Didier Fassin

Life

Initially trained as a physician in Paris, Fassin practiced internal medicine as an infectious disease specialist at the Hospital Pitié-Salpétrière and taught public health at the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie. He has been the physician of the Home for the Dying in Calcutta and the initiator of a national program of prevention of rheumatic heart disease in Tunisia where it was the first cause of death among young adults. Later shifting to the social sciences, he received his M.A. from the University of Paris, and his PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, writing his thesis on power relations and health inequalities in Senegal.

After having been granted a fellowship by the French Institute for Andean Studies to investigate maternal mortality and living conditions among Indian women in Ecuador, Fassin became professor of sociology in 1991 at the University of Paris North. There, he created Cresp, the Center for Research on Social and Health Issues, working on public health problems such as the history of child lead poisoning in France and the politics of Aids in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Elected in 1999 as director of studies in social anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Fassin founded and directed from 2007 to 2010 Iris, the Interdisciplinary Research Institute for Social Sciences, in an effort to bring together anthropologists, sociologists, historians, political scientists and legal scholars around contemporary political and social issues. He himself developed a long-term program exploring the multiple facets of humanitarianism in local and international policies, especially towards the poor, the immigrant and refugees, as well as victims of violence and epidemics. In parallel, he launched a research project on borders and boundaries in an attempt to articulate the issues around immigration and racialization, which were at the time dealt with in separate fields.

In 2008, Fassin received an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council for his program Towards a Critical Moral Anthropology. To reappraise theoretical issues in the analysis of morals and moralities, he started an ethnographic research on police, justice and prison in France. In 2009, he succeeded Clifford Geertz at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, and became the first James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science. His inaugural public lecture was entitled “Critique of Humanitarian Reason”. In 2010, he became Visiting Professor at the Universities of Princeton and Hong Kong. In 2016, he received the Gold Medal of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography, which is awarded every three years to an anthropologist.

In France, Fassin has been involved in the politics of science, as a member of the Scientific Council of the French Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm), and of the Scientific Council of the City of Paris. In 2006, he became the chair of the Committee for Humanities and Social Science in the French National Agency for Research. In the United States, as a member of the Committee of World Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association from 2010 to 2013, he was committed to the global exchange of knowledge and the reduction of the gap between the North and the South in the development of social science. This concern translated in 2015 in a three-year cycle Summer Program in Social Science for Latin American, Middle Eastern and African junior scholars.

Apart from his academic career, Fassin has been involved in various solidarity non-governmental organizations in France. In 1996 he founded the Medico-social Unit Villermé at the Hospital Avicenne to provide health care to uninsured and undocumented patients. He was administrator and later Vice-president of MSF, Doctors Without Borders, from 1999 to 2003, and is currently President of Comede, the Medical Committee for the Exiles since 2006. A public intellectual, he frequently intervenes in the media on issues related to his research such as immigration, asylum, discrimination, social justice, law and order policies. He regards the social sciences as a form of “presence to the world”

Distinctions

As Author

As editor