180 seconds to present their thesis topic clearly and concisely to a varied audience (including several high school classes): this was the challenge taken up by the 10 candidates in this new edition of the MT180 UNamur competition. Introduced by Carine Michiels, Vice-Rector for Research and Libraries, and presented by Aline Wilmet, this 2025 edition brought together 10 candidates from the Faculties of Science, Medicine, Philosophy and Arts, who once again distinguished themselves in this popularization exercise: Petra Manja (microbiology), Laëtitia Riss (philosophy of history), Nicolas Gros (heritage sciences), Jenny Ha (organic chemistry), Audrey Verhaeghe (microbiology), Margaux Mignolet (neuroscience), Lindsay Sprimont (neuroscience), Marine Ote (microbiology), Thomas Rouma (immunology) and Bastien Tirtiaux (microbiology).

This year, it was once again difficult to decide between our candidates, whose performances were always of a very high standard. They were evaluated by a jury made up of personalities from within and outside UNamur, drawn from the worlds of research, teaching and scientific communication.

• Géraldine Tran - Editor-in-Chief of Athéna, the popular science magazine of the Walloon Public Service
• François-Xavier Fiévez - Pedagogue and didactician at UNamur, actor and improviser, Vice-rector for social, student, gender, sports and cultural affairs
• Charlotte Benedetti - Director of Pavillon de Namur, KIKK asbl's exhibition, experimentation and innovation center. This venue dedicated to digital cultures breaks down the barriers between disciplines, simultaneously embracing art, science and technology.
• Nathan Uyttendaele - Mathematician, popularizer and YouTube videographer of the Chat Sceptique channel, former candidate in the MT180 competition and holder of a science popularization prize from the FNRS Fond Wernaers

The public prize was awarded to Petra Manja for her pitch "Dormir pour ne pas mourir". The second jury prize was awarded to Thomas Rouma for his pitch "Comment se débarrasser d'un pique-assiette?!". Thefirst jury prize was awarded to Margaux Mignolet for her pitch "Dory's world the antibody"!

In order to prepare them optimally for the demands of the competition and those of their thesis or conference defense, candidates have benefited from training in popularized communication, in the construction of a structured pitch, as well as in public speaking enabling them to master natural body language and manage the stress provoked by such an exercise. This training course is organized by Aline Wilmet, scientific mediator at Confluent des Savoirs and scientific communication coach, and by Jacques Neefs, actor, director and teacher at the Brussels Conservatory. The training, which is spread over three months as part of MT180, is also available in a short format (from 1h to 2 days' training) for the university community and also offered on an inter-university basis.

Aline Wilmet describes the training experienced by candidates:

"Each year, Le Confluent des Savoirs offers in-depth training to prepare candidates for clear and concise communication. Our aim is to give young researchers the opportunity to practice a difficult communication exercise that is communicating to the general public. It's all about communicating a clear, concrete message, rooted in everyday life, or using storytelling that appeals to emotions, shared experience or the daily grind of research... There's no magic formula. You have to adapt your message without distorting your research. It's a meticulous job to choose the message that will strike a chord with the audience, while conveying in a clear and accessible way the objectives, challenges and working methods of the researchers involved in their doctoral thesis. Obviously, it's not possible to cover all the subtleties of a multi-faceted research project in just three minutes. But for me, the challenge goes far beyond the competition: it's an exercise in communication, a first step that opens the door to other popularization activities: a journalist interview, taking part in a conference, a meeting with the public, a workshop at the Printemps des Sciences, a popularized article, etc. Who better to talk about your research than your doctoral thesis? Who better to talk about your research than a researcher? Having myself taken part in the competition with my thesis during the 2nd edition in 2015, the exercise enabled me to approach my subject differently, to give it more value because I realized that it could be of interest to a wider audience than just specialists. It's rewarding, it's motivating, it's challenging, you learn and share lots of things. It's a great human adventure, and one that's valued as part of doctoral training!"

The strength of disciplinary know-how within PaTHs makes possible bold openings into the exact sciences, which have already been initiated by most of the 5 centers and groups affiliated to the institute: AcanthuM (Monumental, archaeological and artistic heritage), aRaiRe (Recherches namuroises en histoire Rurale), Fontes Antiquitatis, HiSI (History, sounds and images) and PraME (Medieval written practices).

The mammisi or birthing house is a typical architectural feature of Egyptian temples from the Greco-Roman period. The Roman mammisi at Dendera, dating from the Nerva-antonine period (2nd century CE), is the last specimen of this type and embodies the synergy of 400 years of tradition and innovation. The mammisi was dedicated to the child-god and celebrated his (re)birth as a guarantee of natural cycles and thus of Egypt's prosperity.

This project aims to reconstruct the intellectual and material processes that had to be put in place to realize the architectural project. From the priests who gathered theological ideas to the hierogrammatists who wrote the texts and designed the decoration on papyrus, from the architects and workers who erected the walls to the engravers who transferred the concept of decoration from papyrus to the walls, this project sets out to study this monument from different angles in order to identify the operational chain of an architectural project.

The missions in Egypt will produce a new publication conforming to modern standards of epigraphy and a translation of all the texts. This will make it possible to study the arrangement of the monument's decoration made up of offering scenes and texts according to the rules that Egyptologists have called "temple grammar", and to understand the relationship between image and text.

The project will thus provide the first detailed study of the theology of Dendera's two child-gods. It will analyze the hieroglyphic system, characteristic of texts from the Roman period, and examine the walls to define the engraving techniques of the ancient craftsmen. Finally, he will place the mammisi in a wider context to highlight the architectural strategies of the emperors of the Nerva-antonine dynasty in Egypt.

Over the past twenty years, several works by photographic artists have given visibility to the effects of radioactivity - mainly following the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters - or to the risks associated with the burial of radioactive waste.

Series by Japan's Takashi Arai, Switzerland's Julian Charrière, France's David Fathi, Guillaume Herbaut, Jacqueline Salmon, Anaïs Tondeur and Lucas Chastel, Germany's Jürgen Nefzger and Wim Wenders, and Belgium's Cécile Massart have been selected.

Five objectives are pursued in this research:

• analyze the contexts of these artistic productions;
• define the intentions of their authors, with regard to their body of work and their contribution to a nuclear culture;
• study the aesthetics of their creations, in relation to the materiality of photography, its nature as imprint, trace, testimony or even representation ;
• evaluate the public reception of these distinct works;
• contribute, through the dialogical linking of these works, their analysis and dissemination, to a nuclear culture nourished by artistic expression.

A comparative method will be applied to the study of the different series in the corpus to identify their specificities, convergences and/or divergences, assessed against the scientific literature available in the field of visual arts and the humanities on nuclear power and its representations. Fieldwork will be undertaken through interviews conducted with each photographer.

From a cultural studies perspective, this research is part of an approach to analyzing the construction of representations and knowledge, free from bias but invested in societal debates in which the art center and publishing house partners in this research project are also involved, through their respective activities, and which will disseminate the results via:

• an exhibition scheduled at the Le Delta art center (Namur, March-July 2026)
• a study day involving some of the exhibited artists (UNamur, March 2026)
• a book to be published by La Lettre Volée editions (Brussels) (spring 2026)

FNRS funding will enable interviews to be conducted with the artists concerned, in Belgium, France and Germany, but also to guarantee the dissemination of this research, by funding part of the book and exhibition communication in which it will take shape.

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.

This article is taken from the "Tomorrow learn" column in the December 2024 issue of Omalius magazine.

This initiative is spearheaded by Fanny Martin, lecturer in national archaeology at UNamur. "Leaving archaeology studies without having experienced the discipline doesn't make much sense. When I arrived, the University of Namur didn't yet have any field schools. It seemed essential to me to offer a project for students, because field archaeology is a discipline in its own right," she explains. Julian Richard, professor of Greek and Roman archaeology and head of the department, adds: "At UNamur, our trump card is to take students out into the field as much as possible. Right from the bachelor's level, they are brought into contact with the object, observing it, manipulating it, understanding it. This is a pedagogy we're keen on, and setting up work-schools is part of it."

During these work-schools, students, confronted with the realities of the field, have to apply their theoretical knowledge to concrete situations, developing not only their technical skills, but also analytical and problem-solving abilities. "In the first and second years, students receive a methodological background on excavation. And then, between their second and third years, they go out on the training site for two weeks and put these principles into practice," adds Fanny Martin.

I got a lot out of this internship. The team on site was lovely. We first learned the basics of excavation, then, little by little, explored all the stages of the discipline, which was exciting", she recounts. Marion Drabbé, a third-year bachelor's student in archaeology, backs up Bérénice's words, adding, "I was a little apprehensive, as the workcamps are like a little exam in our curriculum. But in the end, it was a great experience. We were surrounded by lovely professionals, and I was supervised by Fanny Thirion, archaeologist at the Musée des Celtes. It was great! These workcamps let you see what you're studying, and you realize just how precise and meticulous archaeology is. There's also the satisfaction of discovering previously unseen objects: we found an urn with bone residues and a fibula pin, which is quite rare in excavations. We were delighted!".

The experience of workcamps is not just professional. For Bérénice Didier, it was also a time for sharing and cohesion: "It felt a bit like summer camp. It was really great and I had the opportunity to forge a lot of bonds." Outside digging hours, the students share their daily lives, which fosters strong bonds and develops their ability to work as a team.

These workcamps, which constitute research projects in their own right, require significant organization and varied support. "We chose to work in the Tintigny region, in Gaume. The site is in conservation danger, and we benefit from funding from the Agence wallonne du Patrimoine as well as a partnership with the Musée des Celtes de Libramont and the Commune de Tintigny to carry out the operations. This type of project requires a lot of collaboration to manage the logistics and the study," explains Fanny Martin. What's more, support from partners and UNamur means that internships are free of charge, so that no student is deprived of this opportunity.

These projects fulfill a dual societal mission: to preserve and pass on heritage to society. With this in mind, students welcome visitors to the site to share their discoveries, enabling them to acquire cultural mediation skills. Bérénice testifies: "Giving guided tours really appealed to me, to the point of making me want to explore this field in the future". Marion adds: "The tours were really enriching. You realize that being able to express your budding knowledge in front of people who are interested in what you're telling them is also very glorifying". This dimension makes these internships much more than mere digs: they are also places of transmission where students value their work to society.

The work sites are also a first experience in the professional world. "They offer them a first baggage for the future", notes Julian Richard. Students can also take part in international missions, such as those organized by Julian Richard in Ostia, the ancient port of Rome, with UCLouvain. These excavations abroad bring a complementary perspective and enrich their training through the study of other contexts, particularly built, as well as other periods.

Thanks to this approach, UNamur archaeology students develop a deeper understanding of their field while building a useful professional network for the future. The workcamp-school becomes a landmark experience, preparing students both academically and personally for the rest of their career.