Books & ideas

The Other Side of Model Minorities

Margot Delon — 2024-03-21T07:37:00Z

While Chinese immigrants and their descendants have long been portrayed as a “model minority”, Ya-Han Chuang shows how this qualifier papers over the representations that are imposed on members of this minority in France – who are now fighting back against racism.

Cow Terrorism

Mathieu Ferry — 2018-03-26T07:00:00Z

The sacredness of the cow and the religious proscription against the consumption of beef were invented as late as the medieval period, and have since represented powerful unifying forces among the Hindu community. Today, the wave of lynchings the country has experienced shows how these notions continue to be instrumentalized by the nationalist extreme right.

Pan-ethnicity and Latino Communities in the U.S.

Marie L. Mallet — 2014-10-20T08:00:00Z

Addressing the fragility of Latino pan-ethnicity in the U.S., Marie L. Mallet presents an overview of the social interactions between Latino communities in Los Angeles, Boston and Miami, showing how these differential interactions impact on the identity formation and subsequent assimilation of Latino immigrants.

Jews and Muslims in France: the History of a Relation

Jean-Philippe Dedieu — 2014-09-18T08:00:00Z

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

Muslims on the Decline?

Nida Kirmani — 2013-04-16T07:00:00Z

The increasing marginalisation and ghettoisation of Indian Muslims is a hotly debated but poorly understood subject. Gayer and Jaffrelot's edited collection presents rich empirical evidence from Muslim localities in eleven Indian cities, providing key insights into the complex nature of this supposed decline.

Claiming Indigenousness in India

Raphael Rousseleau — 2013-02-07T08:00:00Z

India has created a National Commission for the Scheduled Tribes, the name given to its indigenous populations. Have the Adivasi, the other name for the Scheduled Tribes, really benefited from the Commission's policies? There, as in many other issues in India, the problem lies in local politics.

Hopeful Sociology

Stéphane Tonnelat — 2011-12-06T10:50:31Z

An ethnography of Philadelphia takes up a problem rarely addressed by the social sciences: how to account for events that do not take place? In his latest opus, sociologist Elijah Anderson examines the absence of discrimination in a city market and looks at the conditions of possibility of cosmopolitanism.

The Making of an American Aristocracy

Pauline Peretz — 2011-05-04T08:04:01Z

How can the United States sustain the paradox of being a nation founded on freedom and equality while tolerating such levels of inequalities that many diagnose a return to the Gilded Age? For Shamus Khan, the answer lies in the social openness of some key American institutions: under the lure of diversity, they make the economic power of an elite whose privilege is based on merit rather than birth acceptable.

Is representative democracy really democratic ?

Hélène Landemore — 2008-03-31T08:53:07Z

Hélène Landemore : Bernard Manin and Nadia Urbinati, you both have written books with apparently similar titles, respectively The principles of representative government (1997) and Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (2006). I would like to organize the discussion around the question of whether representative democracy is an contradiction in terms or the true essence of democracy. I will break down the theme into more manageable questions.