Foundation
“Promoting SHS in France and around the world, by focusing on their multidisciplinary nature, internationalisation, and collaborations between institutions.”
Founded by Fernand Braudel in 1963, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) is a foundation that has been recognised for its public utility (with the FRUP label). It is a private legal entity, whose mission, as defined in the amended legal decree dated 4 January 1963, consists of promoting “the study of human societies considered chiefly within their current realities and based on these realities.”
The Foundation’s original objective was to go outside the traditional university framework, breaking through the barriers that separated the disciplines organised and taught in university faculties, in order to foster excellent interdisciplinary research in the social and human sciences (SHS), while being resolutely attuned to the international context. While the Foundation celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2013, the adage that summarised its missions, with the three “I’s” of “interdisciplinary”, “international”, and “interinstitutional” still apply today. Furthermore, its missions were recently strengthened considerably through measures for innovation or incubation of initiatives, or new or risk-taking scientific projects.
According to Article of the January 1963 Decree, the Foundation’s mission is to foster “national and international collaboration among researchers, research centres and institutes, while supporting the creation and operation of scientific networks, working groups and experimental research teams.” Its mission also includes “promoting research and diffusing knowledge in the SHS field […], developing group work instruments […] in order to foster scientific production, support it, promote it, and diffuse it.”
FMSH is a unique institution in the French higher education/research landscape given its FRUP legal status (recognising its public utility), its missions, the services it performs for the national and international scientific community, and its setup. In 1963, it was considered an avant-garde institution, and rightly so. It continues to be unique given its open and collaborative view of research, especially in an increasingly competitive context. Its lengthy experience and expertise in managing research contracts, promoting SHS, fostering researcher mobility and international relations, make it a crucial institution in the SHS field.
Today, as in the past, the Foundation fulfils its mission to promote the human sciences. For the past 50 years, it has contributed to the visibility and renown of these disciplines in France and around the world, thanks to the close ties and networks that it has successfully built via informal links with the foreign researchers that it invites or as part of institutional partnerships or bilateral agreements. It is a genuine showcase for SHS on the national and international levels.
After a first term (2009-2013), Michel Wieviorka was re-elected as the Administrator of FMSH in June 2013. He now intends to continue with the Foundation’s transformation in order to make its original missions evolve towards more contemporary challenges and prospects, while remaining true to the principles that presided over its creation. For the next four years, the Foundation has renewed its objectives, in keeping with its missions and following recommendations from the ministries that oversee it, as well as the various entities that have recently evaluated it (AERES, IGAENR, the French Court of Audit, etc.). This transformation involves further overhauling its scientific policy (renewing, modernising, or eliminating programmes); building a large digital pole; and forming a major publishing and diffusion arm which, with FMSH as its operator, would gather the shared resources of various activities and functions in SHS publishing/diffusion, in order to serve a broad community.