Application deadline : the Thursday 29 October 2026 à noon (Paris time).
Scientific background
Observation and monitoring systems have proliferated over recent decades and now span most scientific fields, from the physical and chemical sciences to the life and environmental sciences, and including the humanities and social sciences. They enable us to document phenomena in the short term or over the long term, to characterise their variability and to identify trends based on sets of point observations. These studies are never neutral: measuring, observing, equipping or modelling a system can alter that system, whilst the observer’s choices can determine what is actually observed, recorded and interpreted. The interaction between the observer and the observed object primarily relates to the potential disruption of a system caused by the act of observation itself – whether this involves a material, a chemical reaction, the monitoring of an ecosystem, or the prediction of a behavioural response.
The scientific challenge is therefore to characterise, model and, where possible, quantify the disturbances, transformations and biases associated with the observation set-up and the observer’s choices. In particular, this involves determining the extent to which the data collected reflect the properties of the system under study, those of the observation method, or the interactions between the two.
Overall objective of the call for proposals
This call for proposals aims to support projects which, from an interdisciplinary perspective, examine the non-neutrality of observation and its implications for the knowledge derived from empirical data. Projects may, in particular, focus on:
- disturbance of the system caused by the instrument or observation device; ;
- the effects of presence, habituation, stress or the behaviour of the observer or the system being observed;
- the reflexive or performative effects of observation, measurement, indicators or models; ;
- selection biases arising from protocols, instruments or detection capabilities; ;
- biases arising from the categories, assumptions and models used to define what is observed and the way in which the data are analysed; ;
- the evolution of these biases in long-term follow-up studies and their historical accumulation; ;
- a comparison between human observation (participant, non-participant, direct, indirect, etc.), instrumented observation and automated observation; ;
- the design of experimental or statistical protocols that enable the effects of the system to be distinguished from those of the observation process, quantifying them where possible;
- the development of methods that allow these effects to be explicitly incorporated into the analysis and interpretation of data; ;
- the transfer of methods and concepts between disciplines.
The aim of these projects should be to make explicit and to examine the interactions between observation and the system being observed, in order to better assess their consequences and to improve the robustness, comparability and interpretability of the knowledge produced (development of new, less intrusive observation methods, etc.). With this in mind, the Call for Proposals invites a shift from the question «how can we observe better?» to a more fundamental one: understanding how our methods of observation alter the world we seek to understand?
To apply, please log in to the NOA app: https://noa.cnrs.fr/. You will be asked to log in via the RENATER «identity federation» (using your JANUS codes if you are a member of staff at a CNRS unit) and you will be able to select the «InterObs2027» call from the list of calls. If you are a member of staff at a CNRS unit, please use your institutional email address linked to JANUS so that certain fields can be pre-filled (information about yourself or your laboratory, as well as those of your partners). If you are not a member of staff at a CNRS unit, you can register via your institution’s identity federation with RENATER. If this is not possible, we invite you to create a local account.
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