Anthropologist, sociologist, and physician Didier Fassin is a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is also a director of studies at the EHESS and was the first director of Iris, which he co-founded with Alban Bensa. His research focuses on the political and moral dimensions of contemporary societal transformations. His early work examined the production and construction of health issues, particularly regarding childhood lead poisoning in France, maternal mortality in Ecuador, disability in Senegal, and AIDS in Southern Africa.
He has also explored social inequalities and racial discrimination, as well as what he has termed the new frontiers of French society—linking external and internal borders, and thus immigration and racialization issues. On this topic, he led a research program funded by the French National Research Agency. His most recent reflections on the relationship between social sciences and philosophical thought were presented in the Tanner Lectures at the University of Berkeley, focusing on the foundations of punishment, and the Adorno Lectures at Goethe University in Frankfurt, addressing the value of life.
As the recipient of the 2018 Nomis Distinguished Scientist Award—the first social scientist to receive this honor—he is developing a new research program titled *Crisis: A Global Inquiry in the Contemporary Moment*. A visiting professor at numerous universities, he established a Summer Program in Social Sciences for young researchers from Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. Fassin is the author of around fifteen books translated into seven languages and has edited over twenty collective volumes.
The Covid-19 pandemic was not only an epidemiological phenomenon of considerable magnitude across the planet. Neither was it just a global social event marked by temporary suspensions of human activit…
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