The links between science and beliefs, debated at the amU' Science and Arts Festival 2025

Five days of exchanges, performances and discoveries at the sixth edition of AMU's Science and Arts Festival. True to its ambition of fostering dialogue between research, creation and society, the organisers chose “Science and Beliefs" as this year's theme. Thousands of participants collectively questioned the place of knowledge, doubt and belief in the ways we understand the world.

How are the links between science and beliefs woven? What narratives shape our relationship with truth? By asking these questions, the Festival offered a journey into the tensions, dialogues and hybridizations between two ways of exploring reality.

Researchers, artists, students and citizens came together for 70 events - lectures, performances, workshops, installations, concerts, debates and screenings - bringing together perspectives from 38 disciplines across the human, social, natural and medical sciences.

With more than 120 speakers, 12 interdisciplinary institutional units involved and nearly 6,000 total participants, the 2025 edition confirms the Festival’s distinctive role: a place for collective experience, where science becomes story, exchange and creation.

A growing festival, faithful to its founding spirit

Created in 2019, the Festival has become a key moment for the circulation of knowledge. Initially focused on the humanities and social sciences, it has opened since 2022 - under the impetus of the Interdisciplinarity Mission - to all scientific disciplines, making it a showcase for the multidisciplinary potential of AMU and its partners across the region.

Year after year, it strengthens this vision: connecting scientific, cultural and civic worlds around contemporary themes - from Feeding Ourselves in the Mediterranean to Body to Body in 2024. The 2025 edition follows this path: rethinking the relationship between science and society.

Science and Beliefs - a theme at the heart of contemporary debates

^{role-playing activity inviting visitors to do fictional shopping among thematic aisles - “collective fears,”

“questionable science,” “fluid identities,” and “altered memory” / © Eléa Ropiot for amU}

The chosen theme resonates in a context marked both by renewed trust in science and by a proliferation of misinformation. The Festival explored the complexity of beliefs - religious, social, cultural, political - and their interactions with scientific practices.

Three main threads ran through the programme:

Science and beliefs, a complex relationship - revisiting the history of knowledge and imaginaries
Doing science today - focusing on academic freedom and the Safe Place for Science programme, which hosts researchers threatened in their countries
Understanding our behaviour in relation to beliefs, addressing cognitive biases, disinformation and the human need to believe - even within the medical field.

The major interview with sociologist Gérald Bronner closed the Festival with a striking reflection: Are we living in a post-reality world?

Dialogue through form: a festival of experiences

The 2025 edition further expanded its formats—around twenty in total, from scientific theatre to participatory performance.
Among the new features:

The Institutes’ Café, a convivial discussion space between researchers and the public, set up at the Mucem Forum.
Major interviews (with Catherine Wihtol de Wenden and Gérald Bronner), giving scientific discourse the time it deserves.
Heritage and artistic walks, from Fort Saint-Jean to the centre of Aix.
Contemporary installations, such as The Little Shop of Preconceived Ideas or God Will Open the Sea, real devices of scientific mediation through art.

These experiences embody the Festival’s spirit: bringing science to life differently—through encounters, curiosity and shared emotion.

An edition marked by strong student participation

This sixth edition saw significant student involvement: more than 3,000 students from 15 master’s programmes, one bachelor’s degree and two high-school classes took part in the activities, often as part of their orientation week.

Arts and science workshop at the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations / © Eléa Ropiot for amU

Free concerts, scientific picnics and participatory workshops turned the Festival into a true back-to-school event for the university community, open to all and free of charge. This accessibility, together with a constant commitment to mediation, demonstrates Aix Marseille Université’s strong dedication to open, inclusive and civic-minded science.

Interdisciplinarity and dialogue between worlds

Beyond the numbers, the 2025 edition highlights the Festival’s interdisciplinary vitality. With 38 represented disciplines, the programme brought together perspectives rarely found in the same space. Researchers, artists, journalists, musicians and writers contributed to making the Festival a laboratory for dialogue between arts and sciences, as well as a place for
transdisciplinary experimentation.

Find out more from the original story, in French.

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