This article is a slightly edited excerpt of the lecture given
on the occasion of the awarding of the Edgar di Picciotto
International Prize of the Graduate Institute of Geneva to Joan
Wallach Scott, Professor Emerita in the School of Social
Science...
"Life is a term, none more familiar. And one almost would take
it for an affront, to be asked what he meant by it," writes John
Locke. But he immediately adds: "And yet, if it comes in question,
whether a plant, that lies ready formed in the seed...
We can respect the right of free speech without having to
respect the ideas being uttered. Critical thinking is precisely not
a program of neutrality, not tolerance of all opinion, not an
endorsement of the idea that anything goes. It is about how...
Didier Fassin, James D.
Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science, has authored
Ragione umanitaria. Una storia morale del presente
(DeriveApprodi, 2018), an analysis of the premises, tensions, and
contradictions of the humanitarian...
In Por una repolitización del mundo. Las vidas descartables
como desafío del siglo xxi (Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2018),
Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn
Professor in the School of Social Science, examines who today has
the right to a decent...
Recently, societies have become more repressive, their laws more
relentless, their magistrates more inflexible, independently of the
evolution of crime. In this book, using genealogical and
ethnographic approaches, anthropologist Didier Fassin...
Why should we write the history and sociology of the social
sciences? Some have suggested that putting science under the
sociological microscope is self-indulgent and dangerously
relativist. Others murmur that only those who can’t do science
study...
On April 6, 1960, Institute for Advanced Study Director Robert
Oppenheimer received a letter from psychologist John E. Drevdahl,
requesting his support in setting up a study among IAS Members to
assess the factors that made them creative. Thus far...
Didier Fassin, James D.
Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science, has authored
Life: A Critical User’s Manual (Polity Press, 2018), which asks
"How can we think of life in its dual expression—matter and
experience, the living and the...
