Related publications
May 2018 - Book review of Rogers Brubaker's Trans - by Sarah Mazouz
Available on Books and Ideas.
In a dense, stimulating and thought-provoking book, sociologist Rogers Brubaker investigates why, in the United States, the social acceptation of transgender situations has no equivalent for transracial cases.
The book review can be read here.
March 2017 - La République et ses autres : politiques de l'altérité dans la France des années 2000, by Sarah Mazouz
Is France afraid of its others? Focusing on the various discourses and practices that have been progressively formalized over the last 15 years, this book investigates "French policies of otherness." Drawing upon a double ethnographic study in government bodies fighting racial discrimination and naturalization offices of a large city in the Parisian region, Sarah Mazouz demonstrates how issues of immigration, nation and racialization are articulated in social space. By investigating these two public policies, she explores processes of inclusion and exclusion within the nation itself (by looking at antidiscrimination’s various modalities) and outside of it (by looking at naturalization practices). In doing so, she strives to grasp the paradoxical relationships that ties the Republic to its others and the plurality of logics that relate to the production of a national order.
January 2017 - Special issue "Contemporary Perspectives on Race in the United States," edited by Daniel Sabbagh
The issue of race in the United States is just as topical as ever, as reflected both in the emergence of the ’Black Lives Matter’ movement - in response to instances of police brutality too frequent and too serious to be dismissed as isolated incidents - and to the surprising victory in November 2016 of a presidential candidate who had made disparaging statements about Hispanics. Those recent events have triggered a great many comments. Yet they are only the most striking evidence of the persistence of race as a multidimensional problem, a problem addressed by the complementary contributions by Juliette Galonnier, Ann Morning, Daniel Sabbagh and Richard Thompson Ford, brought together in the following symposium.
May 2016 - "Causalism and contextualization : on the uses of biology in the social sciences" by Carole Reynaud-Paligot and Sébastien Lemerle
The interconnection between life sciences and social sciences is an issue that has been continuously raising concerns during the last decade. On the basis of four examples (social neuroscience, social naturalism, epidemiology of representations, behavioral genetics), this paper deals with the kind of dialogue existing nowadays between these two fields of knowledge. It then addresses two questions that seem to sum up the main problems : the issue of causality in the two approaches and the issue of the relationship between biological factors and social “context”. Finally, it shows that the discussion must not be limited to epistemological debates but must tackle all the dimensions of bio-naturalism, whether theoretical or applied.