Knowledge sharing

Broadcast in prime time on France TV, the Are We All Racists? show explores the psychological mechanisms behind racism. In an original and unprecedented approach, it transposes research protocols validated by social psychology to the television screen. Without knowing the true goal of the show, fifty volunteers unknowingly tested the biases influencing their own prejudices in connection with filmed situations from everyday life. With more than 2.6 million viewers, the programme has already emerged as an educational tool — available for free on replay — to explore stereotypes and discrimination in settings such as schools, associations, and institutions.

A board game presenting the wealth of the world’s languages, all while having fun. Bearing the name [kosmopoli:t], this project created by scientists from the CNRS and l’Université Lumière Lyon 2 emerged from three years of work in partnership with the games distributor Jeux Opla. The players represent the staff of an imaginary restaurant where the orders come in sixty languages, pre-recorded in an application by native speakers. In addition to being fun, the game has a broader ambition: by bring players face to face with languages they do not understand, it recreates the experience of intercultural communication, with a view to changing their perception of linguistic diversity and deconstructing received notions on the hierarchy and complexity of languages. With over 97,000 units sold to date in France, and existing in German and Japanese versions as well, [kosmopoli:t] currently enjoys a significant impact in school settings.

The same gesture, everywhere in France: plunging a test strip in a fresh water source to assess its quality. That is the principle of La Grande Synchr’EAU, a participatory science project that transformed thousands of citizens into field scientists for the space of a weekend. The experiment, which was conducted in 2023 during the European Researchers’ Night, mobilised 1,000 volunteers across all four corners of France, including overseas territories. They all simultaneously measured fresh water quality in a place of their choice (river, canal, well, etc.), using simple kits previously distributed by the scientists who led the project. The 20,000 measurements that were collected were later shared via an interactive map online. Beyond the collective performance, the data served to raise awareness regarding issues relating to water, notably via educational workshops in fifty school institutions: students analysed their own results and those of their region, and debated water quality and the challenges connected to water preservation.

Born of a direct request from citizens from the Yellow Vests movement, the participatory project to analyse the register of grievances gave voice to these thousands of texts drafted between 2018 and 2019. When this initiative was born in 2020, nearly 2,000 people in the Gironde and Creuse departments volunteered for the collective effort to transcribe the texts conserved in departmental archives, a stage preceding in-depth analysis of the registers, tones, and writings by scientists with the help of lexicometric software. Supported by the Fondation de France and the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, the project will expand to other areas by 2028, and has already helped fund other research programmes building on this work, as well as training and discussion workshops in collaboration with departmental archives.