Florence Gould Foundation

Minority sexualities give rise to much discourse, which is more widely ranging than it is broadly disseminated. As much as the question of their actual practice, these sexualities raise the issue of how to talk about them. Halfway between essay and fiction, Marco Vidal offers some potential avenues to explore.

The popular history of France told by Michelle Zancarini-Fournel is the history of often hidden individual figures and political struggles. By filling our “memory gaps,” Zancarini-Fournel also suggests another narrativity.

In order to fix a society, it is not necessary to wield the “civilising” stick of republicanism. The novels of George Sand, far from being mere rustic tales, propose a clandestine way of doing politics – a democratic project undertaken with no preaching or violence.

The omnipresence of the term ‘populism’ only serves to underline its semantic and ideological ambiguity. According to J.-W. Müller, populists claim that they and they alone represent the popular will and are both a reflection of political institutions in crisis and a threat to democracy.

Economic progress is behind us in the West, warns Robert J. Gordon in a 750 pages-tome which revisits the economic history of the U.S. in the last century and a half. Measuring the impact on living standards of the major technological breakthroughs of the “second industrial revolution,” he observes that sources of productivity growth seem to have dried since the 1970s oil shock and that the productivity-enhancing effects of the digital “revolution” have so far proved elusive.

Paleontologists distinguish five periods of mass disappearance of animal species. Are we now entering the sixth period—that of human extinction? Either way, the question brings us back to the fragility of our life conditions. So just a word to the wise!

From a “minor event”, the execution of two traitors from the Aosta Valley in 1943, Sergio Luzzatto offers us an extensive depiction of the history and memory of the Resistance against a backdrop of Jew hunts, denunciations, and civil war.

Was the “Terror” Robespierre’s fault? His name alone has symbolised revolutionary tragedies for two centuries now. Nonetheless, it is a whole different protagonist, once cautious, discreet and indecisive, that the historian, Jean-Clément Martin, invites us to rediscover.

By studying key concepts such as frontier, wilderness and rewilding in the United States, William Cronon shows that human history unfolds within a geographical framework, using natural resources that profoundly shape it. This serves as a reminder that ecology is a humanism.

The black ghetto has garnered much attention from researchers and American society alike. Revisiting the intellectual trajectory of many of its key thinkers, ethnographer Mitchell Duneier examines the consolidation of its progressive layers of meaning. An endeavour in intellectual, political, and social history.

Alongside the usual reductive condemnations, studies on pornography have increased in the academic world. Florian Vörös examines the field’s key texts, which reveal the diversity of productions and uses of pornography and analyse the emotional experiences pornography awakens as well as the hierarchies it shapes and recreates.

After the war on poverty, the United States declared a war on crime. This history of penal policy since 1960 looks at the intellectual and political roots of the punitive treatment often reserved for minorities.

What responses does racial stigma awaken in its victims? Researching in Brazil, the United States and Israel, a group of sociologists sheds new light on the experience of discrimination and collective sources of resilience.

Far from lessening inequality between social groups in France, the organisation of the healthcare system and the practices of healthcare professionals actually serve to increase disparity. The sociology of social relations shows that the health system is not used or organised in the same way depending on the social class to which patients belong.

Retracing the genealogy of the idea of human ‘races’, Claude-Olivier Doron returns to the role of the Enlightenment, and particularly Buffon, in the emergence of monogenistic racial thought. He examines how the idea of ‘race’ and the affirmation of universalism appeared concomitantly.

Do animals have a moral life in the same way as humans do? The philosopher Alice Crary argues that they are visible bearers of moral qualities, as literature suggests. But can values be the object of empirical observation?

Neither passante nor pedestrian, the flâneuse has been left out of history books. Yet, according to Lauren Elkin, flânerie is connected to emancipation, and to revolt. Is urban space then a feminist issue?

In a multidisciplinary book, Catherine Coquio shows that behind the contemporary cult for memory and truth lies a crisis that is preventing us from moving forward.

The Kamasutra, written in the third century, is not only an erotic work: it is also a treatise on the art of living for comfortable city-dwellers, whatever their caste or sexuality—and whether they are stallions, bulls, or hares, elephants, mares, or does.

At a time when the French government has reignited the debate over a universal minimum income, Philippe Askenazy reconsiders the question of wealth redistribution. He maintains that intervention must occur at a much earlier stage, not through taxation or generalized access to property, but by making base incomes equal through a revalorization of work.

Based on the example of Toronto, the sociologist Guillaume Ethier reflects on the cultural and urban effects involved in contemporary architectural realizations referred to as “iconic.” This architecture—a sort of sculpture on a grand scale—derives its aura from starchitects who conceive it and maintain a complex relationship with its urban environment.

The first two years of Bourdieu’s teaching at the Collège de France were less a general introduction to his concepts than a long immersion in his method, at the intersection of reflexivity, symbolics and structural analysis.

Augustus, the founder of the Roman Empire in 27 BC, was a thoroughly ambiguous man: At once a republican and an autocrat, a conqueror and a peacemaker, he was the inventor of a tradition who governed like a sphinx. A biography has just come out that emphasizes the topicality of his reign.

In contrast to general theories that claim to explain sports practices, a recent book sheds light on the forms of socialization and the institutions that make sports an eminently social phenomenon.

In the United States, tenant evictions have become a mass phenomenon. The sociologist Matthew Desmond traces the fate of eight Milwaukee families in the grips of an extraordinarily violent housing market. This outstanding study concludes with a new conceptualization of poverty.

In three essays previously unpublished in French, Max Scheler describes the ethical revolution brought about by the capitalist mentality. Since the 19^th century, consciousness has been shaped by the very idea of work, as embodied by the modern entrepreneur.

How should we analyse individual upward social mobility? How should we understand the move from one social class to another? Chantal Jaquet has created concepts that open up a new way for us to study the issue of social reproduction.

After the domination of French in the 18^th Century, English is now the new world language. As a sociologist, Pascale Casanova shows that using the world language gives authority to those who master it. But what other solution is there, given that a world language is necessary for universal communication?

In the sixteenth century, Europe and India began to trade. Their connected history assumes multiple forms, touching on topics as diverse as vegetable cultivation, the spice trade, literature, and architecture.

Starting from the experimentations of three European ensembles playing improvised music at the turn of the 1970s, Matthieu Saladin defines an aesthetics of free improvisation, whose genuine political dimension he brings to light.

A book on the writings of author and trumpet player Ralph Ellison about jazz music offers an extensive and thought-provoking reflection on Ellison’s theory of the condition of African Americans.

The history of the vote reveals that election was not born with modern representative government, but that elections were held in the Middle Ages. It also reveals that designation by election is not the end of history in our democracies but that other methods may be considered.

By situating the birth of France’s national colors at the point where a prince meets a pig, Michel Pastoureau manages to reconcile cultural history and narrative history. As with any genealogical study, his hypothesis should be considered with a degree of caution.

What are the effects of same-sex parenting on the kinship system of Western societies? A collection of international papers edited by two anthropologists of kinship lead them to reject the thesis of an anthropological break or the claim that the current kinship system has been disrupted. Instead, they emphasize the centrality of multiple parenting.

Let’s not tiptoe around it: this essay on excrement—a crucial agricultural, urban, and ecological issue—is fascinating. After all, it’s a hot topic: what are we going to do with all this shit? It leads us, moreover, to an important scientific and democratic debate.

In Christophe Guilluy’s view, there are two Frances: the urban France of towns and cities, where opportunities are considerable, and the peripheral France of villages, where populations feel ignored and abandoned by public policy. This contrast has caused a lot of ink to flow but is highly debatable and no doubt more ideological than scientific.

In recent years there has been an increase in the number of studies by jurists, anthropologists and sociologists on the resurgence of the biological concept of race in medical research, the medico-legal field and genealogy. They have shown how DNA data that is seemingly of the utmost neutrality and technicality is in fact bringing into play a whole set of sociopolitical and economic values, choices and relationships.

The translation into French of Nicholas Evans’ book Dying Words. Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us is a timely reminder for Francophone readers of the magnitude and, particularly, the severity of a phenomenon on which very little has been written in the French language and of which there is still far too little awareness: the mass extinction of languages currently underway.

At a time when “Disability Studies”—a multidisciplinary approach to physical incapacities that blends scholarship and activism—were first establishing themselves, Robert Bogdan protested the reduction of individuals to purely medical definitions. The translation of his book may contribute to overcoming this position, which remains dominant in France.

During the Belle Époque, the women who took on “men’s work” – doctors, journalists, and lawyers, but also coach drivers and postal workers – met with incredulity, hilarity, and more generally hostility. Postcards began to spread as a medium during the rise of early feminism and offer a striking representation of these reactions.