| 1 | Name: | Dr. Didier Fassin | |
| Institution: | Institute for Advanced Study; École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales | ||
| Year Elected: | 2022 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1955 | ||
Didier Fassin is a French anthropologist and sociologist. He is James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études in Paris. He has recently been elected at the Collège de France to a permanent Chair named “Moral Questions and Political Issues in Contemporary Societies”. Initially trained as a physician in Paris, he practiced internal medicine as an infectious disease specialist at the Hospital Pitié-Salpétrière and taught public health at the University Pierre et Marie Curie. He also worked as a medical doctor in India and Tunisia. Later shifting to social science, he received his M.A. in anthropology from La Sorbonne, and his PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, writing his thesis on power relations and health inequalities in Senegal. After having been granted a fellowship by the French Institute for Andean Studies to investigate maternal mortality and living conditions among Indian women in Ecuador, he became assistant professor of sociology in 1991 at the University of Paris North. There, he created CRESP, the Center for Research on Social and Health Issues, working on several public health problems such as the history of child lead poisoning in France and the politics of AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa. Appointed as Professor of sociology at the University of Paris North in 1997, he was elected two years later as Director of studies in anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. In 2007, he founded IRIS, the Interdisciplinary Research Institute for Social Sciences, in an effort to bring together anthropologists, sociologists, historians, political scientists and legal scholars around contemporary political and social issues. He himself developed a long-term program exploring the multiple facets of humanitarianism in local and international policies, especially towards the poor, immigrant and refugees, as well as victims of violence and epidemics. In parallel, he launched a research project on borders and boundaries in an attempt to articulate the issues around immigration and racialization. In 2008, he received an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council for his program Towards a Critical Moral Anthropology, which he developed with a team of twelve anthropologists and sociologists. To reappraise theoretical issues in the analysis of morals and ethics, he himself conducted ethnographic research on police, justice and prison in France. In 2009, he succeeded Clifford Geertz at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, and became the first James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science. His inaugural public lecture was entitled “Critique of Humanitarian Reason”. In 2010, he became Visiting Professor at the Universities of Princeton and Hong Kong. A year later, he created a Summer Program in Social Science for earlier-career scholars from Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, on the basis of two-year sessions, the first one in Princeton, the second one in the Global South. In France, he has been involved in the politics of science, as a member of the Scientific Council of INSERM, the National Institute for Health and Medical Research, of the Ethics Committee of INRA, the National Institute for Agronomic Research, and of the Scientific Council of the City of Paris. In 2006, he became the chair of the Committee for Humanities and Social Science in the French National Agency for Research. In the United States, as a member of the Committee of World Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association appointed in 2010, he was committed to the global circulation of knowledge and the reduction of the gap between the North and the South in the development of social science. And as a guest advisor of the New Jersey Criminal Sentencing and Disposition Commission, he has contributed since 2018 to the reform of the state penal and penitentiary system. His research on punishment was the matter of his Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of California, Berkeley, and his reflection on life was the topic of his Adorno Lectures, at the Goethe University of Frankfurt. He also gave the inaugural Lemkin Lecture at Rutgers University on resentment and ressentiment, the Tumin Lecture at Princeton University on the life of things, the Eric Wolf Lecture at the University of Vienna on conspiracy theories, and the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia on crisis. He developed a theoretical analysis of the public presence of the social sciences, which he presented in his recipient lecture for the Gold Medal in anthropology at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The Nomis Distinguished Scientist Award he has been granted has allowed him to conduct a multi-sited research exploring the ubiquitous notion of crisis and its multiple meanings from a global perspective. Appointed in 2019 at the Annual Chair in Public Health at the Collège de France he gave his inaugural lecture on the inequality of lives. In 2021, he was elected at the Academia Europaea and received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Liège. Apart from his academic career, he has participated in various solidarity non-governmental organizations in France, in particular as Administrator and later Vice-president of MSF, Doctors Without Borders, from 1999 to 2003, and as President of COMEDE, the Medical Committee for the Exiles since 2006. Following the publication of his book on urban policing, he was requested to testify as amicus curiae in the first French lawsuit against racial discrimination in law enforcement. He is a frequent contributor to various media, in France to national radio programs, newspapers and magazines, such as France Culture, Le Monde, Libération and Alternatives économiques, and occasionally writes for the New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, among others. His publications include: as editor, Contemporary States of Emergency. The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions (with Mariella Pandolfi, Zone Books, 2010), Moral Anthropology. A Companion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), Moral Anthropology; A Critical Reader (Routledge, 2014), Writing the World of Policing. The Difference Ethnography Makes (The University of Chicago Press, 2017), If Truth Be Told. The Politics of Public Ethnography (Duke University Press, 2017), A Time for Critique (with Bernard Harcourt, Columbia University Press, 2018), Deepening Divides. How Physical Borders and Social Boundaries Delineates our World (Pluto Press, 2020), Words and Worlds. A Lexicon for Dark Times (with Veena Das, Duke University Press, 2021), Pandemic Exposures. Economy and Society in the Time of Coronavirus (with Marion Fourcade, Hau Books, 2021), Crisis Under Critique. How People Assess, Transform and Respond to Critical Situations (with Axel Honneth, Columbia University Press, 2022), and La Société qui vient (Seuil, 2022); as author, When Bodies Remember. Politics and Experience of AIDS in South Africa (University of California Press, 2007), The Empire of Trauma. An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (with Richard Rechtman, Princeton University Press, 2009), Humanitarian Reason. A Moral History of the Present (University of California Press, 2011), Enforcing Order. An Ethnography of Urban Policing (Polity, 2013), At the Heart of the State. The Moral World of Institutions (with Yasmine Bouagga et al., Pluto, 2015), Four Lectures on Ethics. Anthropological Perspectives (with Michael Lambek, Veena Das & Webb Keane, Hau Books, 2015), Prison Worlds. An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition (Polity, 2016), Life. A Critical User’s Manual (Polity, 2018), The Will to Punish (Oxford University Press, 2018), Policing the City. An Ethno-Graphic (with Frédéric Debomy and Jake Raynal, Other Press, 2021), Death of a Traveller. A Counter Investigation (Polity, 2021), Les Mondes de la santé publique. Excursions anthropologiques. Cours au Collège de France (Seuil, 2021). His books have been translated into eight languages. | |||