Active in the fight against poverty since the 1950s, the ATD Fourth World movement has successfully combined grassroots action, research and advocacy, exerting a lasting influence on social policies in France and internationally.
Under the Ancien Régime, salaries were not enough to live on. Many people had to combine activities to make ends meet. Laurence Fontaine paints a vivid picture of this reality.
Care, which refers both to a kind of work and a social relationship, covers a wide range of realities and often precarious activities. Helena Hirata subjects this polysemic term to piercing and uncompromising sociological scrutiny.
Can a mushroom help us understand the changes and deadlocks of capitalism? Studying matsutake foraging and commerce, anthropologist Anna Tsing describes a world that has turned its back on progress and where survival depends upon fragile collaborations between humans and the world surrounding them.
While sociological and philosophical studies of social suffering are proliferating, the psychiatrist Jean Furtos casts a clinical eye on the relations between mental health and precariousness. He presents the syndrome of self-exclusion as a pathology of precariousness, consisting of a radical reduction in psychic functioning. This lesson is not limited to psychiatry or to the study of insecurity.
