30th International Conference of Europeanists
Keynotes
Wednesday, July 3 | 6:00-7:30 PM
“Out of Sight, Out of Mind. How Europe Obscures Border Violence”
Speaker: Professor Didier Fassin, Collège de France
Chair: Montserrat Emperador Badimon, Université Lumière Lyon 2
Over the past decade, in a context of growing obsessiveness about migration and denial of asylum, the European Union and European countries have developed policies externalizing the control of its borders on the other side of the Mediterranean and even deep within the African continent. The lecture is based on a five-year ethnographic research in the Briançonnais and the Val di Susa, including interviews of ninety exiles coming from Africa and the Middle East. This border between Italy and France, in the Alps, will serve as both a scene, revealing how people face the police and the military trying to stop them and push them back, and a prism, illuminating how their journey are hindered by repressive policies delegated to Global South countries. Thus, Europe’s complicity in the violence perpetrated against those who flee persecution or poverty, causing the death of many of them, is rendered invisible.
Didier Fassin (speaker) is Professor at the Collège de France, where he holds the Chair Moral Questions and Political Issues in Contemporary Societies, and at the Institute for Advanced Study, in the School of Social Science. At the the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales where he is Director of Studies, he founded Iris, the Interdisciplinary Research Institute on Society. Anthropologist, sociologist and physician, he has conducted research in Senegal, Congo, South Africa, Ecuador, and France, focusing on moral and political issues. He gave the Roger Moore Lecture on resentment at Harvard, the Tanner Lectures at Berkeley on punishment, the Adorno Lectures in Frankfurt on life, and the Eric Wolf Lecture in Vienna on conspiracy theories. Recipient of the Gold Medal in anthropology at the Swedish Royal Academy of Science and of the Nomis Distinguished Scientist Award, he is a member of the American Philosophical Society. Former Vice-President of Doctors Without Borders, he is currently the President of the Comede, French Medical Committee for Exiles. He edited or coedited thirty collective volumes and authored twenty books, translated in eight languages, most recently The Will to Punish (Oxford University Press), Life. A Critical User’s Manual (Polity), Death of a Traveller. A Counter Investigation (Polity), Policing the City. An Ethno-Graphic (Other Press) and, with Anne-Claire Defossez L’Exil, toujours recommencé. Chronique de la frontière (Seuil).
Montserrat Emperador Badimon (chair) is Associate Professor (Maîtresse de conférences) of Political Sociology in the Department of Political Science at Université Lumière Lyon 2. She is currently
Marie Sklodowska Curie fellow and visiting scholar in the Centre Urbanisation Culture Société of INRS (Institut national de la recherche scientifique) in Montreal. Her research interests include housing policy-making and contentious collective action against evictions and displacement in Spain and Quebec.
Thursday, July 4th | 6:00-7:30 PM
“Thinking about alternative justice responses to sexual violence. The case of anti-authoritarian experimentations.”
Speaker: Emeline Fourment, University of Rouen Normandie
Chair: Isabelle Garcin-Marrou, Sciences Po Lyon
Since 2017 and the #MeToo movement, sexual violence has emerged as a prominent topic in the public discourse across numerous European countries. This has led to contentious debates between advocates for women who come forward with allegations and defenders of the accused men. In this climate, public authorities have often portrayed the criminal justice system as the sole arbiter of truth, with criminalization being presented as the primary tool in combating sexual violence. Yet, both within and beyond the feminist movement, there is a growing skepticism regarding the efficacy and relevance of relying on criminal justice. Questions arise: How can cases of sexual violence be proven? What could justice look like for victims? And what should society do with the accused individuals? Well before 2017, anti-authoritarian activists in Germany, Quebec, and France were facing these same questions. They have sought alternative practices to criminal justice, with varying degrees of success. This keynote seeks to analyze these experiments and their implications for addressing issues of justice concerning sexual violence.
Emeline Fourment (speaker) is an Associate Professor of political science at the University of Rouen Normandie. Her research interests include alternative practices to criminal justice, gender issues, and health movements. She is currently involved in a research project on restorative justice at Sciences Po Paris and another project on the West-German health movement at the University of Constance. Additionally, she co-coordinates the French-speaking research network on gender-based violence, VisaGe.
Her recent publications explore the complex relationship between feminists and physicians (Critique Internationale, 2023) and the transnational dissemination of knowledge on transformative justice within anti-authoritarian communities (in M. Di Donato, M. Fulla eds. Leftist Internationalisms, Bloomsbury, 2023). Presently, she is working on a book examining feminist justice practices against sexual violence within anti-authoritarian communities in Germany, France, and Québec/Canada.
Isabelle Garcin-Marrou (chair) is Full Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at Sciences Po Lyon, and a member of the ELICO research unit, which she directed from 2013 to 2023. She works mainly on media treatment of sensitive socio-political issues (terrorism, urban identities, gender) and on media representations (of women, of territories). She currently heads the EPIC doctoral school (Education, Psychology, Information-Communication), one of three doctoral schools in the human and social sciences at the University of Lyon – Saint-Etienne.
