Didier Fassin
Social sciences in times of crisis
Ecological, health, energy, economic, social, humanitarian, democratic: crises are an essential part of the contemporary world. While the social sciences can help to understand and resolve them, their role is also to question the language of crisis, to analyze the gap or convergence between reality and its representation : naming or silencing a crisis, exaggerating or minimizing it, are all processes that generate affects, temporalities and omissions with major consequences that critical thinking must decipher.
Drawing both on the life trajectories of famous figures in the human sciences and on research conducted on eloquent facts of the present, this opening lecture, which is addressed to every citizen, lays the groundwork for a vast ethical and political reflection, the necessity of which our times are constantly demonstrating.
Fassin D., Sciences sociales par temps de crise, Paris, Collège de France, coll. " Leçons inaugurales ",no 321, 2024.
