2025 CO-LAB IN PARIS
SAGA research is being conducted in a host of collaborations, co-hosted laboratory style workshops, or co-labs, that bring together different actors in different settings and cities to spark new research and understandings related to sustainability across languages.
In July 2025, SAGA researchers will convene at the Paris Académie du Climat, a public, open facility created to host dialogues, workshops, conferences and conversations to advance climate understanding and action. Our host will be SAGA researcher Cédissia About from the City of Paris.
We will be joined in conversation by French scholars and urbanist professionals, including Valérie Masson Delmotte, paleoclimatologist based at Université Paris Saclay, who has served as a leading contributor or co-chair of the three most recent IPCC assessment reports, and is an active member of an interdisciplinary environmental group called Ethique en commun. We will ask this leading climate scientist to reflect on her experience of the effects of language differences on the most significant international work to render climate science into policy action.
Our Paris co-lab will also include a day at ISIT, the French Grande Ecole of Intercultural Management and Communication, where we will meet with researchers with expertise in intercultural communications and multilingualism. Our host will be SAGA researcher and ISIT faculty member Pascale Elbaz. We will learn more about her ongoing work with Cédissia About regarding the implications and variability in interpretation and translation of key sustainable cities terms, including nature in the city, circular economy and active mobility. In addition, we will host roundtables with French researchers at the vanguard of critical interpretation and translation work and green colonialism.
Our site visits in Paris will include the Saint-Vincent-de-Paul ecodistrict, a work-in-progress for innovation in temporary, cooperative reuse and ecological redevelopment, on a former hospital precinct in the 14th arrondissement.