PROTEUS.A*Midex

As the number of crises facing our societies increases, there is an urgent need for the humanities and social sciences (HSS) to take up the study of society's future and work with other disciplines on foresight and risk anticipation. However, the humanities and social sciences tend to shy away from this area, where interdisciplinary collaboration is rare. The aim of the PROTEUS project is to make up for this shortcoming and to create the conditions for a dynamic interdisciplinary research project on the anticipation of change and risk in the Mediterranean. The project is based on a recent multidisciplinary group of researchers and doctoral students in the humanities and social sciences (economists, demographers, geographers, historians, lawyers, philosophers, political scientists and sociologists), in collaboration with researchers in management and environmental sciences (ecologists) and experts in foresight.

The objectives are :

I) to build conceptual and methodological analytical frameworks for studying the future of societies,

II) to launch two interdisciplinary pilot surveys based on the identification of major issues for the future of the Mediterranean basin: maritime planning and the fight against megafires,

III) to train in the humanities and social sciences to carry out foresight work combining new disciplinary and methodological approaches.