While mental health is usually assessed using objective health indicators, these measurements fail to address the intricate impact of persistent violence on Palestinians’ lives.
The digital world is the product of mutual transactions between technologies and humans. It produces innovations and knowledge gains that empower citizens and their ability to contribute to a more egalitarian science.
The digital world is the result of the accumulation of centuries of scientific and organizational progress. Virtuality is further enabled by the materiality of computers, objects that are themselves the product of economic exchanges and labor.
Technological change has outstripped existing law, creating a governance vacuum. The pressing need towards a renewal of regulations will likely lead to closed autonomous systems and further increase the fragmentation of the world order.
Digital products are changing how we live. Growing up in a hyper-connected world, the new “Generation Z” has developed different behaviors, attitudes, and values.
According to Isabelle Thireau, there is a political realm in authoritarian regimes, where citizens voice their expectations and evaluate the legitimacy of decisions, public policies and leaders, thus contributing to the assessment of what is acceptable and what is good government.
For the first time, the Pléiade collection is publishing the work of a contemporary historian. This event celebrates the centennial of the birth of this great mediaevalist, a historian of mentalities who found a way to make historical knowledge accessible to a wider audience. Felipe Brandi, an expert on Duby, edited and annotated the book.
Over the past twenty years, a new field of study has developed: metal studies. The scholars in this field are often also music enthusiasts, investigating their own passion. How can fandom be articulated with academia?
As Brexit looms, some predict that protectionism will once again haunt Britain. In this context, historian David Todd reassesses the significance of an ideology which has profoundly impacted British history from the Empire up to the present day, thus reflecting on the deep bonds between politics, economy and national identity.
Flames, disbelief, dread. A cathedral burns and tears flow. But why does our architectural heritage and its disappearance move us so greatly? The sociologist Nathalie Heinich offers some answers.
By insisting on the need to consider philosophical works as interventions in the general, ongoing political debates of their time, Quentin Skinner has profoundly renewed the history of ideas. In this interview, he revisits the main themes of his work.
How do refugees experience everyday life in the United States? Anthropologist Catherine Besteman investigates the trajectories of Somalian refugees in Lewinston, Maine, from their application for resettlement to their struggles in a world that disrupts their social organization and their way of living.
In the 80’s, a peculiar genre of underground music emerged: Japanoise—or Japanese Noise. Based on feedback, without melody nor structure, this genre is often perceived as the end of music. Drawing on the tools of media anthropology, David Novak traces the history of the construction of this genre.
The second part of the interview with Michael Doyle is devoted to foreign armed intervention, which is particularly controversial in the Syrian context, and the doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect”, that was implemented for the first time in Libya in 2011 under the supervision of the United Nations.
Should democratic states go to war? The first part of this interview with Michael Doyle is devoted to the definition of different intellectual traditions of liberalism, in particular Kant and Mill, in an attempt to examine the necessary conditions of democratic peace.
Two hundred years after Karl Marx’s birth, Gregory Claeys takes a new look at the thinker’s intellectual formation, wide-ranging posterity and continued relevance in the 21st century.
Media, publishing, photography, theatre and political discourse are now shifting their attention to the lives of ordinary people. Does this move serve the need to better understand contemporary society? Sylvain Bourmeau, an actor and observer of these changes, offers some explanations.
At a time when the refugee issue is highly topical, a collection of essays offers a history of asylum administration and its actors and practices. A first step towards a European history of asylum in the twentieth century.
First evoked in the 1970s, the idea of a European unemployment benefit scheme has recently become a topics of debate among academics and policy-makers, as it could constitute a way to deal with the macroeconomic imbalances within the EU and the Eurozone. In this interview, Sebastian Dullien presents how such a scheme could work, its potential economic consequences - and whether it would be politically realistic.
Manuel Gárate looks back at the economic revolution that has taken place in Chile since 1975, at huge social and political costs. A much-needed perspective in a context where the United States, Pinochet’s former protector, is turning towards populism and protectionism.
The state of exception has a long history in France. Intended as a measure for dealing with crises of any sort, it is now used as a response to terrorism. According to legal expert François Saint-Bonnet, however, there is no evidence that it is the right solution to the kind of terrorism that strikes today.
According to journalist and critic Jeff Chang, Trump’s appeal partially lays in culture war politics dating back to the 1990s, when the ideas of multiculturalism and post-racialism clashed intensively. It now remains to be seen whether justice movements activated on the ground can come together to resist the new president’s policies.
The president of the Brazilian Political Science Association, an expert of democratic innovations, discusses how Brazilian political scientists are taking stock of the Workers Party president’s curtailed electoral mandate in favor of Michel Temer and how it impacts their research orientation.
Described as “the admirable conjunction of a man, of an action, and of a work” by Jean-Paul Sartre, Camus embodies the very French figure of the “intellectuel engagé,” or public intellectual. The interest he still arouses in the United States reveals how much his work has been the object of enduring fascination for the American readership.
In a lively interview, cyberfeminist Angela Washko explains how “digi-feminism” is currently challenging cybersexism and existing conditions of the web; she discusses her past and current video projects and how to fight harassment against cyberactivist on the web. And if you ask her what the political aspect of her work is, she will say “all of it is political”.
Michel Brunet, a paleontologist and paleoanthropologist at the Collège de France and the discoverer of the oldest pre-human remains yet to be found, describes to Books & Ideas the obsessive quest for the human family’s ancestors and the circumstances in which his field, situated at the crossroads between the natural and human sciences, is practiced.
By tracing the history of surveillance in Europe and the Soviet bloc, the historian Sophie Cœuré explains the differences between democracies and dictatorships in this area. She also urges us to put things in perspective: We do not (yet) live in a “surveillance society.”
Can fresh air come from young democracies like Taiwan and civic-minded hacktivists like Audrey Tang? This interview shows that both help renew democratic practices in providing sophisticated collaborative, participatory and deliberative tools.
Thirty years ago, Pierre Bourdieu’s La Distinction laid the groundwork for a reintegration of cultural factors into our thinking about capital. Is this argument still valid today? Philippe Coulangeon talks about the metamorphoses of distinction in a world defined by inequalities in wealth and by the mutations of cultural legitimacy.
According to Australian specialist of social classes David S.G. Goodman, China is still far from a capitalist country. In this interview, he maps out the connections between the Chinese middle classes, the upper class and the Communist Party and their political implications.
Putin is anti-modern, conservative and expansionist. He is convinced that the Western world in general and Europe in particular are decadent, and advocates a “Russian way”, which he views as an alternative political and social model. Michel Eltchaninoff has analysed this doctrine for us.
Are alternative food movements the panacea for obesity, food-induced health problems and, simply, bad food? One doesn’t need to be a reactionary to see the limits of the proposal, but we still have a hard time relinquishing that belief. Julie Guthman, whose work almost single-handedly launched scientific inquiry into those questions, helps us understand why.
In this new interview, Fred Turner addresses the historical links between American democratic propaganda in the Cold War era, the counterculture movement and the rise of the computer. In doing so, he provides an enlightening outlook on the history of mass media and its relevance in the digital age
How is history relevant to current debates about race, economic inequality or the national narrative? A renowned historian of urban crises and segregation, Thomas Sugrue proposes an answer that emphasizes both the value of passion and that of careful scholarship. Historians can and should engage in public debate, but on their own terms.
Instead of examining minorities in a vacuum, historians should not overlook the relations that these groups build with one another, whether conflictual or not. This is the core of Maud Mandel’s research, which focuses on Jews and Muslims in contemporary France, against the backdrop of WWII, the Algerian War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Jocelyne Dakhlia has addressed clichés about oriental despotism and Islam’s incompatibility with democracy through an historical examination of the form and logic of power in Muslim societies. Her prolific oeuvre, which spans Islamic history from the sultanate courts of the Middle Ages to contemporary Tunisia, redefines the boundaries of the Mediterranean and challenges us to think of European history in different terms.
Bodies that are excluded, ill, damaged: this is often the first glimpse that a historian gets of men and women in the past. Philippe Artières talks about the physical and emotional experience that this creates: “Their history flows through my body.” The writing of history is influenced by other people’s suffering, but also by our own.
Looking back on several decades of intellectual activity, American sociologist Jack Katz explains his vision of a three-dimensional ethnography, combining human interactions, biographical experiences, and historical processes.
Published in 2010, Timothy Snyder’s book Bloodlands is a magisterial rereading of the history of mass murder in Eastern Europe between 1933 and 1945, which has excited interest and controversy in Europe. In this interview, T. Snyder highlights the necessity to go beyond national boundaries in order to achieve “a decent and true understanding of the past”.
Creating connections has been the aim of Jean Starobinski’s work for more than half a century. His body of work is large and shifting, created in response to life, lying somewhere between the critical and the clinical. Books & Ideas met this citizen of the world at his house in Geneva, following the recent publication of three important books.
