Bienvenue aux Post-doctorants 2025 sélectionnés dans le cadre du programme "International Excellence in the Humanities Fellowships" du projet GATES

Project at the MaCI

Discipline: Philosophy

November 2025 - October 2027
 

My project proposes to rethink the beauty of living forms, and to bring to light what makes it specific compared to the beauty of inanimate objects (artistic or natural). We seem to be facing a “crisis of sensibility” towards other forms of life, many of which are disappearing from our anthropocentric attentional landscapes. This might be a crucial, yet underexplored, aspect of the ecological crisis. In this context, I believe aesthetics can help us better understand a certain indifference to other living beings, but also to take seriously the singularity of some sensory, affective, and meaningful encounters with them that might have been overlooked, both in practice and in theory. Indeed, living beings have so far been relatively neglected in the field of philosophical aesthetics, where no clear difference has been made between inanimate natural objects and living beings, even in the recent environmental aesthetics. What kinds of living forms do we judge to be beautiful, and why? And is it the same to find beautiful a peacock, a butterfly, an orchid or a nightingale’s song? Speculating – what if Kant had written about beauty after Darwin? – my working hypothesis is that our aesthetic appreciation of living beings may rely on an intuitive understanding of what I call their temporal depth: their current forms appear as expressive indexes of the agencies that have shaped them over evolutionary time, through intra- and interspecific attentional relationships. These forms have, in part, been selected through the way they appeared, or not, to others as worth noticing and meaningful. The aim of this research is to move beyond problematic analogies with art; beyond the Nature/Culture divide; beyond oppositions between formalism and hermeneutics, and between functionalist and mystical accounts of life. 

By bringing aesthetics into dialogue with contemporary life sciences, this project aims to contribute to the environmental humanities. At the MaCI, my theoretical investigations will be complemented by field inquiry, in line with renewed philosophical practices that consider empirical data and situated experiences – in this case, my own encounters with the local flora and fauna, as well as the experiences of others. Through participatory methods and different formats of dissemination (interdisciplinary workshops, an international conference, an exhibition), the research will unfold in conversation with scholars from other disciplines, as well as non-scholars and the general public. My “aesthetics of the living in times of extinction” sits at the crossroads of theoretical and practical issues we need to address today if we are to make more space for non-human beings in our culture, and perhaps, in doing so, reconfigure our relationships with them.
 

Joshua will be affiliated to the Ambiances, Architectures, Urbanités (AAU) laboratory and will work closely with Céline Bonicco-Donato, Philosopher and Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Grenoble School of Architecture (ENSAG), whose work includes the philosophy of architecture and urban environments.

Project at the MaCI

Discipline: International Relations 

October 2025 - September 2027

How will military command and control evolve under the impression of artificial intelligence (AI)? Adopting AI at the command level could not only change the character of war as with every technological innovation, but possibly the very (human) nature of warfare. This postdoctoral project researches French imaginaries of military command and AI, as well as perceptions of French, British and German military practitioners who will increasingly be supported by AI in command decision-making. It mobilises a mixed methodology combining quantitative and qualitative elements: Quantitative, such as logometric and algorithmic analysis of French strategy documents, as well as of journal articles relating to AI and to military command. Qualitative, deploying scriptwriting and scenario exercise techniques to assess how military personnel might appropriate themselves this new technology.

This post-doctoral project aims to contribute to the crucial interdisciplinary and international reflection on how the penetration of every aspect of our lives by digital technologies is shaping the futures we are imagining, and how pre-existing human expertise and skills could be mobilised and valued. It hopes to contribute to ongoing exchanges on how AI and other digital technologies could provide ethical and sustainable solutions to contemporary challenges.

Johanna will be affiliated to the Centre d'études sur la sécurité internationale et les coopérations européennes (CESICE) and will work closely with Dr. Delphine Deschaux-Dutard. This post-doctoral project benefits from support from the Multidisciplinary Institute in Artificial intelligence (MIAI) and Innovacs (Fédération de recherche Innovation, connaissances et société).

Project at the MaCI

Discipline: History

October 2025 - September 2027

Histories of post-1945 global economic governance revolve around narratives juxtaposing ‘North’ capitalist exploitation to ‘South’ resistance, with intergovernmental organisations and private business bodies starring as repositories of ideas for each side. Instead, this project studies how intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) globally repurposed Keynesian macroeconomics after 1945. It will result in a more accurate narrative that accounts for how women and men hailing from North and South used IGOs to co-create today’s instruments of macroeconomic governance, in dialogue with private business organisations. 

Moving beyond the nation-state as the sole producer of Keynesianism, the project offers a new explanation of why, despite its problematic relation with climate change, the growth bias of Keynesian macroeconomics still underpins the operational work of IGOs and nation-states across the globe. It achieves that goal through three case studies that will generate a publication each: firstly, by examining the dissemination of national income accounting in Asia through the United Nations; secondly, by investigating the UN System’s sponsoring of global forecasting models; and thirdly, by surveying critiques of Keynesianism in the International Chamber of Commerce. Those publications will be complemented by a workshop about the intergovernmental making of macroeconomic knowledge.

‘The MaCI’s interdisciplinarity in the social sciences offers an intellectually stimulating setting to develop my work, which I hope will encourage wider cross-disciplinary collaborations between history and economics. I am particularly looking forward to taking advantage of the MaCI’s Digital Arts Humanities Lab to accelerate my training in Digital Humanities. Being at the MaCI will also allow me to develop my research in connection with the laboratory PACTE and its specialists on international history, gender, and political economy.’

For this project, Guilherme Sampaio will be affiliated to PACTE Laboratory and will collaborate with Jean-François Ponsot (Professeur des universités) from the Regulations team. Pr.Jean-François Ponsot specialises in the histories of Keynesianism and Post-Keynesianism, as well as in the post-1945 evolution of the international monetary system.

Supported by the GATES project (Grenoble ATtractiveness and ExcellenceS), funded by the French government's Programme d'Investissement Avenir and implemented by ANR France 2030

Fellows 2025