Recherches en cours
– Comparer les classes populaires en France et au Portugal (depuis 2016)
Recherche individuelle sur les trajectoires de migrantes portugaises installées en France et sur leurs relations aux institutions publiques.
Recherche collective sur les classes sociales en France et au Portugal au CRESPPA-CSU en collaboration avec une équipe de l’Institut de Sociologie de l’Université de Porto (coordonnée par Virgílio Borges Pereira) dans le cadre d’un programme PICS du CNRS (2018-2021).
I have been teaching sociology in the Sociology Department of Paris 8 University since 2012. I teach at BA and MA levels. My research focuses on lower-income class mutations in present-time France and on political awareness in these circles. I have conducted many individual or group surveys which enabled me to tackle these issues from different angles, at the crossroads of the sociology of social classes, political sociology, urban sociology and the sociology of work.
Mainly based on ethnographic fieldwork, but also on archive and statistical data analysis, these surveys were first focused on the relationships between lower-income households living in the Paris suburbs and public and social services. I analyzed the ambivalent relationships between lower-income families and the “administration”, and how they “cope” and manage in their relations to the institutions. I also highlighted how players and users have been unsettled by the new ways in which work and management were reorganized in social services. Then I worked with Marie Cartier, Isabelle Coutant and Olivier Masclet on social and residential trajectories in a detached housing area located close to housing estates.
Over the generations, from the 1960s to the 2000s, these households have followed trajectories and occupied positions that were somewhere in between the low- and middle-income classes – seeing themselves as belonging to the “lower middle class” – a status that the traditional sociology of social classes finds difficult to analyze. This research concentrates on forms of intense sociability and on the involvement of some of the inhabitants in local political life, but also on the tensions related to the settling of immigrants or of their children. More recently, my work has focused on the training of trade-unionists (in collaboration with Nathalie Ethuin), centering on their training framework, with its contents and the way they are appropriated, as well as on the unionization of workers and public service employees, via the study of low-skilled staff in the technical services of hospitals.
