Giving talks and lectures

Talks and public interventions where the audience contributes: artificial intelligence and creation, cultural policies, youth and digital technology, film and media education, cultural rights.

Ideas for useful conferences Stories of our work in this field Take away as PDF

You are organising a study day, professional meetings, a symposium, an in-house seminar, and you are looking for a talk that genuinely feeds your audience’s thinking, grounded in a practice rather than in a synthesis of other people’s ideas. Often you also expect this event, which brings together fifty, one hundred or two hundred people, to produce something other than a succession of speeches, and each person present to leave with something they have worked out themselves.

This is the very logic of our talks: collective intelligence facilitation techniques are built into the way the talk unfolds. Questions put to the room, answered by standing up or remaining seated, reveal within a few minutes the actual positions of a professional community, including unexpected ones. Timed exchanges in pairs give each person the opportunity to put an idea into words out loud, facing a single other person, a very different experience from taking the microphone in front of the whole assembly. Written contributions (a summary of what has been heard, a disagreement, an additional point) are photographed and shared online by each participant, using a digital tool developed by the agency, very simple to use and hosted on sovereign infrastructure; the wall of contributions built up in this way remains accessible after the day is over, and the final discussion draws on what the whole room has written, no longer only on the questions of those who dare to take the microphone.

This way of working stems from the subjects we deal with. Cultural rights, the place of audiences and of young people, what digital technology and artificial intelligence are doing to professions are democratic subjects; the form of the experience lived during the talk has to be consistent with them. Giving each person present a place and a sense of confidence is part of the point, on a par with the ideas conveyed. A methodological moment at the end of the session looks back at the formats that have just been experienced, so that participants can reuse them in their own contexts; these methods are publicly documented in Collective intelligence facilitation methods.

This work sometimes covers the whole day: we then help the organiser design the event. The path from one talk to the next, the place of contributive moments, the welcome (up to and including a book table whose bibliography the participants put together), the edited summary that extends the day for those who were there as well as for those who were not: all of this is designed with you, on the basis of several possible schedules between which we decide together.

Each talk is built for your context and prepared with you: your situation, the live questions of your audience, what the day should leave them with. It draws on thirty years of practice and on a body of research published on an ongoing basis (our resources), including the book “Defending culture differently : methods for tomorrow” (2026). Talks are given in French and in English, in France and internationally.

Some recent talks: “Culture differently : postures and methods for tomorrow” for the Cultures du Cœur network; “Audiences : how digital technology reshapes our relationship to the performing arts” for Chaillot Augmenté × TMNlab; “Mental health, young people, images : what are we talking about ?” at professional meetings; “EAC and cultural rights”; and the video talks in the Giving talks and conferences section.

And among the days co-designed from start to finish: the interprofessional day on cultural professionals’ approaches to adolescents, with the Jeune Public au Centre network, at Équinoxe, Scène nationale de Châteauroux (one hundred and fifty participants); the “Artistic and digital practices for young people” professional day, co-designed and co-facilitated with Act’art (Seine-et-Marne); helping young people and professionals to speak out at the “Cultures and youth policies” national meetings in Villeurbanne, French Capital of Culture; the Meetings on participative creation of the Théâtre de la Poudrerie (Sevran), whose programme is co-developed with the agency and whose online summary of the 2022 edition was produced by it; and the regional day presenting the shared assessment of screen literacy education in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, at the MÉCA in Bordeaux.

Everything we offer

Working together: the overview

The complete file in PDF

Ideas for useful conferences

Why don’t young people come to us?

Possible talks on the cultural practices of 15-25 year-olds, for cultural teams, youth services, networks and local authorities.

This is the question I am asked most often, and it rarely comes alone. Behind it there is sometimes a territorial cultural plan that mentions students without knowing where to start, sometimes a hundred and fifty staff members from very different professions gathered once a year around a shared topic, sometimes a youth department and a culture department working in the same city without knowing each other. These are not the same talks. What follows is a set of possible directions, so that we (…)

What are we really doing when we do arts and cultural education?

Possible talks on arts and cultural education, for local authorities, cultural agencies, education networks, artistic teams and teachers.

Arts and cultural education is one of those rare subjects on which almost everyone agrees about the words and almost no one about what they cover. I am asked to speak sometimes to put meaning back into a scheme that has become routine, sometimes to help artists and teachers talk to each other, sometimes to address the question of evaluation that poisons every end-of-year report. Here are the directions I can take, to be discussed according to what is at stake for you.First direction: (…)

Should we confiscate the phone?

Possible talks on screens, adolescence and family life, for parents, and for the professionals who support them.

When I speak in front of parents, the question of the phone comes up within the first five minutes, and it is rarely a technical question. It is a question about authority, about trust, and about the fear of missing something important. I do not come with a rule, because no single rule would hold for every family. I come to help each person recover their own capacity for judgement, with what research knows today and what teenagers say when we listen to them. Here are some possible (…)

How do you sharpen critical thinking without lecturing?

Possible talks on media, information and image education, for popular education networks, libraries, school authorities, local authorities and associations.

Media education has become a watchword, with budgets, labels and schemes. And yet most of the professionals I meet feel that it is not taking hold: young people can recite that you should check your sources, and go on believing what they want to believe, like all of us. I think the problem comes from the way we have built this field, and I have several possible ways into a discussion with your teams.First direction: fact-checking does not produce critical thinkingVerifying a piece of (…)

Why does our training change nothing?

Possible talks on pedagogy and transmission, for teaching teams, training organisations, artists who teach, and companies.

A team leaves a training day convinced, and three months later nothing has changed. It is not a problem of motivation, it is a problem of method: validation is not transformation. I have been working on this question for thirty years, with children, teenagers, professionals and university students, and I am releasing a documentary film on progressive education, “Droit à la parole!”. Pedagogy is a subject that matters well beyond school: cultural venues, artists and companies ask me about it, (…)

Is artificial intelligence going to replace us?

Possible talks on artificial intelligence, creation and critical thinking, for cultural teams, schools and universities, local authorities and companies.

This is the question that always comes, and it hides several others: fear for one’s profession, anger at companies that feed on authors’ work, the feeling of being left behind, and sometimes a curiosity one dares not show in front of colleagues. I use these tools every day, in my own creative work and in the agency’s work, and I have been writing about them for years: it is by far the most substantial part of this site. Depending on your teams, I can take very different paths.First (…)

How do you stand up for culture when the money runs out?

Possible talks on cultural policy and the future of the sector, for local authorities, culture departments, networks and subsidized venues.

Budgets are shrinking, and the cultural sector most often responds by defending what it has. I believe that response is a losing one, not for lack of courage but because it places us on our opponents’ ground. I have written an entire book on this, Defending culture differently: methods for tomorrow, free to download, and it is the subject I have been asked about most over the past year. Here are the possible ways in.First direction: funding cuts are the wrong subjectArguing about (…)

What is mediation for, if people are already creating?

Possible talks on cultural mediation and its methods, for mediation teams, museums, theatres, libraries, companies and care settings.

The mediator’s profession was built at a time when access to works was rare and public expression non-existent. Both conditions have changed. This is not the end of the profession, it is a considerable displacement of its purpose, and the teams I meet feel it long before they can put it into words. I write a great deal on this subject, including on the side of therapeutic mediation, where I teach. Here is what I can come and work on with you.First direction: the bond before the content (…)

Cultural rights: what do they mean in practice?

Possible talks on cultural rights, for local authorities, culture departments, networks, and teams writing or revising a project.

Cultural rights have been part of French law since 2015 and 2016, they appear in almost every territorial cultural plan, and many professionals admit to me in private that they could not explain them to a colleague. Vocabulary has much to do with it: this is a field where jargon manufactures domination, which is the height of irony. So I propose talks without jargon, which start from situations your teams will recognise.First direction: the definition in ten minutes, then the consequences (…)

How do you get people who never talk to each other to work together?

Possible talks on collective intelligence and cooperation, for local authorities, networks, management teams, companies and organisations in transition.

Two departments of the same house that ignore each other, a network whose members only meet once a year, a merger that has put professional cultures foreign to one another under the same roof: the situations differ, the request is much the same. It rarely concerns a content, more often a way of doing things. I have been facilitating collective processes for thirty years and I have publicly documented my methods, which is rare enough in this line of work. Here are the possible ways in. (…)

What if someone from your team did the talking?

Supporting a member of your team in designing and giving a talk themselves: content, dramaturgy, facilitation, rehearsals.

Sometimes the right person to hold the microphone is not me. It is someone on your side: the person on the front line of the subject, the one whose legitimacy comes from their daily work, the one who will still be in the team when the day is over. What I offer then is to make them strong. I am an expert on many of the contents involved, and just as much on what makes a talk hold together: narrative, rhythm, facilitating participation, handling difficult questions. These skills can be passed (…)

A few examples