Whether it concerns linguistics, economics, politics, sustainable development, law, history, educational sciences, literature or translation, research in the humanities and social sciences is as eclectic as it is rich and essential for tackling society's challenges. Of UNamur's eleven research institutes, seven are directly involved in SHS research. While there is a high degree of complementarity in these areas of research, better pooling of resources, sharing and easier access to certain services, resources and support will help to sustain and strengthen the excellence of SHS research at UNamur. It is with this in mind that the SHS impulse platform has just been created.

• Axis 1 - Support for the acquisition of databases, documentary resources and software
• Axis 2 - Subsidy for cutting-edge training in the use of specialized methods
• Axis 3 - Funding access to the SMCS "Support en Méthodologie et Calcul Statistique" platform at UCLouvain, thanks to an inter-university partnership.
• Axis 4 - Setting up an SHS space, containing a laboratory for running experiments and shared work tools promoting exchanges between researchers.

This initiative, launched in January 2025, addresses the specific challenges faced by SHS researchers. The long-term aim is to sustain and expand the services. "We will also hire a researcher expert in methodological analysis in SHS who will be able to inform innovative methodologies and frame the methodological design of research projects," emphasizes Sandrine Biémar, vice-dean of UNamur's Faculty of Education and Training Sciences, a member of the IRDENA institute and the SHS Impulse management committee. "The wish is also to support networking between SHS researchers at UNamur and to be a lever for setting up interdisciplinary projects," adds Sandrine Biémar.

The platform's management team is made up of representatives of the university's various SHS institutes, and ensures efficient management of resources. The platform's impact will be assessed during its initial phase (2025-2027), enabling strategies for its sustainability and development to be defined.

The Sign Language of French-speaking Belgium (LSFB) has acquired several resources in recent years. A dictionary, developed and enriched since 2010 by the LSFB asbl association (https://dico.lsfb.be/). A contextual bilingual dictionary, developed at the University of Namur from LSFB-Lab research data and put online in 2022 (https://dico.corpus-lsfb.be/) . Today, MOSI brings these two resources to the user's fingertips, while enabling the signing community to contribute to the enrichment of the data.

From a web browser, a reader will now be able to highlight a word and see a video appear with the corresponding sign. It will also be possible to carry out manual searches in the database, which currently boasts over 7,000 signs. Sign language speakers will be able to add new signs to this resource. MOSI is thus conceived as a bilingual (French - LSFB) and collaborative tool; it is both a site and a web extension.

MOSI is accessible free of charge: https://www.mot-signe.be/

Based on research carried out at the University of Namur (LSFB-Lab and the NaDI institute), the LSFB asbl association and the partnership forged between UNamur and Ecole et Surdité 25 years ago, MOSI will be particularly useful for students, adults, families, teachers, speech therapists, interpreters and anyone working in the field of deafness. The test phase demonstrated the enthusiasm of the 40 registered users, who carried out 30,000 searches and recorded 500 signs.

Linguistic research on LSFB began in 2000 at the University of Namur, pioneering the field in French-speaking Belgium. Since then, a team has developed, the Laboratoire de langue des signes de Belgique francophone (or LSFB-Lab). Several fruitful collaborations between the LSFB-Lab and UNamur's Faculty of Computer Science have led to ambitious projects, such as the bilingual and contextual dictionary: a dictionary that can be queried in both French and LSFB, via a webcam, and provides access to translations illustrated with examples in context, taken from real conversations.

The origins of MOSI lie in the needs of students and teachers in the bilingual classes at Sainte-Marie in Namur. A teacher, Magaly Ghesquière, was aware of the resources available, and had the idea of making them more accessible to students and teachers. A first version of the tool was developed by two students from the Faculty of Computer Science (Innocent Ye and Babacar Sow). This was followed by a collaboration between computer scientists from the PreCISE center and the HuMaLearn laboratory at UNamur (Jérôme Fink, Pierre Poitier, Benoît Frénay, Anthony Cleve), the LSFB-Lab (Sibylle Fonzé, Laurence Meurant and Bruno Sonnemans), École et Surdité teachers (guided by Magaly Ghesquière and Sibylle Fonzé), and the LSFB asbl association (Bruno Sonnemans) which led to the completed version of the tool.

"Despite the progress made, French sign language bilingual education is still sorely lacking in resources and tools for both students and their teachers. By bringing together players from the signing community at large: researchers, teachers, interpreters and all LSFB speakers, the MOSI project offers the hope of a concrete response. It's a citizen's advance that's both generous and collaborative."

The institute comprises four research centers: Pluri-LL, the Centre Nerval, the Observatoire des Littératures Sauvages (OLSa) and the Laboratoire de langue des signes de Belgique francophone (LSFB-Lab).

Two researchers from NaLTT have just been awarded funding from the F.R.S - FNRS following calls whose results were published in December 2024.

An estimated 72 million people worldwide use a sign language. The 150 signed languages recorded to date (The Ethnologue) are derived from the sociolinguistic dynamics of different deaf communities, their history and their interaction with society as a whole.

Like all languages, signed languages evolve and vary. Variations linked in particular to the age, region, gender, linguistic and educational profile of signers are attested in the use of most signed languages. Sign language in French-speaking Belgium (LSFB) is no exception. For example, the former boarding schools for the deaf established in Brussels and Wallonia still have regional variants. While the older generation's sign language shows traces of the restrictive context of oralist teaching and the disregard for signed languages at the time of their schooling, the younger generation's language is tinged with numerous borrowings from American Sign Language (ASL) or international signs, symbols of openness and mobility. Increasingly, LSFB signers are highlighting the linguistic divergence between age- and region-related LSFB varieties.

The Research Project (PDR) "DiVa LSFB - Linguistic distance and variation in French-speaking Belgian sign language: a mixed-methods analysis" aims to understand this phenomenon of linguistic distance and variation within today's LSFB. It aims to provide a multidimensional analysis of this complex phenomenon that is as representative as possible of the social ecosystems in which deaf people live. Can generational or regional profiles be identified from an analysis of LSFB usage? What linguistic characteristics and strategies promote or hinder intercomprehension between young signers and their elders? What ideas and beliefs do signers have about the degree and reasons for variations in LSFB, and about the elements that promote or hinder intercomprehension? And in their day-to-day practices, how do they handle interaction with younger and older signers, and with those who use regional varieties other than their own? To answer these questions, the team will use a combination of corpus data, experimental data on inter-comprehension between signers, as well as ethnolinguistic-type data.

Amandine le Maire completed her thesis at Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh) as part of the Mobile Deaf project (ERC, under the direction of Prof. A. Kusters). After coordinating the LSFB-French Interuniversity Certificate in 2023-2024, Amandine joined the LSFB-Lab as part of "DiVa LSFB" and became the first deaf post-doc involved in research on LSFB, her mother tongue.

She will be working closely with Sibylle Fonzé, Bruno Sonnemans and Laurence Meurant. This project is part of a wider collaboration with Pr. Mieke Van Herreweghe (Universiteit Gent), Myriam Vermeerbergen (KULeuven) and Jeroen Darquennes (UNamur, NaLTT) on the study of linguistic change in Belgian sign languages.

This collaboration is taking shape in perfect synchronicity in the project Changing signs & signs of change: hoe variatie en taalcontact de taalverandering in Vlaamse Gebarentaal in hand werken which has just been selected as a "Senior onderzoekproject" by the FWO - Flanders' equivalent of the FNRS.

In partnership with the Faculty of Computer Science (the teams of Professors Anthony Cleve, Benoît Frénay and Bruno Dumas), it has initiated the development of digital tools in the service of bilingualism and the visibility of LSFB.

The Fonds Namur Université is the University of Namur's interface for its fundraising for patronage, donations and sponsorship. Thanks to the support of donors, the LSBF-French bilingual dictionary project was able to see the light of day.

This project takes as its starting point the fact that the acclimatization of poetry to advertising communication has helped to reinforce its urban inscription, so that today it frequently appears on the walls of our cities, often through fragmentary quotations and isolated verses. It invites us to take these writings seriously and to question the forms, uses and functions of poetic inscription in contemporary urban space.

The aim is to distinguish between authorized inscriptions (commissioned frescoes, window poetry and other installations conceived in collaboration with public authorities) and "wild" writings (spontaneous, raw, ephemeral).

On the side of authorized writings, we find notably quotations from canonical works, but also unpublished works participating in the production of legitimized authors, created to adorn public buildings - which raises a series of questions: is poetry reduced in this case to a simple decorative function? Which texts/extracts are chosen, and in which locations? What forms are favored? Are we banking on formulas that function as "inspirational" or "feel-good " maxims or proverbs, on emblematic extracts aimed at maintaining a common heritage? Should these productions be seen as the manifestation of a soothing "artist capitalism", or can they be seen as mediations that make poetry visible, serving as a first contact and an incentive to discover complex texts? How is the exhibition of the text designed materially (typography, colors, articulation with illustrations, etc.)?

On the side of wild writing, not based on commissions and not benefiting from authorization, other forms and conceptions of poetry are activated, from lyrical slogans to ironic watchwords and from puns to absurd aphorisms. These statements come under the heading of a vivid word vaguely disruptive of the everyday in that it brings salience, playfulness, incongruity, that it de-routinizes.

This is not to overplay the gap between institutional and wild poetic writings: it's striking to observe the multiplication of writings banking on an imaginary of illegality and protest while making it possible to transfer them to other, more instituted and, above all, potentially more sellable media - so that it's also the gentrification(*) of wild writings that we'll be studying in this framework.

(*)Gentrification: the process by which the population of a working-class neighborhood makes way for a more affluent social stratum.

This observatory is devoted to the way literature is also constructed outside the book, through alternative objects and channels, which sometimes nourish and energize the world of letters, but can just as easily evolve at a clear distance from it.

Numerous extra-book productions exploit the resources of literary communication: the handwritten album, the guestbook, the leaflet, the banner, the graffiti, the handmade documents cobbled together by the Surrealists and Situationists, the mimeographed newspaper, the fanzine or, of course, the screen, among many examples, are among these written media welcoming hybrid productions making room for lyricism, fiction or formal experimentation.

It is to these productions that the Observatoire des Littératures Sauvages is dedicated, whose members, from a variety of disciplines, set out to study the articulations of these literary practices to the social world.

International Francqui Chair 2024-2025 - Multilingualism and language learning. Challenges & Opportunities

This International Franqui Chair 2024-2025 is a joint initiative of VUB, Ghent University and Namur University. The Chairholder is Prof. Dr. Jean-Marc Dewaele. He will be present at UNamur for a series of lectures between February 19 and April 2, 2025. A general public conference entitled "How to raise children to become multilingual" will take place on March 11, 2025.

Every year, the F.R.S.-FNRS launches calls for funding for fundamental research. It has set up a range of tools enabling it to offer scientific and technical personnel, equipment and operating resources to researchers, who are the bearers of a project of excellence.

Organized in partnership with the Wallonia-Brussels Federation and UNamur, SETT is recognized as inter-network training days by the Institut interréseaux de la Formation Professionnelle Continue (IFPC). The aim of the event is to bring together all those involved in education to discuss the latest digital and pedagogical advances. According to Julie Henry, head of UNamur's Scientific Committee and an expert in digital education, "the SETT is a key space for the dissemination and impact of our research and a unique opportunity to share knowledge, confront our work with the reality in the field and influence educational practices on a large scale. Since its creation, the SETT has provided a forum for dialogue and strategic intelligence, enabling us to discuss the challenges and opportunities of digital technology in education, a central issue in the evolution of teaching practices". Julie Henry adds: "Today, digital technology is an essential skill for every citizen. It's not just a question of mastering tools, but of developing a digital culture that integrates critical thinking and an understanding of the societal, economic and environmental issues linked to technologies. That's why SETT, a space for collective reflection, is essential to anticipate the transformations to come and to support education players in these changes."

From basic to higher education, SETT offers a variety of workshops, talks and conferences. On the program for these two days, conferences around STE(A)M, Artificial Intelligence, video games, critical digital education... Three major themes in connection with teaching and new technologies were addressed by UNamur experts:

• digital at the service of learners/teachers
• digital media education
• STEM education

Focus on some testimonials from our researchers.

Can we use Black Mirror to educate about the digital? The series, known for its dark tales of technology and its impact on society, offers a basis for discussion of digital issues. In this conference, Benoît Vanderose and Anthony Simonofski, professors at the University of Namur, looked back at the usefulness of the podcast's effectiveness as a pedagogical tool, its possible use in the classroom, and the major themes that can be tackled via this channel.

For years, learning computer science has been based on a bottom-up approach: starting with the basics of programming, via simple exercises, towards more advanced concepts of teamwork, object-oriented, version management, testing and so on. Nevertheless, this approach may seem questionable in view of the mixed results, particularly in learning object-oriented best practices. This problem could be due to the fact that we are constantly putting off complexity until later, rather than welcoming it as an intrinsic element and learning to manage it as soon as possible.

In this café-causerie, Benoît Vanderose and Xavier Devroey, professors at UNamur, proposed to discuss a new approach to learning programming, based on the good development practices in place in industry, notably, thinking through test cases before programming. The aim being to think about the program in terms of its behaviors, rather than directly tackling the algorithmic way of solving the problem.

Initially scheduled to give a talk at SETT, UNamur professor Michaël Lobet was unfortunately unable to attend due to a health impediment. Nevertheless, he was keen to share his views on the importance of taking part in such a show. "We're talking about a 3rd (or even 4th) industrial revolution with the arrival of new information and communication technologies. Recent events such as covid or the advent of AI have had a big impact on our society and, de facto, on teaching. Although not new, the challenge of digital training remains paramount to avoid aggravating social fractures. Through my talk, my message would have been to take stock of the impact of generative AI/IA on teaching. I remain convinced of the need to train teachers in this new technology, to use it critically, responsibly and innovatively. Our institutions must be able to deliver clear messages to accompany user teachers in this challenge," explains Michaël Lobet.

Sign languages emerge naturally in deaf communities around the world. The ASBL Ecole et Surdité active within the Sainte Marie school in Namur is working to offer bilingual French / Langue des Signes Francophone de Belgique (LSFB) courses for primary and secondary schools. In cooperation with them that Laurence Meurant and her team at UNamur's Research Institute NaLTT have created a collaborative lexicon enabling the deaf community to consult and propose LSFB vocabulary autonomously. This presentation by Magaly Ghesquière and Jérôme Fink, both professors at UNamur, looked back at the sources of this collaboration and offered feedback on the tool developed and its future.

Through such interventions, Julie Henry affirms that "since the first edition, the University of Namur remains invested in the quality of the program via the chaire Educonum (Faculty of Computer Science) and its members. Participating - as a speaker, exhibitor or visitor - is a way of extending this commitment and actively contributing to the evolution of digital education. UNamur, notably through the Educonum Chair, thus reaffirms its commitment to research and innovation in digital education, in the service of more effective, inclusive teaching adapted to the challenges of today and tomorrow."