting Research and Innovative Teaching Co-Initiatives

Description

This project aims at the promotion of sustainable links between two newly founded institutions: the Columbia University Center for Science and Society, and the LinX, École polytechnique’s research laboratory in the humanities and social sciences. It is based on the special collections of both Columbia University and École polytechnique. These collections provide crucial historical sources for research on intertwined developments in science, technology, pedagogy, economy, industry, and politics. Linking these two sets of special collections will raise concrete and specific research for scholars on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. This proposal foresees three interrelated stages to the building of this collaboration: 1. Inventory, assess, and preserve the collections. 2. Integration of physical objects and paper archives into graduate and undergraduate teaching. 3. A workshop, including faculty and graduate students from both institutions, to be held in Fall 2016 in Paris to present and share findings and results of research.

Media as Inquiry

Description

This is a proposal for a four-week joint collaboration between Professors Riva Kastoryano (Sciences Po) and Frances Negrón-Muntaner (Columbia University) titled “Media as Inquiry.” The project will consist of three lectures, a presentation, and a workshop to explore how digital analytical tools, media analysis, and video/web building practices can be part of research and courses relating to social marginalization and exclusion in both institutions.

Understanding and Reducing Gender Differences in Public Speaking

Description

Public speaking skills are among the essential skills that students need to acquire during their years at Columbia University and Sciences Po. Currently, students have some opportunities to acquire technical public speaking skills, but female students appear to apply these skills to a lesser extent than male students. The first objective of this project is to measure these gender differences in the context of students’ oral participation in public events. The second objective of this project is for each university to improve their course offerings and share best practices to reach a point where all students can feel comfortable participating in class discussions and public events.

Advancing a Critical Turn in Human Rights Scholarship and Advocacy

Description

This project is a collaboration between students and faculty at Columbia and Sciences Po Law Schools to advance the practice of, and scholarship about, ‘critical human rights advocacy.’ Critical human rights advocacy is a mode of human rights practice characterized by deliberate and reflective efforts to reform human rights practice in light of critiques of the human rights field. While a significant body of academic literature challenges the efficacy and normative foundations of human rights advocacy, this literature has not kept pace with the actual practice of human rights advocates around the world—many of whom directly engage with, and respond to, the academic critique of human rights in their work. This project aims to map, analyze, and assess practices across the globe that employ a critical approach to human rights advocacy, and to provide a space—through convenings and print and web-based platforms— for intellectual and pragmatic engagement around the field’s most pressing challenges. Students from both law schools will take a lead role in researching and mapping critiques and critical human rights practice, engage in structured mutual exchange to expand exposure to a diversity of modes of practice and enable a more robust discussion around salient and common issues, and reflect upon their findings in connection with their own clinical practice. Faculty principal investigators and students will produce: an academic study of scholarly critiques of human rights, including a novel typology of critique; an assessment of the nature and extent of current critical human rights advocacy as evident in the published work of human rights organizations; a survey instrument to assess the views and practices of human rights advocates, paired with in-depth targeted interviews; and a pilot convening of leading scholars, practitioners, and community advocates, joined by students, to workshop one key advocacy challenge, paired with the production of a background note and a written assessment of the approaches discussed during the convening. The combined impact of these various initiatives will be to significantly advance the practice of critical human rights advocacy.

Perceptual Functions for Faster Interactive Visualizations

Description

Interactive visualization tools are critical to many data analysts by making the discovery and verification of hypotheses quick and easy to use. Increasing data sizes has made the scalability of these tools a necessity. To bridge the gap between data sizes and interactivity, many visualization systems have turned to sampling-based approximate query processing frameworks. However, these systems are currently oblivious to human perceptual visual accuracy. This could either lead to overly aggressive sampling when the approximation accuracy is higher than needed or an incorrect visual rendering when the accuracy is too lax. Thus, for both correctness and efficiency, we propose to use empirical knowledge of human perceptual limitations to automatically bound the error of approximate answers meant for visualization.

The Matter of Cities: Excavating the “Material” in Urban Social and Technical Controversies

Description

How do scholars and policymakers understand the production of goods and services, the movement of people and commodities from one place to another, governance arrangements, the establishment and defense of neighborhoods, the reception of immigrants, the disruption or accommodation of ecological systems? What sense do they make of the functioning of cities? In order to answer such questions, scholars need perspectives on the city that allow them to explain and interpret social and technical controversies, for it is in such moments that what can be done – and must be avoided – become most obvious. The issue here is the development of urban policy and planning initiatives that are more congruent with how cities actually work. To address this, the proposed doctoral workshops will focus on a robust and cross-disciplinary perspective that treats the city as a collaboration of humans and their associations, built forms, nature, and technologies. These theoretical ideas will be considered in terms of controversies currently underway in two cities: Paris and New York.

Art and Economic Encounters: An international symposium by CU and Paris 1

Description

The international symposium “Art and Economic Encounters,” scheduled for June 2017 in Paris, is the culminating event of a multi-year collaborative project on new approaches to art and economics. The symposium will bring together an international group of scholars and artists from across disciplines to explore how artifacts and artistic practices have materialized ruptures within, and encounters between, economic systems, as in the context of revolution, colonization, or fiscal uncertainty. As a joint project between Columbia University and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, it aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue between scholars of diverse fields and disciplines (art history of all periods, anthropology, area studies) with shared interests in approaching economic history and theory from the perspective of material objects and practices.

Infrastructures, Technologies and Time in African cities

Description

The “Infrastructures, Technologies and Time in African Cities” project is a research and teaching collaboration between affiliated faculty of the Institute of African Studies (IAS) at Columbia and faculty at the Center for International Studies and Research (CERI) at Sciences Po. It encompasses two joint conferences and course on issues of urban life in Africa and their varied political, social and cultural expressions. The proposal includes support for two conferences, “New infrastructural networks in Africa,” and “Time as politics: past present and future in African urbanism,” and a graduate seminar “Citizenship and Social Movements in Africa” to be taught at Columbia (SIPA) in Fall 2017. The conferences and course are collaborative in nature and will include participation from faculty partners associated with this project as well as colleagues from the Institut français de recherche en Afrique (IFRA) housed at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. To include partners from Africa, the project team have submitted proposals for the Alliance Trilateral Initiatives in Emerging Regions (T.I.E.R.) and the Carnegie Foundation African Diaspora Fellowship Program. The IAS and CERI have recently been awarded a three year grant from the Partnership University Fund to support “The African Humanities Project: A Collaborative Education and Research Program.” This grant will provide additional support for faculty and student exchange related to this proposal.

Legal aspects of Climate Change Studies : Pathways to Green Innovation

Description

Climate change is a multidimensional global pollution problem arising from the world’s social, economic and legal systems. Solutions to this problem necessarily affect the way society establishes and implements laws, and society’s approach to social and environmental justice. In order to better understand current climate change issues, this project proposes to join faculty members and researchers at Columbia University and University of Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne to collaborate to develop a comparative, transatlantic dialog on the legal aspects of climate change, with a focus on France, the European Union and the United States. Through a series of joint seminars and workshops, held at the two institutions in New York City and Paris and remotely through video-conference, students, researchers and faculty will share insights and debates regarding climate justice, green innovation paths and rules for disclosure of climate risk and climate performance.

De-Provincializing Soft Power: A Global-Historical Approach, 1990-2015

Description

Columbia University (European Institute), Sciences Po, and the University of São Paulo are partnering in a research project leading to a two-day conference in São Paulo in April 2017 to study Brazil’s use of cultural power in foreign relations in the period from circa 1990 to 2015. Project participants will analyze Brazil’s concepts and practices of cultural power in the light of the US and European experiences of soft and normative power, and will also compare them with the experiences of Turkey and China. This is the third and final phase of a three-year project, "De-Provincializing Soft Power: A Global-Historical Approach, 1990-2015," which was started in the fall of 2014, and has been conducted by an international team of scholars and students from Columbia and Sciences Po in partnership with universities in Turkey, China (Renmin University) and Brazil (University of São Paulo). The project combines innovative methodologies from international history, international relations, communications, and cultural studies, and its main outcomes will be a collaboratively written global history of soft power, curriculum development and student research, an open-access website, and support to the establishment of an NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers.

The African Philosophy and Politics Project Corpora and Doctrines of African Socialisms: A Global Historical Framing

Description

This project forges new research collaborations in the study of African philosophy and politics
between American, French and African partners. Building on a recent three-day international
conference “African Socialisms/Socialisms in Africa” that took place in Paris, France in April
2016, it will stage two workshops on African socialisms at Columbia University and
Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar that will lead to the publication of an edited volume of
essays on African socialisms. The two workshops and book will highlight the interconnections
and relationships between African thinkers and will demonstrate the complexity of source
materials that informed socialist ideas globally. Participants will seek to understand the hybridity,
adaptations, intertextuality, and circulations of African socialisms in an historical and global
framework. In this way, the project seeks to cast light on local as much as global borrowings.
Beyond the genesis of the texts of African intellectual thinkers, participants will analyse the
production of African social sciences and will cast light on the writings of theorists such as
Amady Aly Dieng or Boubakar Ly, and Archie Mafaje, and the role of journals such as Présence
Africaine and George Padmore’s “The Negro Worker” in the fabrication and diffusion of African
socialisms.

Part I. Research  in “art documentaire/documentary Art: challenges to politics and aesthetics

Description

This four-week joint teaching and workshop activities will explore how digital analytical tools, media analysis, and video/web building practices can be part of research and courses relating to social marginalization and exclusion.

Science-Based Policy and Democratic Deliberation

Description

This joint project aims to understand how to integrate scientific findings with ethical and political discussions of policy through two interdisciplinary conferences, one in New York (on the general question) and one in Paris (devoted to the specific issue). This project shall focus both on the general issue of how scientific research should function within democracies, and on the specific instance of articulating policies for combating climate change. Ultimately, the intent is to create a network of European and American scholars who can advance the understanding of these important (and urgent) matters.

Conference on Criminal Governance in Comparative Perspective

Description

This joint conference will bring together a diverse group of junior and senior scholars from Columbia University, Sciences Po, and other universities from across the world to advance three objectives. First, it will advance new theoretical frameworks for the study of criminal governance. Second, the conference will introduce a novel comparative lens into an area of research largely reliant on single cases studies. And third, the papers presented at the conference will serve as the basis for a peer-reviewed publication in the form of either an edited volume or a special issue of an academic journal.research laboratory in the humanities and social sciences.

Digging Up the Cultural Roots of (late) Liberal Subjectivities

Description

This project articulates three different aspects and targets:
A. Development of researches on the specific topic and innovation in teaching
B. Development of the core issues of the research program
C. Elizabeth Povinelli’s work diffusion (translation)

The Impact of Extraterritorial Application of National Legal Norms on International Business Transactions: A Transatlantic view

Description

This joint project consists of two one-day seminars – one in New York and one in Paris – gathering representatives of all the players involved in or affected by extraterritorial regulation. These include not only academics, but also business persons and public officials. The research project aims to focus on and analyze the impact of extraterritorial legislation  on international business transactions. As a general trend and in a variety  of contexts, legislators and regulators increasingly apply their domestic legal norms extraterritorially in order to better achieve their policy goals. These efforts have significant potential effects on international trade and investment, especially in the U.S.-EU relationships.

The Implications and methods of the analysis of images in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance/ Les enjeux et les méthodes d’analyse des images au Moyen Age et La Renaissance 

Description

This joint project is a  two-day interdisciplinary workshop (to be held in Paris, in 2018) on the interpretation of images from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, broadly defined as extending from the fifth century until the end of the sixteenth century. The participants will be graduate students in the humanities from Columbia University and Paris 1, interacting with faculty from these institutions as well as from others in Paris.

Populism in America and the Middle East: Ethical and Religious Dimensions 

Description

This project will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from Columbia, Sciences Po and other universities, as well as journalists, people in government, and religious leaders, who will comparatively investigate the various forces that come together to produce “populist” movements, focusing on the role of religious and ethical claims in mobilizing a politically powerful electorate in the name of populist goals. As part of the proposed research, IRCPL and Sciences Po will organize two conferences, one in Amman (CU Global Center) and a second in New York, with the aim of furthering scholarly and public understanding of populism as a powerful political process that appears to be transforming the Middle East and the United States. 

Public Authority and Finance

Description

This joint project pursues work presented at a conference in Paris, September 2017 on the issue of “Public Authority and Finance: What is the Relevant Scale and Scope of Deregulation and Re-Regulation?” The project contributes to ongoing research into financial regulation, combining approaches by economists, legal experts, political scientists, geographers and historians. It aims to adopt an empirical approach from a comparative and historical perspective to characterize public authority and its relationship to the financial sector. 

Electronic Band Structures and Ultrafast Carrier Dynamics in Quantum Materials 

Description

This collaboration between Columbia and École Polytechnique seeks to use angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) and time-resolved ARPES (tr-ARPES) to directly map out electronic band structure and dynamics in novel quantum materials created within Columbia’s NSF-supported Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC). Two classes of materials will be studied: layered heterostructures of atomically thin two dimensional (2D) materials; and complex solids created by assembly of atomically precise super-atoms.

Overlapping perspectives on an artistic correspondence: editing the Roman letters of Léon and A.L.T. Vaudoyer (1826-32)

Description

The project of preparing a critical edition of the correspondence exchanged between Paris and Rome, between father and son architects A.L.T. and Léon Vaudoyer will involve bringing together a scholarly world as vibrant and interdisciplinary as the world’s described by the Vaudoyers. Historians of architecture, or archaeology, of language, of politics are to be associated with this international project to shed light on the different aspects and to develop multi-disciplinary frames for reading the letters not only as documents but as romantic epistolary expression.

The Philosophy of Blame Reflections on the Ethics and Politics of Blame

Description

The thematic doctoral workshop “The Philosophy of Blame” is a collaboration between faculty members, young researchers and Ph.D. students of the Philosophy Departments at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Columbia University. The workshop focuses on theoretical, epistemological and normative questions about the nature and functions of blame, questions which we believe ought to be addressed from a wide interdisciplinary perspective able to catalyze innovative ways of thinking. The research program is driven by three principal objectives: (1) to clarify the nature of blame and blaming attitudes as well as their normative implications; (2) to explain the value or the disvalue of blaming practices; (3) to develop new methodological strategies that foster the inclusion of empirically oriented perspectives into philosophical theorizing. The papers presented at the conference will serve as the basis for a peer-reviewed publication in the form of either an edited volume or a special issue of an academic journal.

Comparing inside the courts. Comparative Law Departments working in Supreme and Constitutional Courts

Description

Comparing Inside the Courts is a project aiming at mapping and comparing the actors of constitutional comparison working for constitutional and supreme courts in the world. Even in their diversity, those actors face the same difficulties and can be regrouped under the expression “comparative law services”. The project focuses on methodology and aims to create a new legal community around a series of best practices of applied comparative law. Starting with organizing seminars for experts in legal comparison as places of discussion about their work and method, this project will create a long-lasting network where the actors of the comparison will be able to exchange information and material thus encouraging the transparency of the courts when using foreign law in their judgments.

Crisis in Context: Sagas of HIV Blood Contamination in the US and France

Description

The question addressed in this project concerns the circumstances under which a health crisis is transformed into a political crisis and becomes the vehicle for substantial social and political change. We address this question by means of a detailed comparison between understandings of and responses to the event of blood contamination in the United States and France.

Occupational Identity and the Gig Economy

Description

The goals of this joint project are: 1. the advancement of our understanding of occupational identity and the gig economy, using a dataset on arts and arts-related industries as an initial case study, 2. the expansion of a network of French and American scholars studying non-standard employment and its consequences on workers and occupations, and 3. the dissemination of project findings via peer-review publications. The project will proceed with two workshops for graduate students and scholars held in New York and Paris when the principal investigators will be visiting their respective universities.

Re‐discovering (Astro)Physics Laws Using Machine Learning

Description

In this proposal the investigators plan to leverage the computational power of DNN architectures to automate the discovery of laws of physics using relevant experimental data, thus enabling scientists in fast data analysis and hypothesis generation. As proof of concept, they will primarily focus on automated “re-”discovery of existing physics laws in quantum physics and astrophysics domains. They then plan to test the system on new experimental data to help discover new physical laws

Engineering Pediatric Cardiac Valves that Grow

Description

The proposed research is a collaboration between the groups of Professor David Kalfa at Columbia University and Professor Abdul Barakat at Ecole Polytechnique. The two groups have highly complementary expertise. Professor Kalfa’s group will be responsible for the proposed tissue engineering experiments as well as the animal studies. Professor Barakat’s group will be in charge of the computational modeling (both macroscopic and microscopic) as well as the mechanical characterization of the engineered hybrid prostheses.

Demography, Technological Change, Inequality and the Internal Structure of Cities

Description

This project develops a conference to discuss fundamental determinants of location of individuals, jobs, and firms across and within cities, and to understand how these patterns respond to major demographic and technological shocks. The projects build on the new availability of highly detailed geo-located data extending over long periods of time. The applications are developed using French data concerning patterns in French cities. It is expected that the conference will strengthen the crosspatterns of collaboration among individuals participating in the various projects.

Climate Change Risks: Innovative Legal Tools and Policies

Description

Climate change is a multidimensional global pollution problem arising from the world’s social, economic and legal systems. The risks it presents threaten most if not all aspects of society, including physical infrastructure, natural systems, food security, human health, and financial stability. This project enhances the ongoing collaborations between Columbia and Sorbonne Law Schools to advance the analysis of innovative legal and policy tools that are mobilized in the field of climate change. The project will focus on the legal and policy tools related to the regulation, assessment and judicial evaluation of climate risks, including tools available for and through climate change litigation, climate risk assessment and corporate disclosure. A series of joint seminars and workshops will be organized both in New York and Paris: LL.M and PhD students from both Law Schools will take a lead role in the discussion and exchange around these emerging issues, with a particular focus on France, European-Union and US approaches.

Beyond National History. State Formation in Transnational Perspective: Institutions, Political Practices, Society, Migration

Description

This project represents the fourth edition of a joint Latin American history workshop organized between Paris I and Columbia, with the first three having taken place between 2012 and 2014. The encounter has as its principal objective to bring together professors and advanced doctoral students from the two centers to promote intellectual exchange and discussion of research in progress. In addition to a closed session at which the participants will workshop their research projects, the professors will offer lectures open to the general public. At the same time, the workshop and lectures will serve as a point of departure for future collaboration on collective projects and publications, as well as a basis for new and strengthened relationships among students and professors across the two universities. Looking to the long term, these collaborations may permit the development of a more formal program of exchange and mobility between these two leading centers for the study of Latin American history

The Implications of Time: Time and Temporalities in Medieval Artistic and Musical Culture

Description

The Implications of Time. Time and Temporalities in Medieval Artistic and Musical Culture will be an international workshop for graduate and doctoral students (in November 2020). Its transversal theme is the question of time and how this dimension is expressed in the various plastic, musical and theatrical productions of the Middle Ages. It is also the result of an expanded collaboration with Princeton, consolidating the existing one between Paris 1 and Columbia. The workshop will be held in Princeton and New York, and will last three days.

Blame and Regulation: Psychological and Social Transformation

Description

This workshop will investigate, through a combination of theoretical and empirical approaches, whether the phenomenon of blame as it surfaces at these different levels can be theoretically integrated, and if so, what consequences follow for conceiving of the related concepts of responsibility and agency of individuals, institutions, and the tendencies of the more abstract systemic formations. The outcome of this investigation will be important for our understanding of the role of blame and the concomitant role of value-directed agency in regulating and transforming these distinct subjects in the light of norms: how individuals correct themselves; how institutions reform, how capital might be constrained or redirected (say, by the kind of social democratic constraints proposed by Keynes). And this understanding, in turn, will depend on how we understand the relations between these larger social and political problems and the psychological emotional and attitudinal phenomena that are associated with interpersonal blame, phenomena like anger, resentment, disappointment, and shame.

Punjab at the Limits of History

Description

This project will bring together scholars from across regional and disciplinary boundaries under the auspices of a two-day workshop entitled: “Punjab at the Limits of History.” It will involve scholars and graduate students from Columbia University and Sciences Po, as well as scholars from other institutions in India, Pakistan, the United States, and France, with two goals: i) to develop a transatlantic network of scholars and graduate students working on Punjab; ii) to workshop projects on Punjab that both provide opportunities for transatlantic collaboration and allow for experimental and critical rethinking of theoretical methodologies and conventions

Leapfrogging services for better access to water delivery in Indian cities: between social affordability and financial sustainability

The project examines the on-going development of leap-frogging technologies and frugal payment systems that help the delivery of essential services, such as water, in cities in India (Delhi, Bangalore). These services are impacted by the discontinuity of the provision of the public services. Such intermittency opens an avenue to private operators who propose alternative services to partially fill the gap between the end-users’ demand and the unreliable public service.

The research aims at analysing the impacts on operators’ business models and on end-users’ consumption practices and capacity to pay for the services. Considering the financial constraints of the households in the current economic crisis in developing cities, two payments models will be studied (‘pay as you go’ and prepayment) for water in Delhi.

Reshaping our Digital Interactions: Subjectivity in the PostCinema age

This Alliance Project will bring together an international group of scholars and artists for a two-day symposium investigating the relationship between the technological environment and processes of subjectivization in the 21st century. A series of screenings, artists’ talks, lectures and discussions will culminate in an edited special issue of a bilingual journal. In the era of what Gilles Deleuze has called “control societies” – associated with the rise of the Internet and governed by algorithmic reason, racialized surveillance, the “attention economy,” and new forms of digital labor – what strategies are being explored by artists, amateurs, and anonymous “users” for producing new (non-addictive, critical) relations to the digital devices that are not simply communications media but technological prostheses that reshape our perception and transform our biological and cognitive capacities? In this symposium – the second part of an earlier Alliance Program held in 2019, on “Expanded Documentary” – the investigators are interested in a range of resistant and critical practices from conceptual art installations and found-footage montage to digital documentary films and queer post-cinema.

Artisanal Modes of Writing, Drawing, and Modeling 1400-1830

The project aims to set up a working group on the writings produced by artisans in the field of their professional activity, during the early modern period primarily in Europe, but with global comparisons. Craftspeople were long considered to express their knowledge not in words but in works. The idea that mechanical arts were neither taught nor written down is deeply rooted. This prejudice explains why their contribution to technical and scientific knowledge has been largely neglected. This seminar intends to question this inequality or asymmetry of treatment. The intention is to shed light on both the history of technical discourses and the cultural and social history of craftspeople.

The project will take the form of two joint seminars bringing together scholars and students from the universities of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Columbia University and other institutions.

Transatlantic World History Project To Combat Racism And Antisemitism

This project will convene scholars, world history teachers, and an exciting array of experts from France and the United States for a 4-day summer Forum in summer 2021. The training will empower university and high school history educators to conduct more meaningful conversations in their classrooms about pressing issues that teachers find difficult to discuss, such as racism, antisemitism, islamophobia, sexism, and homophobia. Teachers will be trained to consider the entire world history curriculum as a laboratory to explore relevant moments in history to discuss and reduce the biases and myths that often lead to discrimination, hate crimes, and violence. Together, scholars and teachers will explore how to teach about the competing legacies of genocide and oppression while also encouraging students to consider the legacies of resistance, empathy, and coalition building. The goal is to improve pedagogy and interpersonal communication in the multicultural classroom in an effort to dismantle racist and antisemitic ideas.

Migration and Citizenship in the U.S. and Europe: Transnational Challenges Then and Now

International migration patterns have shaped and reshaped individual and collective identities throughout history and across the world. In the present time of globalization, these dynamics have posed particular political and social challenges in both the United States and Europe and have commanded the attention of scholars working and teaching in diverse disciplines on both sides of the Atlantic. This project will offer an interdisciplinary and comparative graduate course on transnational migration and citizenship in the United States and Europe. Beyond the subject matter of migration and citizenship, it will more broadly expose students in the U.S. and France to international perspectives and connections.  The course will be co-designed and co-taught by Riva Kastoryano, a Sciences-Po political sociologist and Mae Ngai, a Columbia historian, and offered simultaneously to students in New York and Paris, using video conferencing and personal faculty exchange. 

The Experience Of Frontline Healthcare Workers During The Covid Pandemic In France And In The USA: A Pilot Study

This French-American collaborative pilot study is intended to test the feasibility of a larger study on the comparative experience of frontline workers during the Covid-19 pandemic which is beginning in France. Led by Denis Peschanski of Paris 1 and Kristina Orfali of Columbia, both involved in the large French study (C19-S), this pilot project will focus on the personal narratives of frontline healthcare workers interviewed in a small comparative qualitative study in the US and in France, using the framework of previous work on how memory builds up and evolves through time after the terrorist attacks of Nov.13th, 2015 in France (https://www.memoire13novembre.fr/content/english) Through the lived experience of the frontline workers, we hope to understand how different systems responded (or not) both at the micro level of an intensive care unit, an emergency room or as a first responder as well as at the hospital, state or even national levels.    
In the long term, this pilot project will hopefully help initiate a sustainable academic and professional network devoted to the study of the Covid 19 pandemic across national and disciplinary boundaries. A future larger international comparison could yield interesting information during an unprecedented worldwide crisis for future public health policies on how to handle such event; what worked and what did not. It will also build an invaluable historical and social archive of the memory of the pandemic in several countries for future research. 

Anti-Asian Hate Compared: Origins, Patterns, and Responses in the US and France

This project, will study the origins, patterns, and responses to anti-Asian hate from a comparative perspective, focusing specifically on the United States and France. Both countries witnessed a spike in anti-Asian hate incidents since the onset of Covid-19, and both have also witnessed waves of mobilization to address anti-Asian violence and hate. The central question this project addresses is how do we explain the similarities that emerge in two different contexts? Relatedly, how do anti-Asian hate incidents—and the responses to them—diverge in the US and France? The first step to addressing these questions is to organize a workshop that spans boundaries and brings together leading scholars studying Asian Americans and Asian Europeans and journalists, community leaders, and civil society actors who will share their research and insights. A comparison of France and the US—two countries with different migration histories, ethnic diversity, and attitudes toward multiculturalism—is vital to understanding the emergence anti-Asian violence and hate despite these differences in order to carve a path forward. 

The Vagaries of Praetorianism in Mali: Military and Civilian Regimes Amidst Foreign Intervention

Amid an international resurgence of authoritarian populism, democracy may be failing in West Africa. Mali, which enjoyed thirty years of democratic institution building and donors’ indulgence, has now experienced three coups d’état in a decade. Like several other African nations, it  may be witnessing the return of “Khaki Rule” (Nugent 2012). Yet much of the existing literature on African politics—and the paradigms in which it is based—fails to confront this reality. Rather, it is largely focused on democratization and its corollaries, such as elections or civil society. The current context requires accounting for an increased internationalization of government and the growing involvement of transnational operators of various kinds. While the existing literature on Mali describes the action of international organizations in the social and political transformations of recent decades, our interdisciplinary group proposes to study their articulation with a military regime and the sanctions that emerge in reaction to it. The project is part of a broader collaboration on politics in Mali. The first concrete steps in this collaboration are two conferences, to be held in 2023 (Paris) and 2024 (New York). The first will analyze a particular form of civilian rule characterized by a tension between internationalization and autonomy amongst the political class. The second will explore the relationship of the military regime with the many international and foreign organizations involved in the administration of the country, as well as its own internal transformations. We will examine the relationship between the military, the civil service, and the political class, looking at the competition for resources, recruitment and appointments within the state apparatus, and the conflicting discourse on political values. Trans-Atlantic collaboration is vital to this project, which combines an historical orientation with the distinct methodological and epistemological characteristics of political science as practiced in France.  

Climate Change Litigation: a tool for Climate Governance? Comparing Global North and Global South

Climate change remains a multidimensional global pollution problem arising from the world’s social, economic and legal systems. The risks it presents continue to threaten most if not all aspects of society, including physical infrastructure, natural systems, food security, human health, and financial stability. In the face of failures and shortfalls from political and corporate leaders, many civil society actors have taken to courtrooms to seek justice through the implementation of climate policies and the recognition of a right to be protected from the worst impacts of climate change. This project enhances the ongoing collaborations between Columbia and Sorbonne Law Schools to advance the analysis of innovative legal and policy tools that are mobilized in the field of climate change. The project will focus on a comparative study of climate litigation. A series of joint seminars and workshops will be organized both in New York and Paris: LL.M and PhD students from both Law Schools will take a lead role in the discussion and exchange around these emerging issues, with a particular focus on litigation in France, the European Union, the United States of America, Latin America, and Africa.

A Columbia-Sciences Po Joint Course: Race, discrimination and racial inequalities on both sides of the Atlantic

This project proposes a one-semester course directed at approximately fifteen undergraduates from both Sciences Po and from Columbia. The course takes a comparative perspective in discussing the concepts of race, discrimination and racial inequality on both sides of the Atlantic. The course has a particular focus on the U.S. and French cases, but empirical studies of other Western European countries will also be included. It presents the latest empirical evidence demonstrating the pervasiveness of race and addresses the different ways that race and ethnicity are conceptualized in Europe and the U.S. It examines the central role of race in shaping socioeconomic attainment in these two contexts, with attention to discrimination, segregation and inequality in education, in housing and communities, in the labor market, and in interactions with police and the criminal justice system. The innovation in the course lies not only in the joint use of the literature from these two different contexts but also in the systematic co-teaching that involves professors who conduct research on each side of the Atlantic, creating a virtual cross-country classroom that brings together thirty students who study social sciences at the two universities. The weekly seminar will use a hybrid format with the 15 students on each campus in a seminar room and with the fifteen students from the other campus connected via zoom in a joint class. Cross-campus interaction will be facilitated through the assignment of students into small working groups – each working group with students from both campuses – that meet weekly with the TAs in breakout rooms to produce projects that will be discussed in the joint class over the course of the semester. This approach will also encourage research and teaching collaborations between faculty and doctoral students from the two partner institutions.

The evolution of environmental regulation: Lessons from a hundred years of lead-exposure abatement in France and the US

Regulation of the lead content of paint goes back to 1909 in France but lead-based paint was banned in the US only in 1978. At the same time, the lead content of blood of every child born in certain US states including New York is now expected to be tested twice before two years of age and is measured only in rare cases in France. The proponents of the two proposed hybrid workshops, one in Paris and one in New York, believe important lessons for future regulation of both established and emerging toxicants could be drawn from a systematic comparison of the evolution of environmental lead regulation in France and the US. Discussions between a dozen US and French experts with complementary expertise is expected to result in a review paper on the history of environmental lead regulation and could possibly lead to a more ambitious, long term project.

"What is an Author?"

The question what is an author? is no less present today than it was when it was posed by Michel Foucault fifty years ago. In a world of digital media, the questions of intentionality, individuality, and responsibility that were analyzed by Foucault are just as central, politically and epistemically, as they were then. Indeed, the difficulty of those questions has, if anything, been intensified by developments in the politics of race and gender, our understanding of the agency of media, and the effects of initiatives such as open-source licensing. The object of this collaborative project is to reinvigorate and elaborate the transatlantic conversation that was launched by the publication of Foucault’s essay and its presentation in the US in 1970, and to do so by involving collaborators from France and the US, drawn from the breadth of disciplines that are engaged by the question what is an author?

Comparative aspects of Online platforms regulation (US/EU)

In Europe, the regulation of Online platforms is clearly a key issue. The objective of European regulation was to avoid circumvention of the EU standard of protection for European citizens. From intellectual property to data and European consumer protection, the EU imposes a legal fragmentation of Online services regulation. A new series of European regulations (DSA, DMA...) reinforces this spatial approach always in favor of the European public. The objective of this joint project is, on the one hand, to study the EU approach from a US perspective and to determine whether it is considered an extraterritorial application of EU law. It will also be important to determine whether European standards may conflict with U.S. standards and how to resolve such a conflict. On the other hand, this project will analyze the potential convergence of a legal framework for the attention economy, in which platforms are a key player, regarding American and European proposals currently under discussion to address this issue. It would be very important to enrich this issue by a comparative approach between EU and US law, in line with the objective of the submitted project.

In order to conduct this comparative approach, two symposiums will be organized in France (Université Paris 1) and the US (Columbia University) in 2024. The first one will be dedicated to an analyze and discussion about the EU position concerning the spatial application of EU law and the substantial evolution of EU law concerning the regulation of online platforms. The second one will be dedicated to the US answer of the EU position.