Olivier Faron’s editorial   The Collegium de Lyon, IEA (Advanced Studies Institute), the result of an innovative concept in France, exists to create an international scientific community of excellence and to encourage exchange between disciplines, cultures and languages. Its research activities are mainly centred on human and social sciences, but also on the exact sciences, with a view to ensuring a transversal approach and in genuine world vision via a truly innovative inter-disciplinary perspective.     The Collegium de Lyon aims to combine the institute’s scientific programme with challenge of sharing knowledge for action. Its research areas cover a broad spectrum, from the questioning of complexity or globalisation to sustainable development and health issues. It must therefore be a relay for public initiatives, bringing the sphere of research into contact with political and social challenges. The Collegium de Lyon also aims to bring human sciences closer to the world of business. Research carried out must contribute to accompanying change in companies and encouraging development of a knowledge economy. Cooperation with a research institute represents an incredible lever for companies, where knowledge plays a key role in innovation, being both a source of growth and competitiveness. Since its creation in 2006, the Collegium de Lyon has launched two priority scientific themes, the behaviour and practices of health and language. The Institute plays an active part within both chairs, drawing together research, business and public action: chair of responsible globalisation and chair for remembrance, culture and multi-culture. Today, the Collegium is inviting applications from the scientific community for new researchers, motivated by these ambitious goals, as well as to companies and institutions who may become providers of scientific projects as part of their strategy to take positive action.     Call for applicants 2009: the next application session is scheduled for April 2009   The Collegium de Lyon invites leading international researchers for 5-10 month periods to its Lyon facility. During this stay, researchers are freed from their usual teaching and research management obligations. They work on the development of their own scientific projects in a stimulating environment created by the group of guest fellows and the academic and social culture of the city of Lyon. Fellows initiate research projects based on either individual programmes or in relation to the priority themes defined by the Collegium (ASLAN/Advanced Studies on LANguage; Health behaviour and practices), or around dedicated chairs in collaboration with other French or international institutions (Chair for responsible globalisation, Chair for remembrance, culture and multi-culture). Researchers may also form thematic workgroups, inviting fellows to work on a joint project or with other researchers working in similar scientific fields. The next scientific council will meet in April 2009 to select the best individual applicants or to form a coherent thematic research group on the basis of applications received by February 15th, 2009. The application file is first examined by a multi-disciplinary panel of experts, which analyses the research project. The file must contain: The candidate’s curriculum vitae and main publications, along with the research proposal. Two reference letters are also required for junior researchers. The presentation of the research project, 5 pages maximum. This must include the following elements: The subject, methodology, sources and main relevant bibliographic references; The contribution that the candidate’s work will make to his field of research; What it will contribute to other research fields and what it may receive in return from other research fields.     Language, a social, technological, medical and cultural challenge   Language is at the heart of many major scientific considerations, raising questions related to social, technological, medical and cultural issues, requiring efforts to push back the barriers of knowledge. The scientific approaches developed in Lyon call on all levels of language analysis, bringing a multi-modal perspective to human communication.     This work is based on a dense multi-disciplinary network within the human and social sciences (cognitive psychology, anthropology and ethnology) and beyond: life sciences (cognitive neurosciences, population genetics, medicine, etc.) and information and communication sciences (modelling and automatic processing of spoken language, languages and multi-media documents; development of databases, corpus, etc.). The Collegium de Lyon will be working mainly on transversal themes: corpus, databases and automatic processing.     Health: a major challenge for the 21st century   Health in all its forms is becoming a major scientific priority. In terms of research, life sciences is a highly promising field in terms of potential discoveries, as well as in terms of public policy construction.     The importance of this issue as well as cost control have become a major issue for public authorities everywhere. Scientific research in Lyon in the health sector is already being organised via the launch of new support systems for both fundamental and applied research projects: a competitive cluster, Lyon Biopole; an advanced research theme network in infectiology called FINOVI and based in the ENS Lyon and Lyon I university; three health and research theme networks... The Collegium de Lyon is backing up this effort with the creation of transversal initiatives between life sciences and human and social sciences, particularly relevant for institutional and scientific reasons. This goal can be defined at various related levels: creation of gateways and sharing of activities between research groups involved in various scientific fields; epistemological progress in favour of crossed questions between scientific fields, etc. The human-being, faced with health threats, will be the centre of attention for this research effort. The Collegium will also consider economic responsiveness and the transfer of “academic” knowledge into industrial realities. The health economy represents a formidable challenge for research, both academically and in its application, since the resulting scientific questions and their corresponding social and economic implications represent pioneering challenges. Researchers at the Collegium de Lyon will be concentrating on new, innovative approaches, in a highly pluridisciplinary context ranging from virology to anthropology.   “Remembrance, culture and multi-culture chair”: the Collegium de Lyon provides its scientific guarantee       The Collegium de Lyon is participating in this new UNESCO chair, created in November 2007, by the Catholic University of Lyon. This training, research, information, documentation and international exchange chair aims to encourage links between different cultures.     The Chair has a centre of excellence called “Ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic minorities”. Its scientific programme covers three complementary areas, with a view to carry out a global investigation into the question of minorities, based on observation and experimentation: identifying the contours of the notion of minority and its main characteristics via a pluridisciplinary approach (social-anthropological, historical, legal, political, philosophical and geo-political); exploring the origins of minority movements, studying their typologies and examining their claims and goals; analysing the normative and legal arrangements for recognition and the protection and control mechanisms adopted by international law (the UN, UNESCO, etc.), as well as the discrimination suffered by these minorities.     Research in the city centre   The Collegium de Lyon is backed by local authorities, welcoming researchers to the city and its main academic centres. It provides access to all the resources of a major European city: a leading centre for university and higher education institutes, five competitive clusters and a dense, highly diversified industrial fabric. During the transitional phase 2008/2012, the Collegium will be located at the ENS LSH. It will then be relocating to the Saint-Joseph site at Lyon University for the administrative sector. Residences for guest researchers will be built on the ENS campus close to the Denis Diderot library, the university cafeteria, etc. Construction work for these residences has been negotiated as part of the new CPER contract (national-regional project contract) for 5 million euros.     Focus on the researchers       Ioana CHITORAN, linguist specialising in phonetics The Collegium de Lyon is pleased to welcome Ioana CHITORAN, a linguist specialising in phonetics, from January to June 2009.   She is a professor at Dartmouth College in the United States, having trained as a linguist at Bucarest University in Romania and Cornell University in the United States. She has been teaching at the Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences Program at Dartmouth College for ten years.     Her research work lies at the junction of phonetics (the physical properties of a language’s sounds) and phonology (the cognitive representation of sound systems). She is particularly interested in the way in which phonetic variability can result in stable linguistic categories. She has been working on various aspects of this question in Romance languages and, more recently, in Caucasian languages. Ioana CHITORAN will be working at the Collegium de Lyon on the “Dynamics of obstruent sequences in two Caucasian languages” project, using acoustic analysis phonetic methods to study the historical evolution of changes of sounds and their consequences on the evolution of the whole phonological system in the Lezgian and Georgian languages. Her goal is to place the results in a typological context of the evolution of languages. The in-depth typological study of the various phonetic mechanisms leading to the disappearance of vowels raises questions about the complexity of phonological systems, particularly in terms of the role of phonetic variability in complexity measurement research. This aspect of the study thus meets up with the ANR project “Complexity, Language and Languages”.           Yvan ROSE, linguist specialising in the acquisition of phonology in infants From September 2008 to July 2009, Yvan ROSE, linguist, specialising in the acquisition of phonology in infants, will be at the Collegium de Lyon.   Yvan ROSE obtained his Ph.D. in linguistics, specialising in phonology and the acquisition of language, at McGill University in Canada. He continued his post-doctorate studies in the United States (University of California, Berkeley and Brown University).     He is now a professor at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. His research concentrates on the acquisition of phonology in children, and more specifically, on the development of phonological representations from a prosodic perspective (syllables and accent). At the Collegium de Lyon, Yvan ROSE is working on a project about the appearance of grammatical categories and their expression in the acquisition of phonology. He is writing a book about the phonological development of infants, concentrating mainly on the period from babbling until production of the first full, short sentences (around age four), by which time most aspects of prosodic development have been acquired. This research is centred on the development of prosodic categories in infants and the central theory that the child starts to acquire its language with no pre-defined category by using a cognitive system that is highly sensitive to statistic-type observations. If this theory is proved, it will enable better understanding of the mechanisms of language acquisition in children and, from a theoretical viewpoint, to establish more tangible links between research on pre-verbal and verbal periods.           Isabelle MARINONE, historian, specialising in silent films and documentaries in France The Collegium de Lyon welcomes Isabelle MARINONE, historian specialising in silent films and documentaries in France, from September 2008 to July 2009. Isabelle is a professor and researcher at the new Paris 3-Sorbonne university. She specialises in silent films and documentaries in France. She did a post-graduate degree in the history and aesthetics of cinema at Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne University and has written several publications on political films (Anarchism and films in France).     She works at the Collegium de Lyon on the “First exotic French films: seeking a fantasy world” project. It is related to one of the main research areas identified by the Collegium de Lyon: “Culture, heritage and creation”. This study applies a dual approach, related to film history and cultural history. It mainly concerns silent documentaries about foreign countries produced in France between 1895 and 1929 and uses the sources of the Lumière and Albert Kahn collections. Isabelle is not only looking at the way in which foreign countries are viewed, but also and above all, at the concept of the imaginative world behind the fictional dichotomy (documentary, staging) - raw document, creation (recording reality). The “exotic” films, also called “panoramas” or “open air scenes” fall into the “geographic” category. The presentation of a cultural place within a given time makes this category question the relationship with the memory that this era intended to preserve on film. Like the “orientalist” ethnologists and artists of the 19th century, the first French film makers, - from the Lumière operators to those of the Archives de la Planète funded by Albert Kahn - were open to otherness through exotic visions. In this period of colonial expansion, the film industry, as photography had done previously, was attempting to depict and to map out the world once and for all. Using images of the memory, it classified, sorted and archived landscapes and people. This research project aims to understand the memory-related and artistic perspectives of these two enterprises, led by “the inventorial obsession” of those in charge, Lumière and Kahn.     Diary International cinema symposium – Thursday 11 and Friday 12 June 2009 “Images, memories and movements”   In collaboration with the research institute on cinema and audiovisual methods (Paris 3) and the postgraduate school of the cultural and social history of art (Paris 1), Isabelle Marinone, cinema historian and researcher at the Collegium de Lyon, is organising the IEA’s first symposium next June. The symposium aims to stimulate discussion on the relationships between images from both the imagination and the memory. Participants will consider issues related to the notion of “displacement”, both literally and metaphorically. The notion of “displacement” in terms of the questions posed by the relationship between cinema, history and memory, will also allow for the confrontation of social-historical approaches (the role of images in identity construction, etc.) and aesthetic approaches (space-time questions of memory). The Israeli director, Avi Mograbi, will be presenting his latest film, Z 32 (shown at the Venice Biennale in 2008, due to open in French cinemas in February 2009) and contributing to the debate about aesthetic and political issues.     Collegium de Lyon A l'ENS LSH 15, Parvis René Descartes BP 7000, 69342 Lyon Cedex 07 collegium-lyon@ens-lsh.fr