Paris IAS Ideas 2025 - 2026

Presentation

The “Paris IAS Ideas” online talk series features short and stimulating presentations by fellows of the Paris Institute for Advanced Study. The talks mark the beginning of 1-month writing residencies in which fellows will write a paper with the “definitive” version of an idea of concept they have been working on for years.

Short, 20-minutes presentations will be followed by interdisciplinary discussions with researchers across social sciences and humanities. Everyone is welcome to attend and contribute to the debates that will inform the fellows’ work at the Paris IAS.

Practical Information

All presentations will be held online via Zoom in English only.
Please consult the detailed programme below for speaker information and schedules.
Registration is mandatory for each presentation. 

Detailed program 

Friday September 5th, 2025

• 3 pm - How Listening to What Others Are Saying Fell out of Grace in Human Development by Elinor Ochs, linguistic anthropologist and Professor Emerita of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
• 3.40 pm - Can Healthcare be Humanized? by David Cella, certified clinical psychologist and Professor Emeritus at Northwestern University in the United States.
• 4.20 pm - What is language revitalization for? Indigenous languages as commons for environmental governance by Jorge Gomez Rendon, Associate Professor at the School of Humanities at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador in Quito.
• 5.00 pm -  A Cross-Case Analysis of the Representation of Victims-Protagonists in Truth Commission Narratives Using LLMs with Human-in-the-Loop Evaluation by Tine Destrooper, Director of Justice Visions and professor at the Faculty of Law and Criminology at Ghent University, and Jef de Slegte, currently Data Scientist and researcher at the Data Analysis Laboratory at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Tine Destrooper and Jef de Slegte join the Paris IAS from September to October 2025 as part of the Distinguished Fellowship programme developed in collaboration withPostGenAI@Paris.

PostGenAI@Paris : Based in the heart of Paris, this interdisciplinary and cross-sector consortium aims to develop ethical, inclusive and sovereign AI that is fully anchored in the major challenges of our time.

• 5.40 pm - Dialogic Reflection by Steve Mann, professor of applied linguistics at the University of Warwick.

 Friday November 7th, 2025

• 2.00 pm - Why is diversity a value. A history by Lorraine Daston, science historian,  Director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
• 2.40 pm - What is bias? And why are we biased? by Gerd Gigerenzer, psychologist, long-time Director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam, and Vice-President of the European Research Council (ERC)
• 3.20 pm - What is autism? by Will Mandy, clinical psychologist and Professor of neurodevelopmental disorders at University College London (UCL).
• 4.00 pm - Rethinking Compositionality by Uli Sauerland, research Director at  Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics in Berlin.

Friday December 5th, 2025

• 2:00 pm - Civil Wars and the New World Order, 1979-1994 by Jeremy I. Adelman, Director of the Global History Lab at the University of Cambridge, Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University, and Academic Director of the Open Society University.
• 2:40 pm - Technology Adoption and Smallholder Farmers in Latin America: Impacts on Food Supply Chains and Just Rural Transitions by Javier Perez Burgos, Co-Founder & Chief Officer at WËIA (colombian fintech), Former Vice-Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development in Colombia and Former Senior Advisor at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)

Friday, January 9th 2026

• 2 pm - Wars make markets, markets make wars: for a new macro-sociology of violence by Nitsan Chorev, the Harmon Family Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
• 2.40 pm - Our microbial lives: a manifesto against eradication by Victoria Lee,  science historian with a focus on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and an associate professor of history at Ohio University.
• 3.20 pm - TransparentoCene: a critical pharmacology of the present by Emmanuel Alloa, Full Professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at the University of Fribourg.

 Friday February 6th, 2026

• 2pm - Visualisation for AI Augmented Sociology by Mathieu Jacomy, Doctor of Techno-Anthropology and Assistant Professor at Aalborg University Tantlab and by Anders Kristian Munk, professor of computational anthropology and director of the Observatory for Human-Centred Engineering (ECHOlab) at the Technical University of Denmark.

Mathieu Jacomy and Anders Kristian Munk joir the Paris IAS in February 2026 as part of the Distinguished Fellowship programme developed in collaboration with PostGenAI@Paris.

PostGenAI@Paris : Based in the heart of Paris, this interdisciplinary and cross-sector consortium aims to develop ethical, inclusive and sovereign AI that is fully anchored in the major challenges of our time.

Friday, 6 March 2026

• 2:00 pm - The Socioscope: on the relationship between micro- and meso-entities by Helga Nowotny, Professor emerita of Science and Technology Studies, ETH Zurich, Founding Member and Former President of the European Research Council.
• 2:40 p.m. – Puzzles – a method of discovery by Diego Gambetta, Carlo Alberto Professor at the Collegio Carlo Alberto, and Emeritus Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford.
• 3:20 p.m. - Reconciliation Acts. Towards a new theory of reconciliation in the wake of violence by Johanna Mannergren, Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Södertörn University.

Friday April 3rd, 2026

• 2 p.m.- Democratising the energy transition in Europe: a comparative analysis by Pierre Bocquillon, Associate Professor of European Union Politics and Policy at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, United Kingdom.
• 2:40 p.m.-Defining new literacies and education practices for distributed intelligence in a Generative AI era by Roy Pea, professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Education, where he holds the David Jacks Chair in Education and Learning Sciences.
• 3:20 p.m.-How to Invent a Robot - Framing and Solving Problems in Engineering-Driven Innovation by Lara Lammer, Senior Scientist at Technische Universitat Wien (TU Wien) and Co-Founder and Advisor at Fortis AI.
• 4:00 p.m.- Artificial consciousness: is it desirable, possible, detectable? by Kathinka Evers, Professor of Philosophy, Senior Researcher at the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB) at Uppsala University.

Kathinka Evers joins the Paris IAS in April 2026 for one month as part of the "Distinguished Fellowship program" developed in collaboration with PostGenAI@Paris, led by Sorbonne University. Based in the heart of Paris, this interdisciplinary and cross-sector consortium aims to develop ethical, inclusive and sovereign AI that is fully anchored in the major challenges of our time.

Friday, 15 May 2026

• “And Be Good Upon Thy Parents:” Elderly Care and Filial Piety in Times of Crisis by Nada Moumtaz, Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Near and Middle Eastern Civilisations at the University of Toronto.
• Early Warnings on Industrial Agriculture: Lessons for the Next Food Systems Transformation by Jennifer Clapp, Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability, and Professor in the Faculty of Environment, Resources and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo.
• Understanding and mitigating the effects of current behavioural stressors through lessons drawn from human evolution by Nina Jablonski, anthropologist, Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University, where she holds the Atherton Chair.
• Methodological pitfalls in EdTech research by Pierre Dillenbourg, Full Professor of Learning Technologies at the Faculty of Computer and Communication Sciences, where he heads the CHILI laboratory: ‘Computer-Human Interaction for Learning & Instruction’ at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.
• AI Centrism: Promoting Nuance in Polarised Technological Discourse by Meredith Morris, Affiliated Professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and the University of Washington School of Information.
• Out of Sight: Exploring Social (Im)perceptibility by Don Kulick, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Uppsala University in Sweden and Visiting Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hong Kong.
• Troubled Twins: Collective and Artificial Intelligence by Jan EißfeldtJan Eißfeldt, Director and Global Head of Trust and Safety at the Wikimedia Foundation.

Friday, 5 June 2026

• Adaptive self-organization in swidden agriculture by Sean Downey, associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Ohio State University.
• Measuring and Shaping the Effects of AI on Society by Siddharth Suri, researcher in computational social science at Microsoft Research.
• Possibilities for Democratic Education in an Era of Disinformation by Christopher Lubienski, Director of the Centre for Educational Policy and Evaluation and Professor of Educational Policy at Indiana University.