The field of cultural outings represents an area of practice that has been constantly expanding since the 1970s. Some outings, such as going to the cinema, are very common, while others, such as going to the opera or to a rap concert, are more circumscribed and differentiated. Based on quantitative data from the 2018 Cultural Practices in France survey and on a qualitative interview survey conducted in 2021-2022, this article explores the cultural and sociological structuring of cultural outings using multivariate analysis, and it seeks to analyse the motivations for cultural outings by using three concepts: ‘competence’, ‘concernedness’ and ‘attachment’.
This article explores how political invisibilization of foreigners coexists with stereotypical hypervisibility, and sets out to theorize, with the help of Judith Butler’s philosophy, how the “national” acts as a normative framework articulated to ethno-racial schemes, which organizes the interpretation and evaluation of the perceived and differentially affects non-nationals. How does nationality enter the visible, the sensible, and function with other markings of difference? I review different conceptualizations of nationality as a form of visibility, including a discussion of the notion of « gaze » in visual and literary studies. Proposing to think of the national as a perspective that articulates heterogeneous categories of perception and promotes a privileged subjectivity, I use Butler’s theorization of the « frame of intelligibility ». The aim is to show how the national perspective, combined with processes of racialization, creates categories of invisible and ungrievable subjects, reinforcing the national symbolic order to the detriment of non-nationals. More generally, the article proposes a shift from a paradigm of social invisibility to one of differential affectivity.
Starting from the forms of invisibilization of people perceived as black in the narratives of Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, this article proposes to reflect on the link between invisibility, overvisibility and social recognition. This allows us to introduce the link between social invisibility and epistemic invisibilization in the face of the proposal of a critical and decolonial phenomenology reconfiguring the political field of the sensible traversed by the affect of anger. This tragic “game” between ontological survisibility and social invisibility contains a sharing of the sensible that characterizes a global political history of race and racism. It involves processes of epistemic invisibilization, i.e. the erasure of existences, through their productions, traces and memories, or their occultation as actors in contexts where their roles have been socially, politically and historically decisive – resistance, independence, emancipation. This work contributes to questioning the production of philosophical knowledge and its responsibility for the link between epistemic invisibility and social invisibility, regarding the disappearance of black bodies from spaces of power and knowledge, relegating them to its margins in a “zone of non-being”, according to Fanon’s expression, and without a history of their own. This article defends the idea that there can be no analysis of a condition of existence without linking it to the political conditions of production of this knowledge.
This article describes the construction of a media figure of the “ill migrant” by activists fighting for the right to stay in France for medical reasons. It is shown that this figure is created from compassionate and victimized representations inherited from post-colonial imaginaries. In a context of repressive migration policies and media saturation of the image of the “migrant”, I argue that the political strategy of seeking visibility no longer works. If many social movements are problematized as fighting against the social and political invisibilization that affects minority groups, the aim is to question the political effects of negative, stigmatizing visibility.
At a time when urban policies are calling for ever greater involvement and participation on the part of local residents, we took an interest in voluntary care work carried out by women in community centers in French-speaking Switzerland – an activity that has historically been invisible, for a number of reasons. Putting care into an ethical perspective makes it possible to rethink participatory models, and to take a close look at the transition between taking care of someone close to you and forms of commitment in public. This approach opens up an interesting avenue of intervention, based on what the women with whom we have worked collectively in a socio-cultural center are and are doing, in order to promote and strengthen the processes of participation in public life, but this time ‘from below’, i.e. by the women themselves.
Essential child-awakening practices are a tool for socializing children. They give rise to a social economy of (non-)verbalisation and meaning, which largely infuses the construction of the child as a social being within the community. Reverberating through the complex tool of storytelling, three early-learning practices recommended by public health and used by schools – speaking, mimicry and nursery rhymes – are embedded into the heart of symbolic issues and struggles, making the socialisation of children an arena in which new Protestantisms take the floor in an attempt to overturn ancestral traditions. Based on a field survey conducted in agrarian Aizo and lake Tofin communities in Southern Benin, using the Rapid Collective Identification Survey of Strategic Groups (ECRIS) method, this paper draws a micro sociology of awakening practices in child socialization. The paper shows how the collusion of public health, school education and religious reform discourse disrupts the traditional social order around speech as a stake in children’s socialization. It argues that the economy of child-awakening practices sheds light on a social arena of (non-)verbalization and signification, in which actors struggles around symbolic stakes is part of a confrontation between the categories of the modern and the traditional.
While the notion of social invisibility has been the focus of significant and relatively numerous works in the field of philosophy and the social sciences, the concept of social inaudibility, although very similar, has not received similar attention. Starting from this observation, the article aims to question the relationship between the two concepts and the corresponding phenomena, and defends the need for their articulation, against a purely analogical approach. The article then focuses on Axel Honneth’s thinking, highlighting the centrality of the question of social inaudibility in his work. Ultimately, the aim is to understand how the analysis of inaudibility can shed light on the phenomenon of social invisibility.
José Medina est professeur de philosophie à l’université Northwestern à Chicago aux États-Unis d’Amérique. Il est spécialiste de théorie critique de la race et du genre, d’épistémologie sociale et de philosophie des mouvements sociaux. Il s’intéresse en particulier aux enjeux épistémiques des mouvements démocratiques, queer et anti-racistes. Ses travaux portent sur le rôle de la perception et de l’imagination sociales dans le fonctionnement de l’oppression, ainsi que sur les formes d’« activisme épistémique » qui permettent de résister aux violences sexistes et racistes. Il a notamment publié The Epistemology of Resistance : Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations en 2013 et The Epistemology of Protest : Silencing, Epistemic Activism, and the Communicative Life of Resistance en 2023.
The concept of the social off-screen captures the institutional, spatial, sensory, and epistemic dimensions of social invisibility, focusing on its impact on Bangladeshi nationals in precarious residency situations in Île-de-France. Grounded in Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of social space and the conceptualization of public space as a stage for social visibility, this study explores how institutional processes of precarious residency give rise to practices and strategies of invisibilization, alongside concealed movements, and spaces shielded from public scrutiny. These dynamics are further exacerbated by socialized perceptions that reinforce both social and spatial invisibility. In particular, public attention in Île-de-France is shaped by social class and racial hierarchies embedded within a postcolonial context.
This article looks at the place of the dōjō in the lives of martial artists who pratice iaidō, a Japanese martial art that involves fighting with a sword. It examines the quasi-sacred or at least fundamental importance that this place has for them, compared with other places in their daily lives. The « heterotopia », a conceptual tool proposed by Foucault in 1967, serves as the background to this investigation: does the dōjō have characteristics that would allow it to be regarded as an heterotopia? The article distinguishes between two ways of looking at this place, depending on the emotional, symbolic and intellectual commitment of martial artists to their martial activity. The starting point and aim of this article is to consider our general tendency to categorise space from a particular place.
The concept of invisibility is now commonly used to denote some forms of social ignorance. It is generally understood in a metaphorical sense, and some other metaphors (such as silencing and inaudibility) are sometimes considered less problematic than this visual metaphor of social ignorance. More generally, one can wonder whether metaphors of social ignorance shouldn’t be replaced by non-metaphorical conceptions. This article claims that a non-metaphorical concept of invisibility is required if one wants to account for a particular experience of denial of recognition, that of being relegated to the wrong side of the boundary between the visible and the invisible. The first section describes the variety of visual metaphors of social ignorance, from Marx to the contemporary sociology of work. The second section highlights the limits of purely metaphorical conceptions of social invisibility. The third section offers a typology of social invisibility understood in a non-metaphorical sense. The fourth section analyzes the different forms of invisibility at work.
This paper examines how different institutions (medicine, family, state) govern the bodies of children with variations in sex development. In the continuity of the work on governmentality and the government of bodies, sexualized bodies are apprehended as a site of the exercise of power through the regulation, surveillance and control to which they are subjected. Issues of consent and individualized self-constraint that have become central to the practice of governing bodies are absent from contemporary modes of governing variations in children’s sex development. The article shows how medicine exerts a strong external constraint on the bodies of children with variations in sex development, and how parents occupy an intermediary place at once dominated by the medical institution but dominant vis-à-vis their child whom they represent and in whose place they decide.
Since 2000, and particularly 2010 in France, successive governments have chosen to respond to terrorist attacks with institutional reforms. The fight against terrorism mobilises the judicial, police and political spheres, which constitute as many ‘linked ecologies’ (Abbott, 1988) and ‘jurisdictions’, whose relationships can take the form of rivalry, competition or complementarity. In order to study the recent evolution of these interactions, we conducted an sociological survey and met 95 actors involved in this struggle. The ‘linked ecologies’ model provides a way of observing changes in the social world and the reasons for the dynamism of certain social environments. Analysis of the interactions between the spheres of the State in the fight against terrorism [FAT] is useful for gaining a detailed understanding of the changes in the neo-liberal State in France and, at the same time, for developing a sociology of the State. Backed by empirical research, it shows the recent pre-eminence, on the judicial side, of the public prosecutor’s office and, on the police side, of intelligence services, but also of the administrative police. This dual movement has been driven, in remarkable political cycles, by a politicisation of the FAT and an executive that has chosen, since 2012, to place itself at the centre of counter-terrorism.
This article examines the genesis of Nicos Poulantzas’s book Political Power and Social Classes, a manuscript that was extensively studied and criticised by Louis Althusser, and transformed by the exchange between the two, particularly around the concepts of hegemony and civil society. This correspondence is that of a master and his pupil, a teacher’s lesson and a human drama. While Poulantzas transfigures his text and seems to have converted to the intransigence of the master, he retains his original finesse and doubts, derived from the Gramscian matrix. Over time, he becomes disenchanted with his master, and the pupil seems to become master of himself once again, as a young Greek, a foreigner, a European, faced with the French magisterium, as a thinker in the making, an iconoclast faced with the force of the French, if not Parisian, habitus.
This paper proposes to mobilize one of the major contributions of Nicos Poulantzas’ Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, namely the concept of the “internal bourgeoisie” in order to highlight the structural basis of the increasingly conflictual relations between the US, China and Russia. By applying the Poulantzasian political-economic reading of international capital flows to study a set of statistical data on foreign direct investment, this paper shows that globalization remains a fragmented and conflict-prone process. As long as the multiplication of commercial and financial links is not accompanied by the formation of a globally integrated bourgeoisie, the interdependence between different countries remains fragile. The core argument of this paper is that the absence of an internal bourgeoisie favorable to American capital in both Russia and China facilitates the tightening of world politics. Thus, Poulantzas’ international political economy provides a structural explanatory tool for understanding the extent to which the political tensions, which are currently shaking the world, are associated with the process of capital accumulation.
