Didier Fassin is the James D. Wolfensohn Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton since 2009. Prior to this appointment, he was professor at the University of Paris North and director of studies at the EHESS, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. At the CNRS, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, he created the Interdisciplinary Research Institute in Social Sciences (IRIS), of which he was the Director. He is an anthropologist, a sociologist and a physician. At the crossroads between disciplines, he has worked in the field of medical anthropology, conducting fieldwork in Senegal, Ecuador, and South Africa with a focus on issues of power and inequalities as well as on the production and construction of health problems. In recent years he has turned to the question of moral economies in contemporary societies, that is to say to the production, circulation and appropriation of values and affects in social contexts, conducting research on humanitarianism in various parts of the world. His most recent work examines the moral and ethical issues public institutions such as police, justice and prison face when they deal with marginalized “publics.”
He is the author of numerous books, many of which have been translated into English including De la question sociale à la question raciale? Représenter la société française (with Éric Fassin), Paris: La Découverte, 2006; The Empire of Trauma. Inquiry into the Condition of Victim, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009; Humanitarian Reason. A Moral History of the Present, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011; Enforcing Order. An Ethnography of Urban Policing, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013; At the Heart of the State. The Moral World of Institutions, London: Pluto: 2015. Most recently he edited Moral Anthropology. A Companion Volume, Malden: Blackwell, 2012, and Moral Anthropology. A Critical Reader, London: Routledge, 2014. L’Ombre du monde. Une anthropologie de la condition carcérale, Paris: Seuil, 2015 (forthcoming as Prison Worlds. An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition, Cambridge: Polity Press), is the result of a four year study in a French prison. It follows inmates from their trial to their release and analyzes the carceral condition, from the banalization of imprisonment and the reinforcement of social and racial inequalities to the micro-resistances, compromises and accommodations which accompany them.