Didier Fassin

Didier Fassin, born in 1955, is a French anthropologist and sociologist.

He is the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and holds a Direction of Studies in Political and Moral Anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

He has been appointed to the Chair of Public Health at the Collège de France.

Fassin was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.

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 (present day Sorbonne University).

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.

In 1996 he founded the Medico-social Unit Villermé at the Hospital Avicenne to provide health care to uninsured and undocumented patients.

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.

He was administrator and later Vice-president of MSF, Doctors Without Borders, from 1999 to 2003, and is currently President of Comede, the Health 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” and has developed a program on the public life of ethnography.

In 2006, he became the chair of the Committee for Humanities and Social Science in the French National Agency for Research, the main funding agency for scientific research in France.

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.

This research gave birth to the proposal of a moral anthropology of the state.

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 also became Visiting Professor at the Universities of Princeton and Hong Kong.

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.

In 2016, he received the Gold Medal of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography, which is awarded every three years to an anthropologist.

That same year, he gave the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of California, Berkeley, on “The Will to Punish”, and the Adorno Lectures at the Goethe University of Frankfurt on “A Critical Anthropology of Life”.

From 2017 to 2022, he was a member of the Scientific Council of the Contrôleur général des lieux de privation de liberté, the independent French Ombudsman for Prisons.

In 2022, he was appointed to the National Consultative Ethics Committee for Life and Health Sciences in France.

In 2018, he delivered the Inaugural Raphael Lemkin Lecture at Rutgers University in honor of the Polish jurist who coined the term genocide, and in 2022, the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia.

He was the first social scientist to be given the Nomis Distinguished Scientist Award, which will support five years of research on crises.

As part of this program, he developed a five-year research program with Anne-Claire Defossez on borders and exile.

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 connection with his work on prison and punishment, Fassin was invited in 2018 to join the New Jersey Criminal Sentencing and Disposition Commission, which has been appointed by the Governor of the State to make recommendations about the penal and corrections system, as Guest Advisor.

Apart from his academic career, Fassin has been involved in various solidarity non-governmental organizations in France.

In 2019 he was elected at the Collège de France on the Annual Chair in Public Health.

His Leçon inaugurale was on "The Inequality of Lives".