Social sciences of work and politics have poorly documented the relationship between health and political activity. However, research focusing on elected representatives suggests that there is a need to study this subject. On the one hand, the literature emphasises the intensity of political work, on the other hand, it reminds us that dedication is a central component of the political ethos. This tension, which is structurally inscribed in political activity, invites us to consider the health of elected representatives as an object of research. To do so, we hypothesise that tensions between, on the one hand, multiple forms of testing and wear and tear resulting of the requirements of the function, which can potentially degrade health, and, on the other hand, injunctions to dedication and norms of conduct requiring good health, affect the exercise of political mandate(s). The ELUSAN project, which focuses on professional elected officials (national and local), will contribute to enriching and renewing knowledge of the political profession, by combining contributions from the sociology of work and political science. The objective is to answer four linked questions: What are the salient features of the working conditions of elected representatives? How do tacit professional norms on health circulate in the political field? How has the institutional protection of elected officials' health been differentiated and unequal? How is health inscribed in work experiences and political careers? Finally, the ELUSAN project seeks to make a double break. A break with ordinary but also indigenous discourses that tend to deny any physical or psychological weaknesses to elected representatives and a break with academic approaches to politics that do not consider health as a significant component of political activities.

The themes of the “disappearance” of “the Working Class”, the generalization of a middle class and “the end of social class” in European and North-American societies were widely diffused during the 1980’s and 1990’s. But we have witnessed since a “return of social class”. Notably, we see a regained interest in “le populaire”, that is in the working class condition and experience. This recent attention arises from the visible destitution of populations at the bottom of the social hierarchy, but also from renewed discourses on “the people” as a major political question. The socio-economic data available reveals presently rising social inequality between working class categories and middle and upper class categories. Still, these statistics shed no light on the concrete living conditions and experiences, nor the social and cultural recompositions of the working classes. In fact, we do not always know how to name these groups whose way of life, cultural practices, and representations have profoundly evolved. Our project intends to respond to the challenging tasks of grasping “le populaire”. We believe that the working class condition cannot be apprehended solely by looking at its margins or by fragmenting it in a variety of objects of study (politics, family, culture, work, education, etc.). Our approach proves hence to be original in a twofold manner. First, it focuses on a segment of the working classes that has been understudied in France, Europe and the United States. We designate this segment as “the working classes of the middle.” Certainly a loose term, but purposefully chosen for this reason: the research will eventually render it more precise. Frequently, only the “lower” and “upper” segments are distinguished by the scholarship on the working classes: the “lower” being composed of groups lacking economic resources, access to social protections and cultural capital; and the “upper” designating those who by their employment stability, general well being and participation in selective social practices, are often close to the middle class. While this distinction highlights established hierarchies within this social group, it also conceals an essential “middle” where a crossroads for internal mobility actively operates. By focusing on “the working classes of the middle” we take on as object of study particular working class groups, which have paradoxically been left aside by sociology and, moreover, have been analyzed in political science largely as a “repressive” group on the verge of turning to the extreme right. The originality of this project lies also in its methodological approach. It emphasizes a procedure that articulates fieldwork and ethnography with rigorous statistical work throughout the research process. While our fieldwork will focus on cultural recompositions of working class worlds (leisure activities, norms dictating the formation of couples or the education of children, of relationships to local space, to migrations, etc.) and will collectively produce 50 household monographs, we will also revise and reprocess censuses and surveys (on employment, cultural practices, among others) from the INSEE (the National Institute for Statistics of France). Further, the project will stress the necessary combination of national and regional data in order to take into account important territorial disparities. This research program - which gathers 26 researchers specializing on the working class and coming from a variety of research traditions, perspectives and generations - will therefore go beyond the usual monographic approach so often used to study underprivileged groups by analyzing “the working classes of the middle” in a comprehensive manner: be they urban or rural, “feminine” or “masculine”, at the workplace and outside, or in their struggle to make a respectable place for themselves in the present world of precarious employment.

SOMBRERO aims at studying the biographical consequences of participation into social movements. It is from the angle of how trajectories are formed that we propose to broach this question and to determine what involvement leads to rather than, more conventionally, what produces involvement. Thus, it is a matter of understanding how participation is likely to have a continual influence, through redefining or modifying individual behavior and perceptions. Beyond the explicit learning dispensed by activist organizations, or the socializing effects of exposure to political events, it is a matter of studying the ways in which political commitment affects all individual behavior and perceptions, in other words of considering that all participation, however sustained or intense, has secondary socializing effects. For this, we have recourse to a process and multi level approach of activist trajectories, based on an interactionist and configurational approach of life-course, what we call a sociology of « Activist careers.» We start by identifying individuals who were activists in the 1970s (from immediately after 1968 up to 1981) in three “movement families” (the feminist movement, workers’ unions and extreme-leftist organizations) and in five urban locations (Marseille, Lyon, Lille, Rennes, Nantes). On one hand, we produce a mapping of the 1970’s multi organizational fields in each city under study; on the other hand we conduct 500 life-histories, associated to a “sequence analysis” of life calendars. Such a research design will allow us to reconstruct these people’s life course in order to articulate micro (idiosyncrasies) meso (secondary socialization through commitment) and macro (local and national contexts) levels of analysis in order to make sense of individual trajectories.

The year 2008 marked an important turn in terms of self-treatment , in a context of health expenses shortening and healthcare reforms. Following the example of Great Britain in 2000, the French government invited patients to support their own health for « benign situations », favouring free access to certain medicines available without prescription in pharmacies. Nevertheless, the promotion of self-treatment, following an economic rationale, raises the risk of favouring a problematic use of medicines, in the absence of independent and reliable information of the patient. Self-treatment and free access raise the issue of responsibility and education of the patient, and could be a relevant indicator of inequalities in accessing healthcare. In the frame of the “Social determinants of health” call for project, this project proposes original analyses of socio-economic, social, territorial and pathological factors determining self-treatment. This project mobilises researchers in general medicine and general practitioners, as well as researchers in sociology and social geography. This research is not only pluridisciplinary, but also integrated, giving ground for the common construction of research tools and operations, and looking forward to crossing multiple explicative data amidst the same population. The theoretical framework of this project, structurally and strategically marked by the notion of autonomy of the patient, steps on Robert Castel’s analysis of negative individualism, in which “autonomy” is a burden for the one who has low economic resources and insufficient social support, but experienced as freedom for the one who benefits from social security and social affiliation

The general objective of CHOICE is to analyze the hegemonic/counter-hegemonic dialectics operating in Israel today. It offers to do so by studying the wide range of counter-hegemonic discourses and activities circulated and performed by Israeli Jews as well as the institutional and non-institutional attempts to suppress them. By studying not only visible forms of protest, such as participation to social movements, refusal to serve in the army, petitions, etc. but also more inconspicuous practices, such as leaving Israel, schooling ones’ children in a bi-national school, living in a Palestinian locality, and narratives circulated in and out of the activist field that deviate from the mainstream narratives, the project tackles the main challenge to map and study the Israeli “dissenting constellation”.