Welcome to Iglobes

Since September 1, 2023, Fulbright France has opened applications for scholarship programs for students, doctoral students, researchers, French language assistants and NGO managers who wish to go to the United States.

Jointly funded by the French and American governments as well as partners, the Franco-American Fulbright France Commission allows winners to carry out their projects (artistic, economic, academic, scientific, media) in the United States or in France.

The deadline for submitting applications differs depending on the scholarship programs and is generally around December 2024.

Learn more

The Châteaubriand annual scholarship program will open on October 10th, 2023 and will run until January 19th, 2024.

The Chateaubriand Fellowship is offered by the French Embassy in the United States. It supports doctoral students from American institutions who wish to carry out part of their doctoral research in France for a period ranging from 4 to 8/9 months. It helps initiate or strengthen collaborations, partnerships and joint projects between French and American research teams.

A fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), offered by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and supported by Campus France, can be carried out at the Iglobes laboratory.

Visit the Program website, check eligibility requirements and register from October 10th!

How do individuals, after having discovered they were lied to about the conditions of their births and their childhoods, seek out their own identities and re/establish the "truths" about themselves? Based on two ethnographic studies conducted in sites where lives and kinships were disrupted by political violence, this article aims to examine the urge for narrative coherence in contexts defined by public deceit and betrayal. In Argentina, Paul Macalli lived with the nietos who, decades after the dictatorship, discovered they had been stolen and educated by those responsible for their parents' death. In Ethiopia, Sébastien Roux met with adopted children who were searching for their life "of before". In these two contexts, the interviewees explained how their lives had been shattered when they discovered the lies they had been told. Their testimony equally revealed how they felt an existential and urgent need to re-establish the "truth". Drawing on their experiences and their feelings, this article examines the link between two truths, truth regarding the past and truth about oneself, and explores the need to be certain of facts in the making of identities.

Visiting researchers Anne Sourdril and Luc Barbaro made the front page of the Green Valley News on their OHMI project SONATAS – Listening to the SOunds of NATure to understAnd environmental changeS. 

The multidisciplinary research OHMI project aims at grasping (i) how local communities and people perceive their landscapes and ecosystems in a context of strong mutations of societies and their environment; and (ii) how they think about adaptation to environmental changes through their immediate sound environments, or soundscapes. The project is located in Pima County which is confronted with multiple sociological and environmental changes, including climate warming, water scarcity and uncontrolled urbanization. Sonatas aims to understand through sounds experiences and perceptions how the environment is locally conceived by local communities and whether it is seen as changing or immuable. Our objective is to explore how different types of ecological knowledge coexist within those communities in the context of major mutations and how people could collaborate together to face those changes.

Financed by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) with the support of the ANR project led by Sabrina Teyssier, Boris Wieczorek’s doctoral thesis “Changing norms and disparity when confronted with climate change” is looking at how social norms can be used as a mechanism to promote cooperation between individuals in situations where personal and community interests are in conflict, with a specific focus on environments that are threatened by climate change.

Two research laboratories are involved in Boris’ project: Grenoble Applied Economics Laboratory (GAEL, France) and Interdisciplinary Global Environmental Studies (iGLOBES, University of Arizona). After researching behavior changes in controlled environments, the project is now concentrating on water issues in the Tucson region.

The ENERGON research project, funded by the CNRS and INEE through the Labex DRIIHM, is an interdisciplinary and multi-site project, which relies on the network of Human-Environment Observatory (OHM), in place since 2007. Led by the OHM of the Provence Mining Basin, the project’s objective is to question the conditions of energy transitions in 6 different observatories and locations.

If climate change is a major element of global proportio with local repercussions, the resulting injunction on energy transition is done in different manners, depending on the territory. Studies on the local impact of energy transitions are mainly very limited and sectorial in nature. The challenge of this project, at the heart of the OHMs, is to go beyond this barrier, by intersecting social, technical and environmental dimensions specific to each socio-ecosystem. Learn more...

The relationship between societies and their hydrosystems can be understood as a series of connections and disconnections that occur in all domains (e.g., hydrological, geomorphological, ecological, etc.) and dimensions (e.g, longitudinal, vertical, lateral). The use of watercourses and water resources creates material and symbolic connections which leads water stakeholders to also consider the sociological and political, aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of the socio-hydrosystem. However, the development of physical (e.g, dams) and social  infrastructures (e.g, waterbodies are so artificialized that local residents forget about their existence) generates important disconnections. As a result, recent water and environmental policies emphasize the importance of connectivity between the various elements and compartments of socio-hydro-systems and focus especially on reconnection at all levels. Learn more...

The “ecological crisis” would revolutionize our reproductive behavior. Alerted by the non-sustainability of a supposed overpopulation or concerned about a future announced as apocalyptic, more and more individuals would choose to renounce procreation and would refrain from having children, out of ethical concern. Based on a recent study among a young generation of childfree individuals, we show how environmental concerns are indeed influencing some family arrangement choices. However, our interviews also demonstrate that the ecology, if present, is a secondary ethical argument that legitimizes - or even ennobles – a previous desire for a childfree life. By giving voice to the arguments of those individuals, notably women, who choose not to have children for ecological reasons, the article shows that their concern, less than a shared trend, is in fact inscribed in a singular context where the will not to procreate remains tainted by a powerful stigma, calling for justification and avoidance strategies.

Iglobes fosters collaborations across globally innovative research universities with this new article written by Brian O'Neill, Arizona State University and Anne-Lise Boyer, post-doc on the OHM project HYDECO, CNRS.

Desalination (producing potable water from saline sources) has gained notoriety globally as climate change threatens water supplies. Strikingly, Arizona – a territory lacking coastal boundaries – has developed desalination proposals to augment water supplies, which imply leveraging relations with Mexico and/or expanding inland desalting. Read the article...

Regis Ferriere, Director of iGLOBES,  Boris Sauterey, Benjamin Charnay, Antonin Affholder and Stephane Mazeret just published an article in Nature Astronomy, "Early Mars habitability and global cooling by H2-based methanogens" :

"We find that subsurface habitability was very likely, and limited mainly by the extent of surface ice coverage. Biomass productivity could have been as high as in the early Earth’s ocean. However, the predicted atmospheric composition shift caused by methanogenesis would have triggered a global cooling event, ending potential early warm conditions, compromising surface habitability and forcing the biosphere deep into the Martian crust..." 

Daniel Stolte  of University Communications wrote an article in UA News under the title "Life may have thrived on early Mars, until it drove climate change that caused its demise".